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.

PREDATOR 2: No Stopping What Can’t Be Stopped, No Killing What Can’t Be Killed

Predator 2 (1990) – Directed by Stephen Hopkins – Starring Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Ruben Blades, María Conchita Alonso, Bill Paxton, Robert Davi, Kevin Peter Hall, and Adam Baldwin.

PREDATOR 2 may just well be the most poorly conceived and executed sequel of the last three decades.

The largest problem with the film is that it can’t commit to the idea that the Predator isn’t a villain, and it doesn’t have enough brains to artfully work at the theme of moral complexity. The result is that we get the Predator slaughtering drug pushers, yet being tracked by our hero cop, Danny Glover. Are we supposed to root against the Predator when he’s killing hardcore killers and drug lords, and hanging the upside down? Because I’m totally rooting for him through the first part of the movie. Even when his actions are re-contextualized as “evil,” when he kills Glover’s partner, Danny Archuleta (Ruben Blades), that’s not enough for me to root against him – Archuleta was trespassing on the Predator’s turf, after all.

When Lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Glover) goes all predator on the Predator (Kevin Peter Hall), and I’m conflicted. I like Harrigan, and I can understand his wanting revenge, but I like the Predator, too. (Even if in this movie he’s really more Punisher than Predator.) My emotional commitment is further conflicted by the presence of federal agent Peter Keyes (Gary Busey), who’s a typical federal agent douchebag. In the same scene, then, I’m rooting for the Predator to take out Busey as I’m conflicted over the Predator/Glover fight.

There’s a real solid pot of conflicted morality here, but the film is too stupid to do anything with it.

Taking the film series out of the jungle, PREDATOR 2 takes the alien hunter persona and drops him into future, borderline post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. I’m not really sure if PREDATOR 2 is more properly called the worst Predator movie or the worst Lethal Weapon movie, but it’s a film that just isn’t very good. It’s main problem is that it oversells it’s attitude – Harrigan is too much the hothead cop, the violence is too cartoonishly executed, and Detective Jerry Lambert (Bill Paxton) is, well, too much a Bill Paxton character from the ’80s.

Taking the Predator to the city isn’t, in and of itself, a bad idea, but it’s not executed very well, at all, as the filmmakers decide to push this film into the near future by setting it in 1997. They seem to want a war zone in Los Angeles so they can use a gang war as an excuse to have lots of minorities kill each other with lots of blood and bullets.

The opening sequence is simply preposterous. In the director commentary track on PREDATOR, John McTiernan talks about a scene in the jungle where Dutch’s group fires all of their ammo at where they think the Predator has gone. They decimate the forest, but don’t kill the Predator, and McTiernan relates that this scene was his way of silently protesting the fact that he’d been hired to make a film that revels in violence as pornography. The payoff for McTiernan is that all that gunfire kills nothing more than vegetation. It’s a wonderful nod to the shortcomings of guns, which is that you can’t kill what you can’t hit.

There’s none of that cleverness in PREDATOR 2, and the opening sequence of gang violence is a horrid welcome into this movie. It’s just a seemingly endless series of people firing semi-automatics just to show gunfire. After this, we’ve got to endure a whole bunch of formulaic “good cop who doesn’t play by the rules and thus gets called on the carpet” nonsense. In short order, we watch Ruben Blades and Bill Paxton get killed, and Maria Conchita Alonso get injured. Glover then runs into the feds, where Gary Busey gets killed.

Danny Glover gives the role everything he can and it’s everything the role asks for and more. Unfortunately, that’s not always a good thing as he (and the film) go overboard a few too many times.

PREDATOR 2 never creates a real threat for the Predator. Yeah, Harrigan kills him, but it’s an opportunistic kill instead of a battle of smarts and so it falls flat to me.

I do like what happens after the kill, when a group of Predators reveal themselves to Harrigan so they can take the body of their fallen comrade away. One of them tosses Harrigan an old 18th century firearm, which confirms for Harrigan (even though Gary Busey just told him this) that the Predators have been here before and will be here again.

It’ll just take a while for them to be back in their own movie.

LICENSE TO KILL: I’m James Bond! I’m Angry! A Shark Ate My Friend!

License to Kill (1989) – The 16th James Bond Film; The 2nd (of 2) Timothy Dalton Films – Directed by John Glen – Starring Timothy Dalton, Carey Lowell, Robert Davi, Talisa Soto, Anthony Zerbe, Benicio Del Torro, Wayne Newton, Robert Brown, and Desmond Llewelyn.

LICENSE TO KILL is one of the more confounding Bond movies – on the one hand, it’s basically a generic revenge flick absent of nearly anything resembling a sense of humor, but on the other it is a pretty good revenge flick, at least in the context of what it is – a 1980s action movie. The confusion doesn’t stop there in my fragile little mind, because once you get past Timothy Dalton and Robert Davi (and Desmond Llewelyn and Wayne Newton, to be fair) the acting is across-the-board atrocious, but there’s such an energetic force to Dalton’s performance that he single-handedly pushes this film forward, largely overcoming Carey Lowell’s inability to act, Talisa Soto’s inability to act, Sharky’s inability to act, anyone in the DEA’s ability to act, Benicio del Toro’s inability to act in this role, Felix Leiter’s inability to come off as a convincing spy, Felix Leiter’s wife practically sucking face with Bond right after her wedding ceremony, and locations that would fail to make the Florida Tourism Board’s brochure.

It’s not the typical Bond movie, but we’ve got 20-something typical Bond movies, so a change of pace isn’t such a bad thing now and then. LICENSE is the opposite of THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS in a lot of ways – where DAYLIGHTS started strong and petered out to a generic blandness, LICENSE starts out rather awful and then turns engaging, and it does so almost solely because of Dalton.

Dalton’s Bond in LICENSE does not display much of the thinking, adaptable Bond that I so enjoyed in the first half of DAYLIGHTS, trading in the think-on-your feet, instinctual approach for a single-minded determinedness that sees him operating as a rogue agent in order to enact his own personal justice for the murder of Felix Leiter’s wife and the feeding-to-the-sharks of Felix himself. Where Dalton’s Bond rings false this time around is in his softer moments; given that Bond is so driven for revenge that he goes AWOL from MI6 (who, admittedly, look about as hard for Bond as I’m looking for someone to come punch me in the face), the moments where he’s smiling like a school boy at a pretty girl feel off.

There’s a lot of silliness here that keeps LICENSE from being a truly great Bond movie but there was surprisingly more to like than I’d remembered. This is a good movie. It’s not the first Bond movie you’d want to give to a novice, but then “Blink” isn’t the first episode of Doctor Who you’d want to give someone, either. (Not that LICENSE is equal to “Blink.” Far from it.) The inescapable reality that always confronts you is how bad the acting is, and I’m truly not playing to hyperbole when I say it is awful. While Bond films are rarely dotted with acting giants, the acting in LICENSE would look bad if it had come in an episode of Knight Rider. Hell, it would even look bad if it had come in Knight Rider: The Really Crappy New Version, too.

Carey Lowell (who went on to be a perfectly fine actress on Law & Order) and Talisa Soto (who went on the be a perfectly acceptable actress in Mortal Kombat) are certainly in the lower levels of Bond women. When we meet Lowell, Pam Bouvier is an allegedly bad-ass contact of Leiter’s, feeding him info on Sanchez’s (Davi’s) operation. We know she’s a bad-ass because she’s sitting in a dive bar, she’s wearing kevlar, and she’s holding a shotgun in her lap, but we never buy her bad-ass-ness. It’s not because she’s gorgeous because plenty of gorgeous women have played bad-asses, but because there’s a softness to Lowell’s features and her actions that make you think she’s playing dress-up instead of inhabiting her everyday world. Even her tomboyish haircut doesn’t work, seeming to enhance rather than hide her supermodel appearance and unconvincing actions.

After Bouvier convinces Bond to allow her to tag along, Bond starts referring to her as his executive assistant, and then dumps some money on her to go buy some clothes so she can look the part. When she reappears she’s cut her hair and traded in her pilot clothes for sharp business suits and tight evening gowns. When Bond does a double-take at seeing the new look, you believe it. Unfortunately, the change in appearance doesn’t come with a similar change in attitude. Other than being ridiculously pleasing arm candy, I rarely buy Lowell in LICENSE TO KILL. She does have one great scene where she plays dumb to get Wayne Newton’s keys but for the most part if she’s not nearly tumbling out of her dress or being comforted by Q, she doesn’t bring anything to the movie.

Soto is even worse. She’s Sanchez’s girlfriend Lupe, one in a long line of beauties that have filled this role, and she sends conflicting signals at the viewer. When we meet her she’s in the arms of another man (who literally gets his heart cut out by Sanchez for this act) but it’s not like she’s actively trying to escape Sanchez’s life. She seems to enjoy the luxuries that come with being a kept woman, she’s just not necessarily super-happy about being this guy’s kept woman. I started to feel some sympathy for her when she gets whipped for her insolence and again when she helps Bond, but when she pronounces her love for him it just comes across as something a pretty girl would say to get an older man to do things for her. There’s no feeling behind it.

Even worse, Lupe’s “love” for James sends Bouvier into fits of jealous poutiness and it actually becomes hard to imagine that Bond would want anything to do with either one of them once the mission is over. Even with all their beauty you’d think Bond wouldn’t want to put up with the lovesick little girl-ness of either of them.

Robert Davi plays the villain Sanchez and he’s pretty good considering this Bond movie wants a villain that looks and acts like he just wandered off the set of Miami Vice. When he feeds Felix Leiter’s leg to his pet shark, it comes across as ruthless and disgusting; this isn’t a guy who puts frickin’ laser beams on the heads of sharks for fun.

Perhaps knowing the film was a bit too grim in the opening half, Q gets an expanded role this go-round, providing some much needed levity and, more importantly, warmth. It’s great to see him in action, posing as Bond’s chauffeur (similar to Patrick Macnee’s role in A VIEW TO A KILL), but Q’s real contribution to the movie is the way he comforts Bouvier – usually with a look of knowing exasperation that says, “I want to tell you that you’re just number 832 but that would be mean, so here’s my shoulder to cry on and some carefully worded advice.”

LICENSE TO KILL isn’t a fantastic movie, and its certainly riddled with horrible acting, but the back-half of the movie really rescues the film. If I could take the opening half of THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS and combine it with the back-half of LICENSE TO KILL, I think we’d have a heck of a movie.

Oh, the title song is pretty mediocre. I love me some Gladys Knight, and she tries her damndest, but this is mid-80s pop ballad schlockfest makes me think of mom jeans.