One of the few movies I've seen in a long time that was entertaining.

Rating: 5/10 (20 December 2008)

I'm not someone who tries to find the good in every movie. People who do that just overrated cinema and praise movies that genuinely were a complete waste of their time. I think that is why I hate most action movies that have been released in the 2000s. With the exception of a handful, it's a common trend for modern action movies to be cliché paint-by-the-number dramas with a few things blowing up in the background. This modern mindset that action movies have to have cliché drama elements or they're somehow worthless is a misconception that I never understood. I'm an action fan. I came for action. I didn't come for an hour and a halfliterally, sometimesof the buff action hero giving long speeches about how much he loves his one-dimensional kid with cancer. In this sense, Die Hard makes the biggest, most recent action blockbusters look pathetic. I'm very happy to write that its main focus is action; the other lame storytelling elements are all expendable.
With that said, Die Hard does something else I didn't expect. Something that no one gives it credit for. It's creative. If you look behind the terrorist plot, you'll see Die Hard doing things that no other action movie did before it. For one, it has the "hero" (who is really more of a pawn than a hero) completely in solitude for most of the movie. In a sense, Die Hard is almost a reverse slasher film. In slasher films the main bad guy kills people and he's never seen on screen until the ending. In Die Hard, the hero kills people and the bad guys have no clue who is doing it. Again, another thing no other action movie has had the creativity to do. Though the overall movie isn't anything entirely new (thus my somewhat low score), there are a hundred other details that make it far superior to the less creative action movies out there.
Die Hard also has a hardcore level of intensity that I've seen in very few action movies. It builds on a semi-slow pace that immerses the viewer in realism and allows them to care for the characters. The fact Die Hard can do this without ever once becoming tedious or boring is another aspect movies have lost in modern times. The key is in that there is never once an expendable scene in Die Hard. Every scene adds something to the overall effect of the movie, and without it something would be lacking from the overall effect. In opposite, modern action films pump the movie full of pointless talking scenes and pointless sex scenes and pointless drama scenes that add nothing whatsoever to the overall effect of the movie. Also, Die Hard gives the viewer credit that we understood the plot from the first trailer and doesn't need to sit and explain it any further. Modern action films hardly ever do that. Most recently in The Dark Knight, we had to sit thought an hour and a half of nothing but people discussing the cliché crime plot that we understood in full before we even went into the theater.
The directing is also far above average. Coming from the same man who directed Predator, I didn't expect anything less. The directing almost has an epic feel as the camera shows all the necessary rooms of the building without once showing something unnecessary to the overall effect. Again, a trait lost in modern action movies.
Overall, this film is a necessary watch for anyone who calls themselves an action fan. It's not a perfect movie, and it's not something completely alien to everything that has been done before, but it's entertaining. I watch at least two movies a day, and I can't remember the last time I watched a movie that I found genuinely entertaining.
5/10