"Is the building on fire?"

Rating: 10/10 (9 April 2004)

No doubt about it, to a lot of people, Bruce Willis will ALWAYS be John McClane, for better or worse.
In the film that made him a star, or at least got him out of TV work, Bruce Willis is New York native cop John McClane, come down to LA to see his estranged wife and family for the Christmas holiday. Then Hans (Alan Rickman, in one of his best evil performances) and a group of thieves posing as terrorists who look European male models and an obnoxious black computer hacker show up, take over the building and try to rob the place. Only McClane can stop them, and his only real support comes from Sgt. Al Powell (played by the dad from TV's "Family Matters"). Calamity, chaos and mayhem ensue as McClane and the foreign thugs tear the building apart trying to kill each other in the ultimate battle of all American cowboy hero and sophisticated Eurotrash and the idiot cops and FBI gets trip over themselves to help out.
Based on the novel by Roderick Thorpe. Bonnie Bedelia is Bruce's wife, and the late Alexander Godunov is Karl, who's vendetta with Bruce turns personal. Bonnie does well as the sympathetic wife with a bad haircut and Godunov, in a role very different from his debut part as an Amish farmer in "Witness", is surprisingly menacing in spite of his pretty boy looks. Of course, it helps that his career as a ballet dancer gave him more dexterity than the usual hulking henchman. His knock-down-drag-out brawl with Willis is one of the best.
Alan Rickman commented that he didn't view Hans as "the villain", but more as a guy who "has made certain choices in life, wants certain things in life and goes after them." All the same, Alan is the perfect villain for Bruce's wise cracking McClane, who is neither weak nor super human. Bruce worked very hard on this film and allegedly did a lot of his own stunts and really brought a lot of life and warmth to a character who could very easily have been just another grim loner. It's a shame that he's had to spend the majority of his career trying to get away from this character (kind of like Sean Connery trying to live down his glory days as James Bond). And to think that Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Burt Reynolds and Richard Gere all turned this part down (probably better that they did).

Sadly, the appeal of the McClane character was lost in #3 "Die Hard: With A Vengeance", where McClane HAD become a grim, burned out, wasted loner.

A big part of the power of "Die Hard" is that there are no easy escapes, very few places to run and very little "cheating" as director John McTiernan put it. And it's true that very few moments require you to suspend logical disbelief, although we do have to question if it's possible to successfully pull of the stunt where Bruce jumps off the building with a hose wrapped around him.
So grab the popcorn and get ready for the madness of "Die Hard"! This is actually one of the few action films my family and I enjoy watching together. This was actually filmed at the 20th Century Fox Plaza.