IMDb #119 Review: Die Hard (1988)

Source: Wikipedia

A New York City cop can't relax on vacation. Visiting California to visit his estranged wife, he discovers the quintessential action movie, the best Christmas movie ever made, and only the third-worst Christmas of his life. Recognizing a wife's independent career in the eighties must have had these kinds of consequences.

The lone cop liberates an office building under siege by angry foreigners with machine guns. Barefoot, armored only in underwear, armed with only his wits and service pistol and metric fucktons of luck.

Ultimate testosterone fantasy: achieved.

But the bad guys aren't cardboard cutouts. Little details humanize them. They love their brothers, want money, appreciate culture, and might even seem charming before they blast your head off.

Despite petty motivations, the villain is crazy sophisticated. He reads Forbes and Time magazine. He does his own dirty work. He fakes a convincing American accent. That's right -- a Brit impersonating a German impersonating an American. It's ear-boggling.

The American Übermensch isn't alone in his struggle. He has the aid of the overly enthusiastic limo driver in the parking garage. And an overweight LAPD officer who acts on the distress calls and escalates the hostage situation to a national incident, which means bigger explosions and more guns and more fun for everyone.

The pacing is pitch-perfect, the plot tighter than the wife-beater plastered to Bruce Willis's rippling torso. It's wonderfully satisfying to watch, also like the wife-beater plastered to Bruce Willis's rippling torso. The recurring riffs on "Ode to Joy" become quite appropriate.

A word on the sequels.

Once is excusable. More than once becomes absurd. Repeatedly flouting plausibility strains the suspension of disbelief -- simple story engineering, with fake math to back it up. What the sequels miss is the humanity. Just some dude who doesn't know what he's doing and gets lucky. Not invincible supercop versus the entirety of Communist Russia. Just a sweaty nobody crawling in vents and elevator shafts and leaping off exploding buildings with a firehose for a bungee cord.

Never mind, they were always stupid. But the first one did it best.

132 minutes.