Die Hard - 1988
Die Hard is the greatest action movie of all time. Don't believe me? Take off your shoes (and socks), don the nearest white tank, grab a pack of smokes and something semi-automatic, and let's duke this one out.
For starters, this film just about completely reinvented the genre. Sure, there were action heroes before. But none that looked quite like Willis. Granted, there were handsome leads who tossed one-liners off like their paychecks depended on it. But John McClane brought something new to the table. Okay, there have been PLENTY of foreign bad guys with a terrorist scheme to plunder some part of America. But none have been greater than Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber (in his first career role)!
The leads of action films before Die Hard were all of the beefy, brawny variety. They literally looked like action figurines. It wasn't all that clear whether they could act their way out of a paper bag, but they walked around with glistening pecs and chiseled biceps (helped by heavy lifting and...ahem...perhaps some medicinal additives). Their method of fighting was a) Find bad guy, b) Chuck bad guy. Highly choreographed fighting and fluid motion were not the name of their game. It was about brute strength and seeming invincible, like highly trained military operatives (Don't buy this argument either? Do this then...throw on any of Segal's top 3 films and count the number of times he gets touched by baddies. The house over/under is 1).
But this is not Bruce Willis in the least, you see. Oh this part got offered to Arnold and Sly and a slew of others, but it landed in the lap of this guy. A man who looks almost scrawny in his "beater." A dude who just about gets the shit kicked completely out of him over these 130 minutes, who for some inexplicably moronic reason opts to do war with a host barefoot. We're pretty sure given how these things go that McClane will survive, but he's so badly beaten when he walks out of the high rise at the end, it's his wife that's supporting him not the other way around. He wins with smarts, not simply otherworldly strength.
In so doing, Willis births the "regular guy caught in crazy circumstances" type of action star, and his NYC cop line deliveries only serve to highlight this difference further. Where Arnold struggled with monosyllabic phrases, Willis spits venom of the very best kind here. This is one of the most quotable and rewatchable films of all time. "Come out to the coast..." "Yippee-ki-yay!..." "What you thought I was ordering a pizza?!!" On and on it goes.
Opposite Willis is the incomparable Alan Rickman. Rickman's Gruber gets jacked up a half a billion times after '88. Foreign villains become gross stereotypes of the lightning he caught in a bottle for two whole hours in this picture. Gruber is equal parts smart and ruthless. He has a plan here (though what exactly it is may be my sole criticism of the film. The "rooftop escape" scheme seems to have a few holes...but who cares), and he is reading the room and moving pieces around to accomplish his ends. He too has tremendous lines, and his whole crew falls in line with his natural charisma.
One final piece remains. The bit players here are also fantastic. Viewers mileage may vary on Bonnie Bedelia as McClane's wife trapped in the building at an office Christmas party when the terrorists arrive. Hart Bochner's coked out of his mind turn as Ellis is no study in subtlety, but he's pretty effective as a tool to show Gruber's wit and ruthlessness. Still, this movie stars Family Matters own Carl Winslow, Reginal VelJohnson, as the cop on his way home to his pregnant wife who happens to get roped into this whole affair. The exchanges between McClane and Powell are a tad foolish but quite heartwarming. It's like Van Damme and Gibb in Bloodsport. The movie wouldn't be as effective and endearing without them.
In the end Die Hard is entertaining, well-acted, and simply exceptional. It contains great set pieces, solid pacing (after a slow first 20 minutes), and aside from the old computer monitors, has hardly aged a day in thirty plus years. If one can't accept that it's the single greatest action caper (truthfully, I'm still wrestling with this myself), or entirely indicative of a sea change, he or she must at least admit that it's emblematic of emerging trends. Indeed, the spate of movies that followed with the elevator pitches: "Die Hard on a _____" are perhaps the best proof of this fact. (Think Die Hard on a bus: Speed, a mountain: Cliffhanger, a boat: Under Siege, etc.) Who knew Christmas could be such a bloody good time.
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