often (poorly) imitated, never duplicated

Rating: Null/10 (12 November 2015)

The thing the sequels and copycats forget about John McClane is that he isn't a fearless badass Rambo character. What he does in the film is stunning even to him. He keeps fearing for his life and thinks every new insane thing that happens could be where his luck and his planning finally run out and he gets killed. McClane can be heard saying to himself, "Please don't let me die, please don't let me die" just before perhaps his craziest exploit in the film. He can be seen taking long breaks during which he's out of breath and half mad with the conviction of his impending death. He can be seen painfully pulling glass from his bare feet, bandaging them, and barely able to walk afterwards. He can be seen getting legitimately frustrated with the cops and FBI, and not from a place of Godlike hypercompetence, but from a place of desperation and fear - he NEEDS their help, needs them to be competent - or at least he thinks he does, at the time. This is John McClane before he or anybody else knew who John McClane was. This is a McClane who, if he has plot armor (and he does), doesn't know about it, isn't yet arrogant about it, smirking and laughing his way through perilous situations. When he smirks or laughs in this film it's a kind of pathetic coping mechanism, a false bravado, rather than an action hero trademark. The sequels and copycats forget this. They give us cartoons who know they're cartoons, where Die Hard gave us an action hero cartoon who honestly thought he was a man, and who everyone else honestly thought was a man. Take away his seeming to be just a man and you lose half of the quality at least.
Anyway this is a classic. It's nearly perfect. Everything in the building (which is the vast majority of the movie) is perfect. Unfortunately, literally just about everything outside the building involving the police and FBI (the reporter stuff is fine) is terrible, and undermines the reality of the movie in a way even McClane's insane heroics never do. And this starts immediately, with his 911 call, which is handled by what must be the worst 911 operators on the planet. Then continues with VelJohnson's cop, who is incompetent for a moment, then passes the baton of incompetence to the next law enforcement character and becomes competent and sympathetic (this actually happens twice - Paul Gleason, while he's the main obstructivist cop in the movie, is aggressively and implausibly stupid, but once the FBI guys show up to be the main implausibly stupid hero obsructionist guys, Gleason is allowed to become likable, more or less competent comic relief in a couple scenes). The VelJohnson stuff in particular doesn't work at all. We never care about him or buy any of that back and forth for a moment. Nor do we buy McClane going for that sappy stuff. The McClane we saw prior to the building being taken was hyper-cynical and brusque. He'd have rolled his eyes at 90% of VelJohnson's dialogue, and at the tone of all of it. And Gleason, while amusing in playing what is basically his Breakfast Club principal thrown into an action movie, isn't an actual character. So. All that is sacrificed to make the plot run. And the plot runs so well that ultimately these decisions were probably the right ones, or at least not terrible ones. But you never know.
I really like the film's politics. It's extremely anti-PC, and anti-corporate and anti-greed. It's anti-sensuality and anti- softness. It's anti-globalist. It's classically American, in the DH Lawrence sense. McClane is an iron killer able to defeat a dozen other iron killers, because they have mercenary motives. He kills the greedy, dishonest, amoral Euro snake - with a ruse, appropriately enough. But not before the killer snake takes out the globalist Japanese businessman, waging an old war in a new way and commanding US labor to serve Japanese interests (the bit in his bio about having been in an internment camp after coming to the US as a child is significant - you think he doesn't remember and resent?). And not before the snake takes out the master of the universe coked up greedy cocksure materialistic sellout (who, appropriately, dies because he was bluffing). That Takagi and Ellis, two symbols, are the only two hostages killed, is not an accident. The story hates what they stand for, just as it hates the bureaucratic side of policing, the feds, the media, and greed. And just as it hates feminism and the cultural Marxist destruction of the family and of traditional gender roles. Meanwhile what does the film love? Masculinity, courage, resourcefulness, ingenuity, disdain for unmerited authority, and self-reliance.
So. A great film, an action classic, extremely entertaining, and a great snapshot of all-American politics. If this film's likes and dislikes were the likes and dislikes of every US citizen, the country would not be in ruins today. But alas...