Die Hard: A Series in Review

After recently watching Live Free or Die Hard, I began to reflect on the popularity of the "Die Hard" films, and with A Good Day to Die Hard about to hit theaters, now seems like a good time to look back at the previous entries in the series.

To many viewers (myself included), the original Die Hard seems almost as fresh as the year it was released, but believe it or not, that year was 24 years ago, and times have changed.  (How much have they changed?  The main character takes a commercial flight with a gun in his holster, able to do so because he is an NYC cop.)  Back then, Bruce Willis was not a movie star.  Oh, he'd been in movies before -- big roles in a couple of sorta-small films, very small roles in a couple of sorta-big films -- but what he was really known for was as a TV star, as David Addison in Moonlighting.  (I remember a Mad Magazine spoof of Die Hard in which a character gripes, "when I heard that a star of Moonlighting was going to spend half the movie without a shirt on, I was hoping it'd be Cybill Shepherd.")

From the very first shot of Willis in Die Hard, we see that this is a Bruce Willis of a different era in his career.  I'm not talking about the fact that he had hair back then, but look at that smirk he wears throughout the scene.  The smirk has nothing to do with the character's actual emotional state, and everything to do with the fact that audiences knew Willis's wise-ass persona from television.  The smirk seems to say, "yeah, that's right, I'm the guy from Moonlighting."

Much has been said about the psychologically different reactions audiences have toward movie stars and TV stars; going to the movies is an event, and we gape at the literally larger-than-life movie stars on the big screen, while TV stars are routinely invited into our home.  It's with this difference in mind that we can comment on what a good idea it was to cast a familiar TV star in the lead role of Die Hard, rather than casting an established movie action hero.  Think about it:  Arnold Schwarzenegger was the Terminator.  Chuck Norris was already known for kicking ass (even having fought Bruce Lee on screen).  Sylvester Stallone was an icon as Rocky Balboa and a one-man army as John Rambo.  But who was Bruce Willis?  Why, he was just a wise-cracking but otherwise regular guy!  Die Hard may not have been written with the star of Moonlighting in mind (it was actually based on Nothing Lasts Forever, a novel by Roderick Thorp), but it sure as heck feels like it.

This "he's just a regular guy" approach may initially seem like an incidental detail, but far from it -- it's actually the very heart of much of the film's appeal.  Yes, John McClane eventually ends up single-handedly defeating what seems like a small army of heavily armed bad guys, but if you haven't seen Die Hard in a while, watch again, and notice how director John McTiernan and writers Jeb Stuart and Steven E. DeSouza go to great lengths to show you how McClane defeats them -- not with superhuman feats, but with a combination of determination, ingenuity, and dumb luck.  Unlike James Bond or the characters played by Norris, Schwarzenegger, and Stallone, McClane always seems in danger of losing the fight for his life every time he has to go mano-a-mano with even minor bad guys.  McClane may exercise superheroics, but he's no superhero; he gripes a lot, he gets scared, and when he gets hurt, Willis conveys that McClane does indeed feel pain.  McClane's everyman humanity is a recurring element throughout the series, but the best example is in the first film, when the barefoot McClane has to flee for his life over a floor covered with broken glass.  Director McTiernan shows Willis's face for just a moment in this sequence, but it's a moment long enough for us to clearly see McClane weighing his options and making his decision.  Willis's face conveys so much at once -- despair, fear, panic, reluctance -- and we think, "I know he has to run across that glass, but can he?"  Later, as McClane tends to his wounds, nearly passing out from the pain in his feet, the scene is both believable (as anyone who has had even a small sliver of glass in his foot knows how painful it can be) and shocking (as action movies at the time rarely showed their heroes noticing pain [can you imagine how the scene would have played out with the Schwarzenegger persona of the time?])

I'm one of the few who loves Die Hard 2 as much as the original.  For one thing, McClane's everyman persona is very much intact.  Yes, there is some dialogue about his experience and instincts as a police officer, but despite his heroic actions, McClane is not depicted as a supercop, but just as a guy trying to get stuff done.  Even if the average viewer can't relate to his actions or circumstances, we can relate to his attitude and motivation.

For another thing, I admire the writers' smartly simple solution to what could have been a major dilemma:  given the lengths to which the first film established that McClane is a regular guy, how to plausibly present his immersion in another bigger-than-life adventure?  Easy:  Have McClane himself marvel at the improbability of the situation.  "How can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?" McClane gripes in both the movie and the trailer.  Once again, McClane takes on a platoon of heavily armed bad guys, and once again he has to do it single-handedly, as federal and local law enforcement (once again) turn out alternately incapable and unwilling to do what has to be done.  I like how this potentially unbelievable aspect of the stories is depicted as refreshingly realistic plot points; yes, the uncooperative Dwayne T. Robinson and Carmine Lorenzo police chiefs come across as jerks, but hey, they've got a job to do, they've been trained to do it by the book (even when circumstances call for the book to be thrown out the window), and McClane is, from their perspective, a mysterious outsider wild-card with his own agenda and a tendency to blow stuff up.

The third film, Die Hard With a Vengeance, takes a gratifyingly different approach to this aspect of action films, and shows McClane actually being aided, rather than hindered, by the local police.

With a Vengeance mostly eschews the now familiar Die Hard formula (which had at that point been copied in quite a few otherwise unrelated action films) in favor of a buddy movie format, teaming McClane with Samuel L. Jackson's Zeus Carver.  What could have been a stale formula film, however, is enlivened by the inspiration of the villain's penchant for riddles and intellectual challenges.  Here we are reminded yet again that McClane isn't just a fightin' machine, he is, more than most action heroes, a guy who is highly capable of using his head (even when it's pounding from a hangover).  The dialogue between the Jackson and Willis characters is amusing, the villain's riddles are intriguing, and the story, even when it requires the main characters to be kept in the dark, is never for a moment confusing (yet nor is it ever condescending).  As I mentioned, I especially like how, this time around, McClane is shown as a part of a team, as the NYPD does everything it can to help McClane track down the madman threatening to blow up various parts of New York City.  The screenplay (having morphed from the previously unproduced script Simon Says) is good enough to have attracted original Die Hard director John McTiernan, despite his previous vows to never do a sequel.

The next entry in the series, Live Free or Die Hard, was released over a decade later, and even if the main character is still unmistakably John McClane, he is played by a very different Bruce Willis, a Bruce Willis who has matured as an actor.  McClane still has his smirk, for example, but now he actually seems to be smirking in character, as opposed to smirking as a wink to the audience.  It's interesting to observe how, even though he hasn't played the character in twelve years, the Bruce Willis and John McClane personas have now completely merged.  Back in 1990, 20th Century Fox could have gotten away with making Die Hard 2 with a different actor as McClane.  In 2007, the idea of another actor playing the role is simply absurd.

Live Free or Die Hard continues the ever-important strategy of reminding us of McClane's humanity by showing us new sides to his character.  We see him as an ineffective but well-meaning parent.  We see him on a routine police call.  And so on.  This nicely lays the groundwork to make us accept the guy's plausibility -- a highly necessary tactic, considering that his stunts in this film are more fantastic than in any of his previous films.  How expertly is this done?  At one point, McClane is shot at by a jet, has a bridge fall out from under him, lands on the jet, and survives when the plane crashes.  Kudos to director Len Wiseman for making such far-fetched events seem at least possible.  Yeah, okay, it sounds ridiculous.  But watch the sequence, and you'll see what I mean.

That compliment to Wiseman, by the way, is no small point here, but rather at the very heart of the appeal of the Die Hard series.  Consistently, the directors, stunt coordinators, and writers of the Die Hard films successfully convey not only John McClane's heroics, not only his humanity, but how they are intertwined, and how his increasingly extreme circumstances aren't just silly script contrivances but rather an important aspect of his character, who, the dialogue often points out, has a tendency to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.  It's all to make the implausible seem possible -- and here's to the people behind the scenes who succeed in doing just that every time a Die Hard movie is released.  I can't wait for the next one.