Die Hard (1988)
40 stories of sheer adventure!
I went through three ideas for the movie tonight - not including the possibility of just being too busy to fit it in given family time and whatnot. I had intended at first to do Jingle all the Way, with my favorite comedian Sinbad in it - then i saw about three other people or places do a review on it and figured that would just be derivative at that point. The second option I thought would make for a better movie next week. So I went with the “I’m surprised I haven’t done this” movie option, following in my footsteps of various other movies I’ve done this year. Fill up the nog and make those fists with your feet, tonight we watch Die Hard.
Okay, lets get this part out of the way - no, I don’t consider Die Hard to be a Christmas movie. I look at it as a movie that’s set during Christmas - Christmas movies are all about the power of magic and giving and family at their core, and although you could try and make an argument for those things in this movie, to me it’s very much an action movie heist film - not one about any of those things mentioned before. Will I still watch it on the holiday? Sure - I’ll watch it whenever, it’s a pretty fun movie - but I’m not going to fight people over it being a holiday movie. Tune your brain for R rated action thrills in a skyscraper, and you’ll be settled in perfectly.
The story on one end is about a NY cop going to visit his wife and family for the holidays. She’s got a big company party going celebrating the holiday and a big deal they just closed. Unfortunately for them, before they can get to into the heated arguments of life and their tensions towards each other, the main story decides to kick in. The main story being that of a rather elaborate heist. A group of robbers posing as terrorists are there to steal a very large amount of money in bank bonds, and have the entire thing planned out in detail - from how to sneak in, take over, even little details like making sure eventually the cops get involved. What they couldn’t plan for is that NY cop being there, and throwing one heck of a large cowboy boot worth of wrench into the works. Who will win and who will survive?
The nicest part about how the movie plays out is it ground’s itself in realism while also still having some moments that might be a bit far fetched. One one hand, you have details like blowing out glass to hamper the shoe-less hero, while in the other you have death-defying leaps saved by nothing but a fire hose (that would kill a man outside the silver screen). You also have a lot of minor drama moments mixed in there, and it makes things feel more well lived even when things aren’t necessarily happening on screen - and there’s a lot of talking in here, it’s not just non stop action! The bantering between the NY and LA cop over the radio for example builds plenty of character for the LA cop, whose for all intents just a side character and doesn’t have much real pull on the plot as a whole. It adds a little bit more depth to the action movie fare, and that’s always appreciable.
Party rock.
Of course, some of that dramatic flair would be lost if the actors didn’t do a good job. Here, we’ve got some great opening performances from names that went on to be well known. Rickman does a great job acting in the movie, in both the sense of actual actor acting and in-movie character doing acting. Willis flexes some pretty good chops in the action hero scene, busting out lines that feel pretty generic action hero dumb at times but pulling off the motions pretty good for someone who wasn’t already a headliner in the action genre. Even side characters get a bit of time to make you like or hate them, although the vast majority of the hostage-types are simply just screaming faces. Heck, even most the bad guys are sort of just faces, with there really only being any sort of elaboration to our lead bad and to the revenge-hungry brother who spends most the movie just getting progressively more furious with the hero.
Despite character development being left largely to the main and oddly enough the cop side character who doesn’t show up until well after things have been going for a while, there are other departments to be checking out as well. I picked up a 4k version of the movie, and the Transfer is pretty good but not without some film grains style fuzziness here and there if you look hard enough. Honestly, it’s still very good, and it feels almost exactly like what you remember from watching it on DVD when televisions were designed for them. Most of the effects look great, with plenty of squibs and fake blood. There are a few that don’t look quite as good - usually to do with compositing of explosions - that aren’t because of the 4k but it also probably doesn’t help either.
Costumes end up rolling in with music this time around - both doing their job but not standing out to me in the slightest. A lot of suits and other modern attire, you won’t have a hard time realizing what character is what from looks - but you might never know who the character is just because they aren’t important enough to have conversations. Line delivery is good, balancing is great - never will you struggle to understand what someone said. Maybe I should have prefaced that a little - you’ll never struggle to understand what someone said when it’s a language you understand. The bad guys have a mix of languages in there, so obviously when they start spitting out German or Italian I’m at a loss (with super helpful subtitles that just say “speaking German” to fill me in that I’m not missing anything important).
So many quotable quotes.
Die Hard is a great movie - it’s fun, it has a ton of action, and it felt pretty unique in a genre of muscle bound guys blowing everything up at the time. The included drama elements and bonding between some of the characters helps to make it more than just a generic action flick, but the action elements are done quite well and should appease any action movie fan. You could cheese it as a holiday movie because it takes place on or around the holiday, but the holiday itself is so irrelevant to the movie that you can also easily watch it any time of the year and not feel like it’s out of season.