Lean

Rating: Null/10 (1 January 2014)

This gets better every Christmas and I predict no stop to it. It works so well I believe one day film students will be forced to study the effect beyond the cultural just like they now study Hawks and Hitchcock. Some groundwork here for future readings.
Willis had charm of a similar sort to Wayne, empty swag and unable to act. The story derives from a western mentality anyway. We have a couple drifting apart and the situation that brings them close again, but this isn't really a main driving force in the story. Neither Willis nor his wife are directed to convey much anxiety about their reuniting, we can logically assume it but it's not a palpable tension in the film. The movie is his macho dream to destroy that corporate life that has taken his wife from him; the Japanese boss who he didn't prevent being shot, the annoying Ellis character who puzzlingly doesn't give him up as the husband, the whole building that he tears apart, Willis unclasping her rollex in the climax and with it corporate, money-driven Hans Gruber tumbles down.
More interesting is that all this is wrapped in the usual Christmas fantasy about family, but for the fact that it's not the usual one. The usual one would begin after the movie ends as their kids who had gone to bed that night with an estranged father on the other side of the country wake up to find their parents together again. It's the same cinematic leanness that makes Christmas a faint background instead of bending every edge to it like most Christmas films do, probably inspired by the low-key approach of Lethal Weapon.
This brings me to another point. It really has little action compared to what we have now in superhero stuff. Preparations take up much more screen time than gunplay. Of course at the time it didn't seem so, which is why now the effect is beginning to surface with some clarity. We don't need to have whole fabrics of world torn up for it to be intense, it derives from the situation and is punctuated by bursts of action in very clearly defined cinematic space. Up and down, in and out. Economic use of space. The rooftop climax is a great example, we don't have endless shooting and a storm of fractured image; McClane gets there fires a machinegun burst in the air, an explosion throws him off the edge, he smashes in through the windows below.
Lethal Weapon was liberal, this is conservative. That one inspired by noir, this one by westerns. Briggs and Murtaugh are frayed and flummoxed in earnest by the world, McClane coolly stands above it, alone and charred only on the outside. What kind of guy are you?