As I was saying, a cool hero, a cigarette, a clean white vest and forty stories of sheer adventure! Not two trucks loaded with nitro-glycerine? Oh, well you can’t have everything. But that’s what Die Hard (1985) tries to deliver. Although I didn’t pick up on all the signs and symbols the first time around I knew this was a landmark film, not because it was so new or different, but because it harked back to everything that was great about movies that had gone before. That’s what made it so good. Takes the past and ramping it up so that looked all shiny and new. It set the standard for action adventure movies for the next twenty years by taking everything that was good from the previous forty years. The white vest comes directly from The Wages of Fear, the skyscraper from Towering Inferno perhaps, the small town cowboy ‘tec from a multitude of sources, a heady and not unsubtle blend.
One of the most notable and pleasant aspects of the film was the restraint with which the action scenes were shot. A heck of a lot of action, but hardly a note of unpleasantness. The second film was much much cruder in that regard. The villain there had to kill almost everybody before we, the audience, could be allowed to figure out that “gosh, duh, like he must be evil!” At least Die Hard doesn’t throw in the towel so easily. The villain here remains the bad guy. He doesn’t suffer the indignity of having motivation other than greed, and yet he is still human, capable of error and doubt. If this ever seems like a series of cardboard cut-out characters then you’ve not been watching blockbuster movies in the past twenty years – because this is positively Shakespearean by comparison. What was RKB saying about villains?
July 10, 2009 at 1:54 pm |
It’s a rare thing to see a great film that walks the fine line between hollow recycling and learning from the past. So many empty action movies get cranked out each year a gem like Die Hard really stands out.