Die Hard
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| Die Hard | |
|---|---|
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| Directed by | John McTiernan |
| Produced by | Lawrence Gordon Joel Silver Charles Gordon (executive producer) Beau Marks (associate producer) |
| Written by | Roderick Thorp (novel "Nothing Lasts Forever") Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza (screenplay) |
| Starring | Bruce Willis Alan Rickman Alexander Godunov Bonnie Bedelia |
| Music by | Michael Kamen, Chris Boardman (uncredited) |
| Cinematography | Jan de Bont |
| Editing by | John F. Link Frank J. Urioste |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release date(s) | July 15, 1988 |
| Running time | 131 min. |
| Country | USA  |
| Language | English |
| Followed by | Die Hard 2 Die Hard with a Vengeance Live Free or Die Hard |
| IMDb profile | |
Die Hard is a Hollywood action film released in 1988. It was written by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, starring Bruce Willis, Bonnie Bedelia, Alan Rickman, William Atherton, and directed by John McTiernan. A huge critical and commercial success, Die Hard propelled Willis' film career, giving him more credibility in action, dramatic, and musical roles, and established Alan Rickman as a popular portrayer of villains in American film.
The movie is based on a 1979 novel by Roderick Thorp titled Nothing Lasts Forever, itself a sequel to the book The Detective, which was previously made into a 1968 movie starring Frank Sinatra.
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[edit] Plot
The film opens with New York City police detective John McClane arriving in Los Angeles to attempt a Christmas reunion with his estranged wife Holly. He is picked up in a limousine manned by the talkative driver Argyle and taken to Holly's place of work, a large office building named the Nakatomi Plaza after its corporate owner. Argyle waits for John in the building's underground parking garage.
Joining the Nakatomi Christmas party, McClane meets his wife's boss Takagi and her sleazy co-worker Ellis. He finally finds Holly (after discovering she is now using her maiden name, Gennero), and they immediately get into an argument. Holly leaves John alone in a small room near the party, where he takes off his shoes in an attempt to deal with his jet lag.
A gang of terrorists led by the German Hans Gruber invade and secure the building. The party-goers are subdued and Takagi is taken aside, where it is revealed that the group are pretending to be terrorists and plan to steal millions of dollars in bearer bonds from the building's main security vault. When Takagi does not provide the vault combination, he is killed and Theo, the gang's technical mastermind, begins disabling the sequential vault locks.
McClane manages to slip away during the round-up of the party-goers, albeit without his shoes. His attempt to summon help brings him into confrontation with a terrorist named Tony. John wins the fight and escapes to the roof to again call for help, this time with Tony's radio, but the police refuse to respond until they overhear Tony's vengeful brother Karl attempting to shoot John. LAPD Sgt. Al Powell is sent to check the disturbance, but one of the gangmembers posing as a Plaza guard fools him into thinking all is in order. Chased through the building by Karl and the others, McClane secures the departing Powell's attention by dropping the body of one of his pursuers onto the hood of the officer's car.
The cops finally respond in force, but this merely accelerates Gruber's original timetable. Disgusted by the local police's inept handing of the situation, McClane continues his fight from within, with Powell as his only ally outside the building. After John captures the terrorists' vital supply of explosive detonators, Ellis foolishly attempts to negotiate a settlement and is murdered. Gruber then finds himself in an unexpected face-to-face confrontation with John; the mastermind's attempt at pretending to be an escaped hostage is successful enough to recover the detonators and, by forcing John to run over glass shards, badly injure McClane's feet.
Back outside the building, an irresponsible TV reporter named Richard Thornburg finds out about McClane and goes to Holly's home for an easy news story, interviewing the couple's two young children. Seeing the report, along with a picture of the kids on Holly's desk, alerts Gruber to the fact that "Holly Gennero" is John's wife. He takes her as a hostage.
After having doctored his wounds, John, wondering about Hans' presence on the top floor, investigates and finds out that the plan is to blow up the hostages on the roof of the building. Just as he moves to prevent this, he is delayed by a brutal fight with Karl. McClane gets the hostages back off the roof, but Gruber still sets off the explosion. John escapes the blast by tying a fire hose around his waist, jumping over the side of the building and blasting his way through the window into an office a couple of stories down.
In the meantime, Argyle, after making cheerful use of the limo's many frills and thus unaware of the events happening right above him, gets wind of the situation through a radio report. He manages to disable Theo, who is preparing the gang's getaway ambulance, ramming the vehicle with his limo and giving the man a knockout punch.
The film climaxes with a battered and beaten McClane confronting Gruber and gangmember Eddie one last time high up in the tower, with Holly being held at gunpoint. With only two rounds in a hidden gun taped to his back, McClane suckers Hans by pretending to surrender, then shoots him through the chest, turning to blast Eddie in the forehead as well. Gruber falls out the shattered window but pulls Holly with him. McClane manages to grab onto her, while Gruber attempts to finish them both off with his gun. Gruber is hanging on to Holly's Rolex watch, a gift from her boss. McClane undoes the band and Gruber falls thirty-two stories to his death.
As McClane and his wife leave from the building, the seemingly indestructible Karl suddenly reappears, brandishing his Steyr AUG in one final attempt to kill McClane. As McClane shields his wife, Karl is finally cut down for good by several bullets from an unseen shooter. As the image comes into view, we see it is Powell who has saved his friend's life. (Powell had earlier confided to John that he had mistakenly shot and killed a teenager, an event which had rendered him emotionally unable to draw a gun at someone.)
McClane and Holly, finally safe, prepare to leave. Thornburg approaches them, still relentlessly angling for a story, and is punched in the face by Holly (who had been a horrified witness to Thornburg's TV interview with her kids). Argyle crashes his limo through the garage's security barrier, and the couple are driven away from the scene in the battered vehicle, kissing each other on the passenger seat while their driver vows to be with them to see how exciting their New Year's Eve will be, given how they spent their Christmas Eve.
[edit] Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Bruce Willis | Detective John McClane |
| Alan Rickman | Hans Gruber |
| Bonnie Bedelia | Holly Gennero McClane |
| Reginald VelJohnson | Sgt. Al Powell |
| Alexander Godunov | Karl |
| Paul Gleason | Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson |
| William Atherton | Richard Thornburg |
| De'voreaux White | Argyle |
| Hart Bochner | Harry Ellis |
| James Shigeta | Joe Takagi |
| Dennis Hayden | Eddie |
| Clarence Gilyard Jr. | Theo |
| Bruno Doyon | Franco |
| Andreas Wisniewski | Tony |
| Al Leong | Uli |
| Robert Davi | FBI Special Agent Johnson |
| Grand L. Bush | FBI Agent Johnson |
[edit] Trivia
- During the final scene in which Karl suddenly reappears for one final attempt to kill McClane, a music cue from James Horner's score of Aliens is heard. The cue is "Resolution and Hyperspace" from the Aliens soundtrack, in which the first part of the track was ultimately unused in the original Aliens film.[citation needed]
- In the German dub the names and backgrounds of the German-born terrorists were changed into English forms (mostly into their British equivalents): Hans became Jack, Karl became Charlie, Heinrich turned into Henry etc. The new background depicted them as radical Irish activists having gone freelance and for profit rather than ideals. (This led to some odd plot holes in this movie and continuity problems with Die Hard with a Vengeance; there, the villain is considered to be the brother of Hans Gruber, yet he's German.) This was because German terrorism (especially by the Rote Armee Fraktion) was still considered a sensitive issue by the German government in the 1980s.
- In this film, Hans Gruber mocks McClane, telling him that this time "John Wayne doesn't go riding off into the sunset with Grace Kelly." Willis responds, "That was Gary Cooper, you asshole," in an obvious reference to 1952 western High Noon.
- In the DVD version of the movie, some inside facts about the movie are revealed in the audio commentary, including:
- The Nakatomi building is actually Twentieth Century Fox headquarters, and the company charged itself rent for use of the (unfinished) building as if the production were simply another tenant of the building, as well as damages for the destruction of the sidewalk guardrail destroyed by the LAPD armored personnel carrier.
- In the scene where Rickman is lowered from the window (as Hans) to drop 30 stories, he was told that the stuntman would release him at the count of three. However, the stuntman let go at the count of two, which is why in the film he has such a surprised look on his face.
- The majority of the terrorists arrive in a truck, and it is noted that the van that they arrive in is not really large enough to hold the terrorists and the ambulance they were going to use to escape; at the time they filmed the scene where the terrorists walk out of the delivery van, the writers did not know exactly what the terrorists were going to use as a method of escape.
- The truck the terrorists use has the name "Pacific Courier", which means "Bringer of Peace". This firm name is also used as the name on the airplane which is destroyed in the Keanu Reeves film Speed.
- It is often repeated that Bruce Willis ad-libbed his character's emotional plea to Powell (after pulling glass out of his foot), and that, upon learning of this fact, Terry Gilliam cast him as the lead in 12 Monkeys. However, the script for Die Hard seems to indicate that Willis veered only very slightly from the originally written scene.
[edit] Errors
- While talking to the emergency operator using the walkie-talkie, McClane "interrupts" her, but this is impossible with half-duplex 2-way radios since each party has to release the push-to-talk button in order to cease transmission and then be able to hear the other party.
- The walkie-talkie is either a VHF or UHF, not HF radio, therefore not capable of transmitting in the 27.065MHz emergency channel of the Citizen's Band (Channel 9)
- When doctor Hasseldorf speaks about the terrorists he mentions the "Helsinki-syndrome". It's wrong, the real name is Stockholm syndrome, making Harvey right when he says Sweden.
- McClane uses his gun as a support for his weight and lowers himself into the air shaft on its strap to evade Karl and the others chasing him - as he makes the lunge for the duct leading off the shaft, the stuntman misses the duct and appears to fall away from the wall, but the scene was kept and cuts to McClane grabbing the next duct down.
- Al, McClane's cop pal, hits his head when the terrorists were turning his car into "swiss cheese", leaving a big gash on his forehead but later on in the film the gash is no longer visible.
[edit] Reception
When Die Hard was released, it was considered one of the best action films of its era. This is probably in part due to the fact that there are few artificial plot points in the story. It is said to have reinvented the action genre and set the 90s for action/thriller movies such as Under Siege and Speed. "Die Hard on a _____" became a common way to describe the plot of many of the action films that came in its wake.[1] The movie was also responsible for creating the "action star" archetype that is a far more fallible and human hero, wearing few pieces of clothing, speaking few words (including "one liners") and always having a rough look across their face.[2] Die Hard grossed $80,707,729 at the U.S. Box Office.[3]
It was highly acclaimed by critics[4] and spawned two sequels Die Hard 2: Die Harder (1990) and Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995). The fourth film in the series, titled Live Free or Die Hard is currently scheduled for release on June 29, 2007.
[edit] Video games
A number of video games based on the Die Hard series of films have been made, including Die Hard Trilogy, Die Hard Arcade, Die Hard: Vendetta, and Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza. There was also a NES video game based on the original movie.
[edit] Parodies
- On the Ben Stiller Show, the Die Hard series was parodied in a fictional film trailer of Die Hard 12: Die Hungry. Stiller took the place of John McClane, defending a supermarket against terrorists, demanding millions of dollars of coupons on Christmas Eve.
- In National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 (mainly a parody of the Lethal Weapon franchise), Bruce Willis (in a similar under shirt and pants as he had in Die Hard) emerges from a trailer that exploded from heavy gunfire waving a white flag, surrendering (thus in turn parodying Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 2, where Rigg's trailer home is shot to pieces).
- The Dexter's Laboratory episode Trapped with A Vengeance is similar to Die Hard.
- A seventh-season episode of Charmed, "Scry Hard", spoofed the title of the Die Hard movie.
- Internet sketch comedy group TeamTigerAwesome recut scenes from Die Hard into a black and white silent film retelling titled "The Ballad of John McClane".
See also Spy Hard.
[edit] Notes
- ^ http://www.foxhome.com/diehard/trinity/dh1/
- ^ The Movies of the Eighties (1990) by Ron Base and David Haslam.
- ^ Yahoo! Die Hard Movie Details
- ^ RottenTomatoes Aggregated Film Reviews
[edit] External links
- Die Hard at the Internet Movie Database
- Script
- Script analysis of the film
- RottenTomatoes Aggregate reviews of Die Hard
| The Die Hard films | |
|---|---|
| Die Hard | Die Hard 2 | Die Hard with a Vengeance | Live Free or Die Hard | |
| Characters | |
| Heroes: John McClane | Sgt. Al Powell | Zeus Carver | Matt Foster | |
| Villains: Hans Gruber | Colonel Stuart | Simon Gruber | |
| Recurring: Holly Gennero McClane | Richard Thornburg | |
| Crew | |
| Directors: John McTiernan | Renny Harlin | Len Wiseman | |
| Producers: Joel Silver | Lawrence Gordon | John McTiernan | Bruce Willis | |
| Writers: Steven E. de Souza | Doug Richardson | Jonathan Hensleigh | |
| Video games | |
| Die Hard | Die Hard Arcade | Die Hard Trilogy | Die Hard Trilogy 2 | Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza | Die Hard: Vendetta | |
| Miscellaneous | |
| Fox Plaza | Glock 7 | Nothing Lasts Forever |
Categories: Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | 1988 films | 20th Century Fox films | Action films | American films | Christmas films | Crime films | Die Hard | English-language films | Films based on thriller books | Films directed by John McTiernan | New York City in fiction | Heist films | Films about terrorism
