DIE HARD: Benefits of a Classical Education

Die Hard (1988) – Directed by John McTiernan – Starring Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Alexander Godunov, Bonnie Bedelia, Reginald VelJohnson, Paul Gleason, Robert Davi, Grand L. Bush, De’voreaux White, Hart Bochner, James Shigeta, and William Atherton.

John McTiernan will never win an Academy Award for Best Director, but he directed Predator, DIE HARD, and The Hunt for Red October.

In a row.

So f*ck you, Oscar.

If you’ve been reading the Anxiety for any length of time, you darn well that the two greatest action movies of my lifetime are DIE HARD and Casino Royale. Make no mistake where I’m coming from here – I’m not giving these two films simply the compliments of genre. DIE HARD and Casino Royale are cinematic masterpieces that can stand alongside any film ever made in my eyes. That the Academy would never recognize a film like DIE HARD goes a long way to explaining why I think awards are bullsh*t. (That awards are arbitrary popularity contests goes a long way to completing that explanation. That I’m the kind of person that is eternally, creatively restless is the icing on that cake.) What films were nominated for Best Picture in 1989?

Rain Man, Dangerous Liaisons, The Accidental Tourist, Mississippi Burning, and Working Girl.

That’s right, Working Girl. The year DIE HARD was released, the Academy chose to nominate a romantic comedy about a secretary who uses her boss’ injury to climb the corporate ladder by hooking up with someone in power at the company and getting her ideas heard. It’s a paean to upward mobility, to the fact that working class has not only value in the world, but that they can do their superiors’ job even better than the bosses can. At the end of the film, Melanie Griffith’s Tess is rewarded for all the hilarity that has ensued by getting her own big fancy office, secretary, and paycheck.

Working Girl stars a bunch of popular Hollywood folk (Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver, Melanie Griffiths), was directed by Mike Nichols, and perpetuates that myth of the American economic ladder.

In contrast, John McClane (Bruce Willis) is a guy the Academy doesn’t understand. Like Tess, McClane is a working class guy, but he’s not struggling to get his big break or looking for an opportunity to impress the corporate ladder. He’s flawed in a way the Academy doesn’t usually recognize: he’s not suffering from a disease or battling to overcome societal prejudices. He’s just a guy who gets up and does his job and doesn’t take care of his home life like he should. When his wife got her chance to climb that corporate ladder, he balked at leaving the comforts of New York for the new experience of Los Angeles. When he gets invited to the Christmas party at the fancy office tower where his wife works, he decides to head out west and finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and then spends the rest of the film simply trying to stop the bad guys.

Rain Man, Dangerous Liaisons, The Accidental Tourist, Mississippi Burning, and Working Girl are all fine films and I don’t mean to bag on their nominations as much as I want to point out that none of them are better films than DIE HARD, and that the glass ceiling that Tess and Holly Gennaro (Bonnie Bedelia) smash through in Working Girl and DIE HARD is a ceiling even the best action movie of our lifetime can’t crack.

The ultimate difference between the two films is that where Working Girl celebrates the climb, DIE HARD celebrates the trenches.

By specifically not making him Superman – or, as Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) mentions in the film – by not making him John Wayne or Rambo, the makers of DIE HARD have created in John McClane (Bruce Willis) the ultimate working class action hero.

It’s McClane’s humanity more than his proficiency for killing that makes his heroism stand out. This is a guy afraid of flying, uncomfortable with sitting in the backseat of a limo, uncomfortable with being in the fancy Nakatomi building, and who spends the action portion of the movie without any shoes. His got a big ol’ individualistic streak in him and a smart mouth, so we recognize him as the latest cinematic action hero, but note how both Hans and Sgt. Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) refer to him as a cowboy. Even McClane casts himself as a cowboy; when he doesn’t want to give him real name to Al because Hans is listening, he calls himself Roy, after Roy Rogers, the cowboy he told Hans he preferred over John Wayne and Marshall Dillon. We’ve got a cowboy in the middle of all this upward mobility and it’s only McClane and his trusty sidekick Al that are far more interested in who they are rather than where they’re trying to get.

What’s impressive is not just how many upwardly mobile-interested characters McTiernan and his screenwriters fit into this film, but that they run the gamut from decent, represented by Holly and her boss, Mr. Takagi (James Shigeta), who makes a point to mention to Hans that the company’s plans for India are not simply to exploit but to be a good community partner; to ass-kissing and bullying Deputy Chief of Police Dwayne T. Robinson (Paul Gleason); to slimy reporter Richard Thornburg (William Atherton) and slimy corporate schmuck Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner); to downright evil: Hans and his crew. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be upwardly mobile, of course, but DIE HARD takes all of these shades of economic desire and mobility and plops two good, simple cops, John and Al, down in the middle of it to simply try and endure all the nonsense a desire for money can cause.

The core of DIE HARD is the radio-only relationship between McClane and Al (and Reginald VelJohnson is really fantastic here), making this one of the weirder buddy movies of all time. It’s pure bromance, two dudes falling in respect with one another over the radio during one of the worst nights of their respective lives. Their relationship is infinitely more important to the film than John and Holly’s relationship. When Holly is reunited with John, she might get the liplock, but it’s the first meeting between McClane and Al that gets the cinematic romantic treatment: they stare at each other over a short distance and through a crowd, the music swells, they slowly approach, and then they embrace.

In this way, the film slowly cuts Holly’s decision to be upwardly mobile and uproot her family for Los Angeles out at the knees. Sure, John gives a tearful apology about how he should have been more supportive, but tellingly, he gives it to Al, who is only to give it to Holly if John doesn’t survive. When John leaves Holly’s side to hug Al, the film is giving us an embrace between John and the only person in the film who really understands him. His reward for what he’s done is recognition by his peer.

Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber is one of the best villains in cinematic history and I love how DIE HARD gives him almost as many great lines as they give Willis. It’s really good writing, too, that Hans’ great lines are delivered counter to McClane’s. Where the American’s lines are short and sharp, the German’s are often longer and dryer. Everyone will remember “Yippie Kai Yay, Motherf*cker,” of course, but I actually get a bigger thrill from Hans’ best lines:

“Nice Suit. John Philips, London. I have two myself. Rumor has it Arafat buys his there too.”

“And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. Benefits of a classical education.”

“I could talk about industrialization and men’s fashion all day, but I’m afraid work must intrude.”

“You ask for miracles. Theo, I give you the F … B … I.”

“When they touch down, we’ll blow the roof. They’ll spend a month sifting through the rubble and by the time they figure out what went wrong, we’ll be sitting on a beach earning twenty percent.”

There’s great dialogue throughout DIE HARD and it feels very natural instead of a deliberate attempt to introduce a new catch phrase.

DIE HARD is impeccably cast. Not only does the film score with its main protagonist and antagonist, it gets all the secondary characters cast perfectly: Reginald VelJohnson, William Atherton, Paul Gleason, Robert Davi, Grand L. Bush, Bonnie Bedelia, Hart Bochner, and De’voreaux White hit all of their notes perfectly.

Perhaps the most influential movie of the past 50 years, DIE HARD set a clear gold standard for action movies. It seemed like every movie for years afterwards was given a DIE HARD high concept pitch. John McTiernan’s direction is spot on, Bruce Willis delivered the performance of a lifetime. It’s almost hard to imagine that DIE HARD is now 25 years old, especially when you watch the film and it still feels like it was made this year. Other than some goofy ’80s hair on Hans’ henchman, and McClane doing a few things that couldn’t be done today (carrying his gun on a plane, smoking at LAX), DIE HARD could roll into the multiplex today and still kick everyone else’s ass.

DIE HARD is a masterpiece, and one of the best movies any of us will ever see.

SUPERGIRL: Your Suffering Will Be Short … Mine, Forever

Supergirl (Special Edition; 1984) – Directed by Jeannot Swarcz – Starring Helen Slater, Faye Dunaway, Peter O’Toole, Hart Bochner, Mia Farrow, Brenda Vaccaro, Peter Cook, Marc McClure, Maureen Teefy, and Matt Frewer.

The most exciting thing that happens in SUPERGIRL involves Supergirl (Helen Slater) and Zaltar (Peter O’Toole) climbing up a rocky hill.

Yup.

Instead of saying that SUPERGIRL is a completely dreadful movie, I will simply say that it is a product of its time and that’s a time I really don’t want to visit. A cousin (ha, I’m hilarious) to the Christopher Reeve Superman films, SUPERGIRL has the same tone, style, and feel as those films, and quality-wise it’s less than the first two and better than the final two. In case you haven’t heard my Superman rants, I’m a marginal fan of even the first two Reeves’ films, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a derivative version of those films wouldn’t do much for me.*

I simply find the mix of a soft-glow hero, realistic setting, and cartoonish villains rather noxious.

(*Author’s Note: When I wrote this review, it had been years since I’d watched the Superman films and while it is completely true that I was not a huge fan of them as a kid, I have come to really like the original movie and the Richard Donner Cut of Superman II.)

SUPERGIRL contains all of this to the nth degree. Kara Zor-El is a precocious teenager living in Argo City, a Kryptonian establishment inside a pocket of transdimensional mumbo-jumbo. We know she’s precocious because she wanders through an impressive stage set of white walkways and weird, vaguely tree-like objects. She interrupts a class room and apologizes with a cute smile to the teacher. She’s on her way to see Zaltar, who’s the city’s designer/architect/magic man. He’s borrowed an Omegahedron, which is responsible for the city’s power supply. He and Kara have a nice grandfather/granddaughter relationship; they’re both a bit impish and when Kara struggles with knowing her sixth dimensional geometry, Zaltar assures her to use her imagination instead as artistic people often have issues with math.

I believe this to be true because Peter O’Toole says it’s true.

Zaltar gives his magic design wand and the Omegahedron to Kara so she can invent a big rubber fly for use in a Doctor Who serial, and Kara ends up losing the Omegahedron (which is roughly the size of an orange) when her fly crashes through the window (I mean, the plastic wall of the city – it’s literally encased in plastic) and the Omegahedron gets sucked out through the window. Kara’s mom and dad (Mia Farrow and Simon Ward) freak out because this means the entire city will be plunged into darkness and die within days. Zaltar first says he’ll go after it and then, when Kara jumps in his space-bubble and goes after it instead, he commits himself to the Phantom Zone.

“You’re suffering will be short,” he tells them. “Mine … forever.”

Right. Think on that: the city is dying and Zaltar sacrifices himself by living forever instead of dying within 3 or 4 days.

Kara is off on the trail of the Omegahedron on a journey that will lead her out of inner space and into outer space; which is to say, Earth. The Omegahedron gets there first and falls into the possession of Selena (Faye Dunaway), a witch who wants to rule the world but is spending the day picnicking at a lake with Nigel (Peter Cook), her warlock instructor. Selena takes the Omegahedron and because she can use it to start her car, she leaves Nigel by the lake. Kara shows up next and appears on the banks of the lake in her Supergirl costume.

Which, to be perfectly honest, is the only real reason for me to watch this movie. Helen Slater’s Supergirl is ridiculously nice and ridiculously cute, and does what she can to save this rather silly, awful movie, but it’s not close to being enough.

Supergirl (she doesn’t call herself this) flies to the city, where she lands in the middle of the street. Two truck drivers decide they want to gang rape her, and one of the truck drivers is played by Matt Frewer, so if I ever meet Mr. Frewer, I want to ask him if his desire to rape Supergirl is the jerkiest thing he’s ever done on camera. The two would-be rapists don’t do anything more than pull up Supergirl’s skirt because she seems to understand perfectly that she can knock them around, which she does.

This scene represents the inanity of SUPERGIRL, and I’m guessing one’s willingness to go with the flow with a scene like this will go a long way to determining how much one can enjoy the movie. Think this through – two drivers stop their truck in the middle of a city street to harass a girl dressed in a Superman costume. When she picks up one guy by his chin and tosses him away, the other one asks, “Oh, she works out, huh?”

“Why are you doing this?” Kara asks innocently.

“It’s just the way we are,” Frewer says maniacally.

So Supergirl uses her super-breath and blows him backwards and through a wooden fence. Read that again. She blows him through a wooden fence. The other would-be rapist’s reaction is to pull out a switchblade (remember when criminals used switchblades? God the ’80s were an awful time) and growl, “You shouldn’t have done that, baby. Come on,” he says, urging her forward. Dude, she just breathed on a guy and blew him backwards through a freaking fence and you think, what, I can totally take her? The dude can’t even be bothered to drop his cigarette, so she uses her heat vision to warm up the switchblade and cause him to drop it. “Oh, I see,” he says, proving himself to be the dumbest truck driving, would-be rapist in film history, “you really want to play games, huh?”

So she kicks him a good ten feet away and flies off, and then the growly-voiced would-be rapist makes a joke about keeping it to themselves. Hilarious.

It gets better.

She ends up sleeping in the woods, which just so happens to be near a baseball field, which just so happens to be the baseball field of an all girls’ school, which just so happens to be the all-girls’ school where Lois Lane’s sister Lucy (Maureen Teefy) goes to school, and Kara/Supergirl uses her magic clothes-changing powers to dress up like a member of the school to enroll herself in classes (because … she hates school so much?), where she just so happens to be given Lucy Lane as a roommate. Oh, and Nigel, the warlock right hand man of Selena? Yeah, he just so happens to teach there.

From that moment on, there’s lots of Supergirl vs. Selena fighting stuff, usually involving Selena’s magic and Supergirl’s cuteness, and there’s a whole pointless subplot about a hunky gardener (Hart Bochner) who Selena tries to turn into her love slave, only things go wonky and he ends up as Linda Lee’s love slave instead. Linda Lee is Kara’s human identity – she got the “Lee” from a portrait of Robert E. Lee, which just so happens to be hanging in the headmaster’s office of an all-girls’ boarding school in freaking Midvale, Illinois, and she got the “Linda” part from … I don’t know where. I think she just pulled it out of thin air, but I might have been too busy rolling my eyes at the nonsensical script that I missed something.

There is a bit of a Buffy, Season 2 vibe to the back half of the movie as the scenes in Selena’s magic castle feel a bit like Buffy’s battles in that castle where Angelus, Spike, and Drusilla were hanging out.

There’s a trip to the Phantom Zone so Peter O’Toole can fulfill his required the part of his contract that asks him to overact like he’s doing Shakespeare at a regional theater to pay for a hit of smack, and it’s here that we get the best of Supergirl, as she gets angry with him and snaps at him and uses reverse psychology on him to have him help her get out of the Phantom Zone.

How does one get out of the Phantom Zone? One climbs up a steep hill with a tornado whirling beneath you. Yup. You can see why no one has ever tried to escape before.

If all of this seems fine to you, then you’ll probably get a kick out of SUPERGIRL. It’s not an offensively bad movie, it’s just a movie with a vibe I can’t stand. Like when Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure) shows up because he’s sweet on Lucy, and I swear he’s wearing the same clothes from the Superman films and he never takes his omnipresent camera off from around his neck. Seriously, dude, you traveled all the way to Midvale, Illinois to hit on your co-worker’s sister. Leave the camera at home. Jimmy helps to illustrate that these aren’t real people in SUPERGIRL; they’re simplistic cartoons come to life. SUPERGIRL is some kind of weird urban fantasy where good guys and bad guys exist in the contemporary present but act like they’re in a nostalgic version of the 1950s.

It’s just not a world I have any interest in.