Though Grueber and his team act like some kind of anti-capitalist guerrillas, that turns out to be a cover. Their work ethic seems stronger than Ellis’s – they’re presented as very professional, storming from a truck to the building like elite space marines marching through an airlock – but Grueber is a parallel to Nakatomi CEO Joe Takagi, pointing out that he owns two of the same expensive suits. Grueber and his gang might as well be an international conglomerate themselves. Meanwhile these people just make money for some international conglomerate and they get to fuck around and party, wear shiny watches, ride in limos. I think these people and this world set off McClane’s alarms not because he’s a prude but because he senses the general unfairness here, that he works way harder at a much more dangerous job and he suffers for it, losing his wife and kids. She shuts the topic down because she knows John won’t be impressed by it. He makes a lame attempt to seduce Holly by talking about wine and brie, and makes way too big of a deal about the Rolex that the company bought her. (Admittedly the McClane family has a maid who seems to be familiar with John, so he’s not pure in his status as the Common Man.)Īt the Nakatomi Corporation Christmas party he sees various office sex and drugs going on, and he meets douchey Harry Ellis, the guy in charge of international development who’s clearly snorting coke and sniffing around married Holly Gennaro. “Okay Argyle, whadda we do now?” He ends up sitting shotgun, refusing to play along with the traditional Driving Miss Daisy power dynamics of driver and passenger. He seems embarrassed to be picked up by a limo, and doesn’t even know how it works. He looks suspiciously at a girl in tight pants giving her boyfriend a four-limbed hug. McClane walks around with a look of “can you believe this shit?” bemusement. And as punishment Holly changes back to her maiden name Gennaro, a severing of the patriarchal tradition of surnames. He chose chasing his “six month backlog of New York scumbags” over being with his wife and kids as they build a new life on the west coast. From what we know he’s a good cop, putting himself on the line to make the world better, but at the expense of his most important relationships. John McClane represents a no nonsense, hard-working man. But there’s definitely a bit of good natured class subtext here in the midst of its New York over L.A. Maybe that’s good, because it’s a unifying movie, easy for people of all stripes to get behind and enjoy together. I don’t consider it a political movie at all. Unlike some of my other favorite movies, DIE HARD does not have a clear underlying message that speaks to me. In retrospect it wasn’t the amount of C-4 but the placement of it that caused the ads to vow it “WILL BLOW YOU THROUGH THE BACK WALL OF THE THEATRE.” And then it escalates into spectacular crescendos – the explosion in the elevator shaft, the desperate leap from the roof and bare-foot-kicking-through of the window – that, in their somewhat grounded context, continue to feel enormous even after movies (including its four sequels) have gotten bigger and bigger for nearly three decades. They crafted a pitch perfect introduction of this character (based around the charm and humor of Bruce Willis) and unrolling of the sinister plot he’s about to crash head first into. de Souza, and its precise cinematic execution by director John McTiernan, cinematographer Jan de Bont, editors John F. This is a testament to the genius of the setup by Roderick Thorp in his novel Nothing Lasts Forever, its remolding by screenwriters Jeb Stuart and Steven E. The story is so perfect and elemental that it became a template, a name for a reliably entertaining subgenre of action movies. By now most people have caught on to the fact that it’s an extremely well made, ridiculously entertaining popcorn masterwork. Many of the reasons I love DIE HARD are self evident. I wrote a piece about it before, but that was 16 years ago, I was a different person then, and it’s embarrassing to me. But if I had to choose one, like if you had to register your favorite movie with the government or something, maybe it would be DIE HARD. There are too many great ones that I love for too many equally meaningful-to-me reasons. I don’t like to say I have a favorite movie.
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