Yep its time for another movie franchise analysis and this time its one of my favs, and that is the Die Hard franchise. Four films of classy action set-pieces, wisecracks and thrills a few minutes, with your affable down to earth cop John McClane at the centre of it all. So why not start with the first film, which has become a real classic in the annals of action thriller movies, so here's more about the plot (SPOILERS may abound!!).
The film starts with New York police officer, John McClane (Bruce Willis) arriving in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve to meet up with his estranged wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) who has a very prominent job working for the Nakatomi corporation. Driven in a fancy limosuine to the Nakatomi plaza, McClane meets with Holly (who uses her maiden surname Generro instead while employed with the company) and her boss Joseph Takagi (James Shigeta) who arranged the limo. After McClane washes up, he starts to talk with Holly, but they argue with each other about their marriage, and their conversation is interrupted by one of the employees who calls on Holly to speak to her staff. Pretty soon at this point, a group men in cars and a truck pull into the plaza, two of the men in the car, Karl (Alexander Gudonov) and Theo (Clarence Gilyard) enter the building and shoot the security guard on the front desk. Theo locks down the building using the computers in the security office, and the other men enter the building from the parking lot in the basement of the building. The men of course are terrorists who are lead by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), who are apparently there to teach the Nakatomi corporation a lesson for their greed. Hans once having identified Takagi takes him upstairs to the boardroom where he asks for the code to their vault as he wants to enter the vault to steal $640 million dollars in negotiable bearer bonds. Takagi however refuses to cooperate which leaves Hans with no other choice but to shoot him and puts his man Theo, the computer hacker specialist on the job of opening the vault.
At this point McClane has managed to sneak away from the terrorists before being captured, and listens in on Hans conversation with Takagi. McClane then sets off a fire alarm which attracts the attention of Hans, who sends one of his men to investigation, who soon finds McClane, they fight and in the ensuing struggle, they fall down the stairs, and the terrorist is killed in the fall. McClane then takes the terrorist's gun and checks his pockets to find he has a phoney ID and a CB radio. The terrorist however is revealed to be the brother of Hans main henchman, Karl, who is enraged. McClane runs up to the roof where he uses his radio to call the police, who respond to his call, but don't believe his call is for real. By then Karl and his men engage McClane in a gunfight on the roof, which McClane narrowly escapes and makes his way back into the building, via the elevator shafts. The police dispatchers however send an off duty officer, Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) to investigate the Plaza, on arriving he speaks with one of the terrorists, who has assumed the role of the security guard, and reassures nothing is up. During this point, McClane having re-entered the boardroom where Takagi was shot, he smashes one of the windows to try and get the attention of the officer below, but is then confronted by some of the terrorists, and McClane kills them. McClane then takes one of the bodies and dumps it out the window onto Powell's car, just as he is about to leave, with the terrorists shooting at Powell's car, Powell narrowly avoids being shot as he backs his car away.
Pretty soon the police arrive on the scene and try to take control of the situation by sending their SWAT team into the building, however this fails miserably as Gruber's men shoot and maim the team members who try to make their way in the front door. The SWAT team also try to send in a reinforced vehicle (RV) to the building, but the terrorists James and Alexander, destroy the RV with rockets. McClane outraged retaliates by using some of the C4 he got from one of the dead terrorists, and throws it down the lift shaft, which kills the two terrorists, James and Alexander. During all this McClane keeps in contact with Powell by radio, and gives him an assumed name to protect his identity. However one of the execs at the party Ellis (Hart Bochner), a cocky negotiator for the company, in attempt to end the seige, gives McClane's real name away to the Gruber, and tries to reason with McClane to give himself up, but McClane refuses, and pleads with Ellis to tell them he isn't McClane's friend, however Gruber shoots Ellis. After the debacale with the SWAT team, the FBI are sent in to try and mop up the situation, lead by special agents Johnson (Robert Davi) and Johnson (Grand L. Bush) who arranged to cut the building's power and go in with armed choppers to take out the terrorists, who they have agreed to meet with on the roof, allegedly with choppers for transport.
Gruber however has planned a double cross to blow the roof. McClane soon enough finds C4 in the floors above wired to blow, and Karl finds him and they engage an intense fight, which McClane finally escapes from after hanging Karl up in chains. McClane gets to the roof, where the hostages have been sent to and gets them to go back down, which prompts Hans to blow the roof. McClane dives off the roof with a firehose attached to his waist, he manages to smash back into an office floor below. McClane makes his way back upstairs to the 30th floor where Hans now holds Holly hostage, and the two men have the final showdown.
Die Hard is without a doubt one of the best action movies of the 1980s and it signalled the start of Bruce Willis's film career. John McTiernan, who directed the excellent Arnie action flick Predator, does a terrific job here in keeping up the suspense, and brilliantly stages some great action scenes, that include McClane's fight with Karl, and the famous scene where he jumps off the roof, with a fire hose attached round his waist. Although admittedly it is a rather silly way for McClane to try and get off the roof, surely he could have just ran back down the stairs and tried to stay out of sight from the terrorists. However Die Hard is about all things proposterous, and what it does very well, is take an average joe like McClane and turns him into a hero in an impossible situation. Of course as the Die Hard films progressed the situations got even more and more ridiculous, right up until Die Hard 4.0 where McClane faces off a Harrier jet plane, as you do! McTiernan also uses the sets very well and the building to utilise the cat and mouse chase between McClane and the terrorists, and there some really well stage gunfights, especially in the roof scenes and the scene in the office where Gruber and Karl shoot out the office windows to force McClane to walk on the glass. The Fox Plaza building of course also doubles as the Nakatomi Plaza building, although I doubt they used it to blow the roof and blast out the windows!
In terms of performances, Die Hard has a pretty strong cast, and Bruce Willis is perfect for the role of John McClane, a wise-cracking cop, who is very down to earth and quite likeable and has plenty of lines we can all remember such as "Yippe ki-yay motherfucker!" and "I'm not the one that just got butt-fucked on national TV, Dwayne!" and "welcome to the party, pal!!". Although at the start of the film I have to say Willis's take on McClane is somewhat cold, as he refuses to engage in conversation the limo drive Argyle (De'Voreaux White). However as things progress McClane really emerges and becomes the affable character that he remained in the rest of the franchise. Alan Rickman is just great as the Hans Gruber, a quintessentially smooth, suave, intellectual villain who as Holly says at one point in the film is no more than a common thief. Rickman gets his fair share of the best dialogue in the film and plays Gruber with a dry wit and a cold calculating persona.
The supporting cast are also very good, with Reginald VelJohnson playing the desk jockey cop Al Powell, as a decent cop who got off the street after making the mistake of shooting a kid in the past. Bonnie Bedelia too is very good as McClane's wife, Holly, a headstrong woman, and she keeps a cool head during the seige, and she gets one of the funniest moments in the film where she punches the sleazy news reporter Dick Thornburg (Richard Atherton) on TV at the end! Paul Gleason is also quite amusing as Dwayne T. Robinson, the deputy chief of police, who despite his authority, is pretty incompetent in the film, and he gets one of the all time best lines in the film, when the FBI chopper is blown up, "Holy Christ! Looks like we're gonna need more FBI guys I guess!". And finally Alexandar Gudonov is quite effective as the steely cold henchman, Karl, and he too gets some good lines, when he argues with Hans for example about killing McClane, Hans says "We do not alter the plan!", and Karl replies "And if he alters it?????".
Although if there is one critcism that can be levelled at Die Hard is its depiction of the police in the film, as they are pretty much all potrayed as idiots, except McClane and Powell. The SWAT team in particularly make the silly decision to go in to the Nakatomi building, despite the drastic repercusions they will face if they do, and did face when the terrorists retaliated. And one of the more amusing scenes shows the dim-witted qualities of Dwayne Robinson, when Gruber contacts him with his list of "demands" which are to release political prisoners, such as the Asian Dawn, and Robinson carries on following it up, despite the fact Gruber is just bluffing them to keep them away. And the FBI aren't much brighter as they use as Powell describes "the universal terrorist playbook and play it step by step" in cutting the building's power, which lets the terrorist access the vault to get their money. But again it is an action movie and the writers are poking fun at law enforcement as they have a tendacy to do.
And finally here's a bit on the score written by Michael Kamen, which is very good and has plenty of fine dramatic passages, Kamen of course went on to score the 2nd and 3rd films as well, before he sadly passed away in 2003. However if you listen closely near the end, you can hear a passage that was nicked from James Horner's score for Aliens, which was apparently left in by the studio as a temp track (according to the ol Wikipedia). The other tracks in the film are also pretty memorably used, especially Beethoven's 9th Symphony when the terrorists finally crack into the vault and raid it, and of course "Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow!" at the end.
Rrrrright well that's my analysis of Die Hard over with and it remains one of my favourite action films. Die Hard 2 will soon follow.....
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