Christmas: Die Hard (1988)
In spite of the debate that wages on social media each December, there’s no real doubt that Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Even more clearly than Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon, which I explored for Christmas last year, Die Hard has family at the core of its exceptional action heroics. It’s no accident that this particular tale of an ordinary cop, John McClane (Bruce Willis), doing the extraordinary to save his estranged wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), takes place on Christmas Eve. Like so many films of the eighties, Die Hard leans into the secular meaning of Christmas, emphasizing our collective need for family and the Christmas season’s particular ability to help people grow as human beings (a convention first established in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol). That it also happens to be an action masterpiece is icing on the cake, but make no mistake: Christmas as a time for family to come together is at the core of this movie and its appeal.
Loosely based on Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel, Nothing Lasts Forever, Die Hard has an iconic and simple hook: an ordinary cop is in the right place at the right time when his wife’s Christmas Party is taken hostage by German thieves masquerading as terrorists. The cop is the only man who can stop the thieves, working against the clock as well as the blustering responses of the LAPD in order to save his wife and stop the thieves’ grand scheme. The core ingredients of Die Hard—the accidental hero who is coincidentally in the right place at the right time, the restricted setting, the limited timeframe, the family drama inserted into a life-and-death situation—have been much-imitated over the years, not only in direct sequels but in other action films that aim for the same strong appeal.
Yet, no matter how much other action filmmakers try to capture aspects of the film’s appeal, no filmmakers have been as successful at conjuring effortlessly entertaining action as director John McTiernan in Die Hard. McTiernan was in the midst of an unmatched action hot streak when he made Die Hard. He had just directed Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator and would follow-up Die Hard with the best Tom Clancy adaptation, The Hunt for Red October. But however impressive the other two films are, Die Hard is his masterpiece and a touchstone for action filmmaking.
I’ve already discussed the simple yet extremely effective premise. Another key ingredient, and one often less admired, is McTiernan’s visual style. Along with cinematographer Jan de Bont, he injects some much-needed elegance into the visual approach to American action filmmaking. Instead of relying on quick edits or the massive scale of on-screen events to supply excitement, McTiernan uses his camera to provide momentum and keep the viewer consistently engaged in the action. He favours medium-wide shots that roam the corridors of Nakatomi Plaza with the use of Steadicam. These shots not only continue movement even when characters are standing still, but they create a clear spatial geography within the mind of the viewer. As a result, the action in Die Hard is not only fast and visually-appealing, but completely coherent.
As well, McTiernan and de Bont’s use of lens flares and reliance on low-angles create an almost-first-person perspective to events in the film. We see what John sees, which links us to him both narratively and experientially. The action itself is also engaging and tactical in a manner not usually found in American action films of the eighties. The series of back-and-forth moves and counter-moves between John and dapper German thief, Hans Gruber (the wonderful, late Alan Rickman in perhaps his best on-screen role), constantly escalate and recalibrate throughout the film. Characters don’t use one approach throughout and must rely on subterfuge to outsmart their opponent.
For instance, the characters often discover information that their adversaries don’t possess, giving them, and us—the watching audience—an advantage. John takes advantage of his walkie talkie to listen in on Hans and his fellow thieves. However, when John desperately calls the LAPD, Hans overhears him and learns that John is not a security guard but a family member of a guest at the party. This is similar to John overhearing Hans talking to Joseph Takagi (James Shigeta), learning that Hans is a thief before the media and outside law enforcement do. This tactical chess match gives the film an intellectual appeal, which extends beyond the visceral pleasure of the action, and is a great example of using dramatic irony to escalate suspense. The film is very Hitchcockian in this sense. It also makes the film about something more than heroes applying sheer brute force, which is something of a mainstay in American cinema.
Of course, it’s not only the action that makes Die Hard a classic. It’s also the way that it emphasizes the normalcy of its hero. John McClane is not a supercop like Jackie Chan or even a “lethal weapon” like Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs. He is an ordinary, bitter man put into an exceptional situation. He’s endlessly relatable. No scene better defines this relatability than when John runs across the upper floors of the building berating himself for doing nothing when Hans killed Takagi—“Why didn’t you try to stop ’em, John?” “Because then you’d be dead too, asshole.” John doesn’t handle this situation like a movie hero: he handles it like a real person, in that he panics and blames himself for not doing more to save others. He ends up handling the situation admirably, but never effortlessly, or without anxiety and fear, which unquestionably ingratiates him to the viewer. In short, John is endlessly sympathetic.
It also helps that the film explores John’s character (and Hans’s as well) through the action scenes. His reaction to Takagi’s death shows his desire to be the superhero, while his reliance on humour shows how he copes with the direness of the situation. John constantly uses humour to get a grip on the situation and remain in control of something that is out of control. His use of humour as a coping mechanism is a relatable trait.
Now how does all this make Die Hard a Christmas movie? Aside from the setting, Christmas movies are typically about restoring the centrality and health of the domestic sphere, healing emotional wounds, and emphasizing the importance of family. Although Die Hard depicts a highly charged scenario, its emotional arc ends up doing all three of these things that are essential to Christmas films. It’s important to note that John’s estrangement from Holly is not an ancillary element of the story, but a key element. Had they not been estranged, Holly would be living in New York, or John would already be living in Los Angeles, and this exact scenario would not play out as it does. John’s need to reconnect with Holly gives him the opportunity to be a hero for her. In a sense, the true conflict in the film is not between John and Hans, but between John and Holly, as John has to do something to heal the rift between them. And that healing only occurs as they collectively identify a new enemy: Hans Gruber.
Just as the extraordinary situation allows John to play the hero and reconnect with his wife, it also lets John form a friendship with another cop, Al (Reginald VelJohnson), and help that man grow in the process. On rewatch, it’s notable how much of the film focuses on John’s burgeoning friendship with Al and their confessions to each other. John confesses to being a bad husband—not listening to Holly, being dismissive of her personal and professional desires—while Al confesses to being a bad cop—specifically to accidentally shooting a child while on the job. They encourage each other to grow and over the course of the film, each helps the other to heal in either a personal or professional sense. We know that the film has properly invested in this friendship when their embrace of each other at film’s end is more emotional than John’s embrace with his wife.
The ending of Die Hard not only reestablishes the status quo for John, Holly, and Al—John and Holly are again a couple; she emphasizes to the cop that her last name is “McClane,” not her maiden name, Gennero—but it creates a deeper bond between them that can be relied on in the future. The film’s ending does not erase the considerable marital problems between John and Holly, but it does put them in stark perspective next to larger, life-and-death considerations.
Secular Christmas films put the family at the centre. They celebrate the capacity for human beings to grow as well as the magical possibility of the holiday, where problems can be put to rest and new relationships can grow out of past failures. Die Hard may be the definitive action film of the 1980s and one of the foremost technical accomplishments in American action filmmaking, but it’s also one of cinema’s most successful secular Christmas films. But it’s important to note that it’s no accident that a quintessentially American film links one to the other. Die Hard’s appeal lies in it fully embracing this linkage and excelling on both counts.
10 out of 10
Die Hard (1988, USA)
Directed by John McTiernan; written by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, based on Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp; starring Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Alexander Godunov, Bonnie Bedelia, Reginald VelJohnson, Paul Gleason, De’voreaux White, William Atherton, Clarence Gilyard, Hart Bochner, James Shigeta.