I wouldn’t say that I was intentionally avoiding it. I simply didn’t think I needed to see it, or see it again. But Sunday afternoon was dark and cold before the snow made the city glow so I thought, perhaps, Die Hard. Two hours later—as I was raising from the sofa still bundled up in the arctic runner full dress uniform I had previously gone to the park with—it was still unclear if I had actually ever watched it or not. Which, really, says much about the impact certain titles from that generation had on our popular culture.
Halfway through the film, I decided that nostalgia must be largely responsible for the high regard Die Hard is broadly granted. If Alan Rickman’s remarkable performance is somehow timeless in its hypnotic Shakespearean tones, Bruce Willis’s fetishistic singlet or Bonnie Borelia’s thin curls are as iconic of the Eighties as Hulk Hogan’s moustaches. Likewise, their characters. John, a dedicated average cop, an impossible husband but a righteous man, and a sweaty Rambo type if need be. Holly Gennaro, of Italian ancestry, a brave working woman almost indifferent to men’s pathetic material games, and a single mother de facto.
During the second half though, a more discernible clue as to why this film is so special started to take shape. Only then, I found myself acknowledging how nicely the dialogues are written, how so very rarely they slip into the phoney machismo ever idiosyncratic of such action-driven shows, and how brilliantly, lead to character, the actors play against the stereotyped nature of their roles.
In narrative terms too—within the sense of structure and drama that Hollywood has defined in the last, say, four decades—Die Hard is pretty impeccable. The tension tightens steadily its grip from the very first scene all the way to the climactic confrontation and the imperative feel-good resolution through a comforting cascade of expected surprises. In a nutshell, however seemingly generated by an artificial intelligence system, Die Hard does work, or rather functions, but only up to a point. For me at least.
What prevents me from fully appreciating it, is how everything in the film revolves around violence. I remember Quentin Tarantino shouting back at an interviewer who was insistently arguing about violence in his oeuvre, ‘Because it’s so much fun!’ Well, yes and no. What is fun, ironic, clever, is never quite brutality per se, but the good writing around it. As it is, after all, in Tarantino’s gore brimful yet intelligent scripts. But in a film like Die Hard, violence appears to be used as the sole narrative lever to move from one story beat to the next, for the characters to achieve their objectives whether good or sick, interim or final, and ultimately—here comes a word so often abused to evoke an allure of nobility—to restore justice, in any of its forms.
On a side note, I can’t even think a film like this could have a sequel. They made two. Now, if that isn’t a blind and greedy commercial attitude, I really don’t know what else it could be.
