DIE HARD 2: Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow

Die Hard 2 (1990) – Directed by Renny Harlin – Starring Bruce Willis, Bonnie Bedelia, William Sadler, Art Evans, William Atherton, Franco Nero, Dennis Franz, Fred Thompson, Tom Bower, Sheila McCarthy, John Amos, Robert Patrick, Colm Meaney, Vondie Curtis-Hall, and Reginald VelJohnson.

“What sets off the metal detectors first? The lead in your ass or the sh*t in your brains?”
- John McClane to Captain Lorenzo

Yes, the final 20 minutes or so of DIE HARD 2 stretches credibility. Seeing John McClane jump onto a moving plane and taking out two trained military soldiers on the wing as the plane speeds towards takeoff is a step too far because it superhumanizes McClane – until then, the stunts he performs are largely plausible. Yeah, sure, the amount of trained bad guys he kills is pushing it, but taking out four bad guys in an otherwise empty airport terminal isn’t something you can’t conceive of him doing.

Jumping on the wing of a moving airplane from a helicopter in the middle of a snowstorm, though? Yeah. Pushing it.

That’s only the final act in what’s otherwise a thoroughly satisfying sequel. DIE HARD 2, with Renny Harlin taking over the director’s chair from John McTeirnan, is a rock-solid action movie that manages to hit all the right beats from the original DIE HARD while twisting expectations just enough that the story still feels fresh and urgent, instead of stale and repetitive.

The first thing that DH2 does right is that it acknowledges the repetitive nature of McClane (Bruce Willis) once again finding himself in a crazy hostage situation. Since the film has a good humor about what’s going on, we are invited to laugh at seeing McClane again crawling through air ducts, stuck in basements, and arguing with authority. The film wisely doesn’t repeat all of its beats, however. Where the last film had McClane teaming with Sgt. Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), the sequel has John calling Al early in the film because his “sidekick” cop this time around serves as an extra antagonist rather than an ally. Carmine Lorenzo (Dennis Franz) is the head of Dulles International Airport’s police squad and some of the films best smiles come from watching him and McClane verbally joust with one another. DH2 further inverts the McClane/PD structure by having Trudeau (Fred Thompson), Dulles’ Head of Operations, sympathetic to what McClane is trying to do. While Trudeau isn’t an ally who gives McClane free run of the airport, he is willing to listen to the semi-famous cop from the Nakatomi incident of two years previous, always to the consternation of Lorenzo.

DIE HARD 2 also makes an effort at the start of the film to humanize McClane. The first film showed that he was afraid of flying, and this time around he’s getting his car towed from outside of Dulles as he waits for his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) to arrive for the Christmas holidays. McClane is living and working in LA now, but they’re spending the holidays in DC with Holly’s parents. By putting Holly on a plane, it repeats the first film’s use of Holly as a hostage, though this time it’s because she’s trapped in a plane the terrorists refuse to let land.

I could have done without the plane angle in terms of having Holly and reporter Richard Thornburg (William Atherton) back for a second go-round in familiar roles. All of the plane scenes are effective, so they’re not a huge negative in the film, but it would have been nice to see an alteration of the formula. I thought it was coming. It’s Thornburg who realizes something is wrong when he sees a number of planes flying near the plane he and Holly are on and it’s Thornburg who gets his assistant to monitor radio frequencies, which leads to them learning the truth about why they’re in the air. It would have been a perfect opportunity to have Holly and Thornburg put aside their differences and work together, but the film is determined to keep Thornburg as a jerk, even if Thornburg does real reporting. Sure, he’s a glory hog, but he does his job and gets the story.

DIE HARD 2 introduces a new reporter that is cast as the “good” alternative to Thornburg. Samantha Coleman (Sheila McCarthy) is at Dulles to cover the story of the arrival of General Ramon Esperanza (Franco Nero). Esperanza is being extradited to the United States because he’s a drug lord, but for some reason the government agents in charge of the swap are sitting in the airport like they’re two chumps waiting for their flight to Charlotte and offer blah “No comments” to Coleman. (They could at least have said, “Merry Christmas.”) Coleman generally makes a pain of herself through most of the film as no one wants to talk to the press (the level of anti-press hostility in the first two DIE HARD movies is pretty extraordinary), but she redeems herself in the hand when McClane needs her help to get to the airfield, and then prevents her cameraman from filming more than a couple seconds of John and Holly’s reunion.

Through it all, though, it’s still John McClane’s show. His main ally this time around is Leslie Barnes (Art Evans), the airport’s communication director. Like Al, Barnes is lower down on the totem pole, but unlike Al, Barnes can affect real change in the narrative because he’s inside the airport and involved with the action. Barnes represents same common sense approach, however, that McClane demonstrates and it’s why the two men bond. Where Lorenzo sees McClane as a threat and Trudeau can’t fully accept McClane’s help, Barnes sees that McClane is their best shot for stopping the terrorists.

The terrorists are largely just here to give McClane someone to fight. Colonel Stuart (William Sadler) has none of the charisma of Hans Gruber, but he is coolly effective. It’s a smart move, to be honest, again varying up the formula. The political motivations of the terrorists are real this time, as Stuart’s group is attempting to rescue General Esperanza, and when he and Major Grant (John Amos) align with him, there’s … well, there’s still not much antagonistic personality.

There’s not as many great lines or even great scenes this time around, but it’s hard for me to think of DIE HARD 2 as a disappointment. I rewatched it the day after rewatching DIE HARD and at no point in the viewing was I bored. Renny Harlin keeps everything moving, and substituting McTiernan’s technical proficiency with Harlin’s frenetic energy works to the film’s advantage. I enjoyed little touches, too, like the abundance of snow naturally raising the stakes and changing up the visual palette, and I love behind-the-scenes sequences, like we get here in the baggage area and in the basement beneath the runway. Perhaps the scene that best represents DIE HARD 2 comes when McClane proves his point to Lorenzo that Major Grant was playing them. Lorenzo doesn’t want to hear it, so McClane “opens fire” with the automatic machine gun he took from Stuart’s mercenaries. Everyone freaks but no bullets are fired, and Lorenzo is won over once he realizes he hasn’t been turned into pulp.

That scene turns the movie’s main structure on its head: McClane is right, the people in power don’t listen, he makes a big scene. Usually that scene involves killing someone or blowing something up, but this time, it’s the lack of death and destruction.

DIE HARD 2 has aged very well. I did not buy the new Blu-ray box set because while I love 1 and 3, my memory was lukewarm on 2 and 4, so I settled on buying the original for $10. I kinda wish now I had bought the box set because I’m absolutely certain I’ll watch DIE HARD 2 more over the next 23 years than I have in the 23 years since it was released.

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.

GHOSTBUSTERS: Generally, You Don’t See That Behavior Out of a Major Appliance

Ghostbusters (1984) – Directed by Ivan Reitman – Starring Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Harold Ramis, Rick Moranis, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, Jennifer Runyon, and William Atherton.

Has there ever been a better movie sleazeball than William Atherton? Atherton’s Walter Peck serves as the only human villain in GHOSTBUSTERS, an officious agent of the Environmental Protection Agency who wants to shut the Ghostbusters down because his mother didn’t love him enough. Peck plays a small but important role in GHOSTBUSTERS, transitioning us from the first spectral bad guys (the old lady in the library and Slimer, most notably) to the latter demons (Gozer, Zuul, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man). Peck also gives Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) someone to verbally combat, because as cool as Slimer may be, he’s not much for conversation. Atherton provides as good an annoying slimebag here as he will in Die Hard a few years later, establishing himself as one of the ultimate “that guys,” and earning himself a spot in the movie I’d make if someone let me make a movie.

I bring Atherton up first in this reaction to GHOSTBUSTERS because it helps to enforce how important secondary casting decisions are in a movie like GHOSTBUSTERS, a high-concept comedy about a group of fired professors who open a ghost catching business in New York City. Along with Annie Potts, Rick Moranis, and Ernie Hudson, it’s four of the film’s smaller roles that keep the story’s infrastructure strong and grounded.

First, let’s be clear about one thing – this is Bill Murray’s movie from start to finish. The movie might be called GHOSTBUSTERS, and Dan Ackroyd (as Raymond Stantz) and Harold Ramis (as Egon Spengler) might get to wear the outfits and fire the fancy energy guns, but this film puts Bill Murray in the center and lets everyone and everything revolve around him. Neither Ackroyd or Ramis are very good here (Ackroyd’s style of humor always feels more suited to the broader style of TV sitcoms than motion pictures), but they don’t need to be, and they wisely create their characters to be supportive of the story: Stantz is the earnest true believer and Spangler is the awkward brains, yet both feel like real characters because they’re alternately thrilled, confused, scared, brilliant, and clueless.

It’s a wise move to put Murray in the center, of course, because Murray is the film’s best actor, and his sense of humor best sets the tone for the film’s comedy. Venkman opens the film by rigging a science experiment so a geek gets electro-shocked and a beauty (Jennifer Runyon) doesn’t. Venkman really isn’t interested in the science; he’s just interested in scoring with a hot student. Ray interrupts him, tells him there’s been some paranormal activity and Venkman wants to pass, but when the hottie agrees to come back to his office later on (“At 8?” she suggests. “I was just going to say that,” charms Venkman), he goes with Ray and Egon to the public library, where an old lady ghost is waiting for them downstairs.

When the old lady ghost gets all spooky demon face, the three men run screaming from the building. It’s a fantastic bit, with our three heroes being revealed as honest cowards. They return to their lab at Columbia in time to get fired, so Venkman convinces them to go into business together and after spending all their money without getting a client, Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) walks into their converted firehouse. Dana had some paranormal activity in her apartment a few days earlier and has finally worked up the coverage to visit the Ghostbusters (whose cheesy ad she’d seen on TV right before her store-bought eggs started cooking themselves on her counter).

Weaver provides another perfect foil for Murray (or perhaps Murray is just that good that he can play off anyone), her serious questions matching perfectly with his cartoonish science. “What does that even do?” she asks as Venkman walks around her apartment spraying something. “It’s technical,” Venkman answers back. Just like with the student earlier, Venkman is less interested in the science as he is in making the moves on the attractive woman, but where the student bought his act, Dana is cooler towards him because she can see through his routine.

Venkman doesn’t find any demons in Dana’s refrigerator, but soon after this failed investigation, things start to pick up. The Sedgewick Hotel has a ghost problem and they bring the boys in to catch a green, gelatinous eat monster they name Slimer. Along with the giant Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man at the end, the Sedgewick Hotel sequence is the film’s signature moment as the team faces a ridiculous ghost that’s as funny to us as it is scary to them. After tearing up the 12th floor, they finally trap Slimer in the ball room where they nearly destroy the place in capturing him. Director Ivan Reitman does an excellent job building a great scene that both stands on its own and explains how their equipment works, and when the hotel manager refuses to pay the $5,000 bill, the guys let him know they can free the ghost, so then the manager agrees and the busting business is off and running.

Complete with a montage! Featuring newspaper and magazine covers! And Ray Parker’s theme song!

You said it, Ray, bustin’ makes me feel good, too. Although, to be fair, neither Ray nor I did any kind of ghost busting. Which makes me wonder why Ghost Hunters has never had Ray Parker on. Well okay, probably no one under the age of 35 knows who Ray Parker is, but why not Ackroyd? He’s into all this paranormal stuff. Make it happen, SyFy.

There’s a big paranormal outbreak in the city so they have to hire a fourth hand (Ernie Hudson) to help them out. Apparently, the role was originally written for Eddie Murphy (just as the Venkman role was written for John Belushi and the Louis Tully role was written for John Candy instead of Rick Moranis) and intended to be much bigger, but when Murphy wasn’t available they downsized the role … almost to the point where they shouldn’t have bothered. Still, Hudson makes good in the scenes he is in, as a working class guy who knows he’s in over his head but is happy to be picking up a steady paycheck.

Though he does want his own lawyer. At least until the Mayor calls.

After Peck uses his legal power to shut down the Ghostbusters’ containment unit, all of the trapped ghosts go free. Peck has them arrested, but then the mayor comes and gets them out in order to ask for their help, which leads to the final scene against the Stay-Puft Giant. The team’s final victory occurs when they cross the streams of their weapons and shut the doorway to the other dimension. It’s a bit of a letdown, really, since the big victory happens when they fire their guns into a doorway instead of into the Stay-Puft Giant, but marshmallow still gets blown all over the building and the team (except for Venkman, who manages to not get creamed and get the girl).

GHOSTBUSTERS is a fantastic movie, always amusing and with a fine narrative. Reitman does a bang-up job balancing the story with the laughs, and the science with the action. He deftly blends in the Gozer/Zuul subplot with Dana and Louis to keep things moving, and balances the ghost/human bad guys with Peck and the ghost of the moment. There are a million movies that take place in New York City, but Reitman does a fantastic job making you feel like this movie has to take place there because the city feels like a supporting character.

While GHOSTBUSTERS doesn’t make me laugh harder than any other comedy ever, long-time readers of the Anxiety will know that I place a lot of value on a movie’s story over it’s belly laughs; GHOSTBUSTERS is always entertaining and never sacrifices story just to be funny, which is what more comedies should aim to achieve. The end result is one of the signature performances by one of film’s best actors and one of the most enjoyable films ever made.

Now here’s a little something to get stuck in your head for the rest of they day: