A Very Action-Movie Christmas: Die Hard (Dir John McTiernan, 2h12m, 1988)

The year is 1988. Arnold Schwarzenegger is busy pretending to be Russian against Jim Belushi in buddy-cop movie, Red Heat, and Danny DeVito's long lost twin in Twins. His great rival of the 1980s, Sylvester Stallone, is fighting the in-hindsight, ill-judged fight alongside the Mujahideen in Rambo III. Action cinema of the period is dominated by these twin indestructible demigods of cinema, who mow down entire armies without flinching in stolid action fare, and their ilk, unthinking, unstoppable, always armed with a quip and never on the back foot throughout their one-man demotion of anything that stands in their way. But Olympus is about to fall. The action star, embodied by Bruce Willis' John McClane, is about to become every bit as vulnerable and woundable and reliant on wits and skill rather than quips and seemingly limitless ammunition. Die Hard is about to change the course of action cinema forever.

What Die Hard is, in short, is a positive tectonic shift, a great buckling up and divergence from the path of the ever more unstoppable action movie stars of the mid to late 1980s. It is a film like no other, granted legendary status by its storied production history, including the previously comedically inclined Willis being given a then eye-watering $5 million dollars, the order of henchmen actors' deaths determined by their ability to play the part, the script being written, dashed out in order to keep the film rolling, and a dozen other stories. Die Hard begins and ends with its hero, this man, this woundable and injured and fragile sole hero.

Of course, this being the season of goodwill, peace to all men, and the inevitable cavalcade of seasonally appropriate cinema, there's another reason we're watching this quintessential action classic. It's December, and with the inevitability of Bruce Willis' John McClain stumbling into another festive showdown against scores of terrorists and their usually foreign and nefarious leader, comes countless think-pieces on whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie. We'll get to that, but it's inarguable that, if it wasn't initially intended to be, over thirty years, the growth of the internet, and the veritable avalanche of Christmas-themed Die Hard merchandise have cemented it as one anyway.

We meet John McClain on the plane, and in these opening five minutes, we are given as much information as in the next two hours. He's tense, he's terse, and yet capable of cracking a joke-the props the scene gives him, his gun, the colossal teddy-bear that he manhauls down the aisle of the aircraft quickly establish him as both a cop, and a family man. He seems an uneasy figure, his fear of flight obvious from his first scenes, only reluctantly taking advice from a fellow passenger on how to deal with jet-lag , and lighting up a cigarette as soon as he's off the plane, the opening credits showing him as a lone figure, divides from the happy families reuniting. These three elements are attributes that the film neatly develops, not only in the car with his driver, Argyle (De'voreaux White), but over the party at the film's main setting, Nakatomi Plaza, and through his cat and mouse game with Hans and his team.

Why Willis' performance is so revolutionary in this day and age is a little difficult to explain-in the decades since, action cinema has since mutated, and the Die Hard series with it, such that figures like Keanu Reeves' John Wick and Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto feel like a curious hybrid of this, characters who retain a mortal breakability, a woundability, but do things positively superhuman, spurred on, in greater part, by Reeves himself in The Matrix (1999). But to contemporary audiences, the idea of introducing your hero not in the blare of trumpets or synthesiser, complete with quip or self-aware moment, or in the lengthy establishing moments of Rambo III, building to Stallone's appearance, but as an ordinary man, is positively revolutionary. 

The drive to Nakatomi is nimbly intercut by another great moment of cinematic efficiency, as the dramatis personae of the Nakatomi Corporation, from the thirty employees eventually taken hostage to John's wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), here using her maiden name in a simple piece of visual storytelling that speaks volumes, to the noble but inevitably doomed Joseph Takagi (James Shigeta) and the brusque and sleazy Harry (Hart Bochner), whose attempts to play peacemaker between McClane and the terrorists eventually backfires. Moreover, it introduces the film's other great central character, that of Nakatomi Plaza (a real-life Fox Plaza, whose staff had to be worked around and the noise kept down during filming). In the hands of the terrorists, Nakatomi becomes a fortress against the LAPD and their escalating attempts to release the hostages, and a labyrinth for McClane, as he moves from room to room, and floor-to-floor to outwit and out-manuver the terrorists

It's here, accompanied by the ominous strains of a slowed-down Beethoven that acts as their motif, that a large truck arrives, and, following several strained sequences between Holly and John, in which the fragility of their relationship, that the villains of the piece make their appearance. Against its everyman hero comes its stellar antagonist, the highly educated, highly articulate, highly dressed European ying to Willis's grubby beat cop every-man’s yang, in the form of the iconic Hans Gruber, the pinnacle of the late Alan Rickman's career, the figure pulling all the strings, the puppeteer of everything thrown at McClane, and his gang of Eurotrash cronies.

If McClane changed the action movie hero, Gruber changed the action movie villain irrecoverably. Before Hans Gruber (astonishly the first ever screen role from Alan Rickman), the action movie villain was simply a dragon to slay at the end (or almost the end) of the movie, arrived to by the hero after having decimated his forces. They were often foreign (Rocky's Ivan Drago barely speaks five sentences of English in a two hour film, Arnold barely twenty as the unstoppable titular Terminator), a representative of the villainous authorities (Rambo, Escape from New York), or both (innumerable low-rent action movies, Commando among them). But what's common is their general behaviour, the villain is simply there to be a threat at the beginning and dispatched at the end, disappearing to let his (and they are, almost to a man, male) underlings do the dirty work of the plot. They get few lines, fewer still of any quotable quality, and but for a few exceptions are utterly forgettable.

Hans Gruber is a wrecking ball to all this. His entrance, in comparison to McClane's nervy uncertainty, is assured, arriving, unhurried among his henchmen, in the back of a truck, and leads them down corridors, hands in his pockets. This is a man, and the film only compounds that fact, who has all the time in the world. Over his next few scenes, Rickman practically rewrites the rulebook on cinematic villainy. Far from violent-although, aside from McClane, Hans kills the most people in the film, there is an undeniable coolness to Gruber, a quiet danger to him, that bubbles underneath the surface. But more than this, it is in his sophisticatedness-one of his first lines to Takagi is to compliment him on his suit, and that he has two just like it-and his charm that he truly feels like a pioneer. For, if Die Hard changed the action movie in one way above all, it is in how it changed villains.

Enter that great all-American trope, the Evil Brit; in Hans Gruber's wake comes Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter, Sean Bean's Alec Trevelyan, and much of the 1990s for Jeremy Irons and Alan Rickman, not to mention more modern villains such as Tom Hiddlestone's Loki and Ian McKellen's Magneto. The Evil Brit is above all, smart, sophisticated, well spoken, and intelligent, often set against a more average, everyman protagonist who is his polar opposite, or inevitably an underdog. Moreover, the Evil Brit is always one step ahead of our hero, he always has the advantage, the numbers, and holds power over our hero, or heroes until his inevitable defeat, almost always by underestimating them. It could even be said that, and certainly intended, if Die Hard's writer, Stephen De Souza is anything to go by, that Gruber is the film's villainous protagonist, his perfect scheme fatally undermined by the fly in the ointment that is John McClane

That Rickman cements Gruber as this masterclass, this blueprint of an antagonist archetype, is in no small part due to Rickman himself, but also the very structure of Die Hard as a film. Once the terrorists arrive, Die Hard begins, in short, to reinvent the action movie. Rather than pitched battles, there are sudden bursts of violence punctuated by tension-like Jaws, encounters between the hero and the villain are rare, but starkly memorable, the moment when Hans and John finally come face to face only heightening the tension as Hans adopts a eerily good American accent and false name to trick John into giving him a gun only to find that his adversary has thought one step ahead and unloaded it. By the point they come face to face though, their dialogue over the radio has, in the film's single best aesthetic choice, fleshed out their conflict far more than much of the scenes of Gruber with his men, or McClane left alone for his thoughts to mull in the silence around him.

The balance of power is almost always with Gruber, McClane taunting Gruber and co over the radio for much of the film more the bravado of a scared and largely cornered man, whilst Gruber's utter power over the hostages, both in terms of his dispatch of Takagi and, over the radio as the latter tries to reason with McClane, the hapless Ellis. Moreover, unlike in previous action movies, the arrival of the police means little-Gruber's men outgun them with ease, and the ineptitude of both the police and the FBI, who Gruber plays to perfection, leaves only McClane capable of defeating him. What the film does, more than anything is to isolate John physically and mentally-whilst the film lends him a sympathetic ear in fellow cop, Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), who becomes an unlikely ally in the battle against Gruber, and, compared to the largely ineffectual LAPD, is a largely competent and supportive ally on the outside.

John McClane is an everyman. He is one of us, aside from his background as a police officer, and through this, through his excellent introduction, we understand that John is fallible and fragile-rather than fight Hans head-on, he runs from the initial hostage taking, a move that eventually becomes crucial. His first encounter with one of the hostage takers, Tony, is a messy, brutal scene, the taunting henchman eventually bundled through a door to break his neck. From here, John picks up a bag of tools including the radio, the brutal efficiency of the script giving him a veritable Chekov's armoury that all prove useful in the cat-and-mouse game between the terrorists and McClane that unfolds. All of this is shot, not with clunky on-rails cameras, but on handheld cameras, granting each action movie a bruising quality, as the camera shunts past tables, or through glass, or following McClane or the dozen terrorists through offices and around the building, giving each action scene a verité quality, and the claustrophobia of the enclosed places all the more cloying.
 
But, Die Hard, most of all, changed the very language of the action movie; if cinema post-Jaws was obsessed with replicating that formula, eventually spawning, among countless imitators, Alien, Tremors and Basic Instinct, then action cinema post-Die Hard was equally drawn along in its wake. Its single setting, its tense transformation from office block to warren of lift-shafts and ventilation ducts became the language of action cinema for a decade or more. Single-location action movies like Con-Air (Die Hard on a plane, though the more recent Non-Stop feels even more like that stereotype) and Speed (Die Hard on a bus) to Paul Blart Mall Cop (Die Hard min. mall, complete with lift-shaft crawl) owe their existence to Die Hard.

But more than this, Die Hard is a film that blows through action cinema like a hurricane, bringing with it a complete change in action cinema, from villainy, to the average joe hero, to the very feel and sense of the action movie in the 1990s onwards. Whether it be some ironic joke run rampant, lazy scheduling throwing any vaguely Christmas orientated film on over the festive period, or a genuine love of the film as an integral part of their Christmases, it remains a classic at Christmas and beyond and represents a stunning change of the tide in action cinema from the musclebound unstoppable forces of Arnold and Sylvester towards the average blue-collar, and unquestionably human McClain and his ilk.

Rating: Highly Recommended