Five films, one impossible Christmas, and the gradual disappearance of an action hero who used to know how much falling hurt.
Spoilers for all five films.
A Christmas party, a pair of bare feet, and a very bad night
There is a particular kind of late-eighties office interior that now looks almost archaeological: polished stone, smoked glass, severe furniture, an expensive painting nobody seems to like, and a reception desk that could probably land a small aircraft. Nakatomi Plaza is full of it. Every time I return to Die Hard (1988), I notice something else about that building before I notice the explosions. It is corporate aspiration rendered in marble and steel, and the film spends the next two hours taking it apart.
It begins, remarkably, with a marriage in trouble. John McClane (Bruce Willis), a New York policeman, has flown to Los Angeles hoping to patch things up with Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), who has built a career and a life that no longer revolve around him. He is tired, defensive and not particularly good at admitting when he has been an idiot. Before the night is over, he will be crawling through ventilation shafts, losing blood from his feet and talking to a stranger on a police radio because he needs someone to know he is still there. That is a fairly peculiar foundation for one of cinema’s defining action heroes, and it is precisely why the film works.
Across five films released between 1988 and 2013, Hollywood gradually forgot that distinction. The explosions grew, the geography widened and the enemies acquired more elaborate equipment. McClane became harder and harder to kill, which sounds useful for a franchise called Die Hard, until you realise that the interesting thing about him was never his apparent immortality. It was the likelihood that, this time, he might actually get hurt.
The novel behind the building
The first film’s ancestry is stranger and rather more downbeat than its reputation suggests. Die Hard adapts Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, itself a sequel to The Detective. The novel follows an older, retired detective, Joe Leland, whose daughter is among the hostages in a skyscraper. The film changes the family relationship, makes the protagonist younger and gives the story a more hopeful emotional destination. Because Frank Sinatra had played Leland in the 1968 screen version of The Detective, he was offered the opportunity to return before the property took the shape we recognise. It is an amusing counterfactual, although not one I can quite imagine surviving the ventilation ducts.
Writers Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza and director John McTiernan kept the useful architectural idea: a man is trapped inside a vertical maze that his enemies believe they control. They softened some of the book’s bleakness without removing its weariness. McClane is not a professional commando arriving with a plan. He happens to be in the wrong place, knows enough to improvise, and is just frightened enough to be convincing.
Willis was still strongly associated with television’s Moonlighting, and his reported five-million-dollar fee was a talking point in 1988. That casting now seems inevitable, but part of its appeal was the risk. Here was a leading man with comic timing, a slightly raffish face and a willingness to appear ridiculous, rather than another sculpted action figure who could clear a room simply by turning sideways. The film needed his wisecracks, but it also needed the pauses between them.
Nakatomi Plaza is the other leading character
The location does an extraordinary amount of work. Fox Plaza in Century City, then newly built and still partly unfinished, supplied much of the real-world architecture; elaborate studio interiors extended the illusion. Production designer Jackson DeGovia turned a corporate headquarters into a series of increasingly hostile environments: sleek offices, exposed service floors, narrow shafts, concrete stairwells and the glittering vault. Each level has its own shape and rules. McClane’s body seems to keep a running inventory of the surfaces it has encountered.
Jan de Bont’s cinematography and the editing by Frank J. Urioste and John F. Link make this a film whose action can usually be followed in space. We understand where the police are, why the roof matters, and how a particular corridor might become a trap. The camera moves energetically without losing the map. When McClane leaps from the roof with a fire hose around his waist, the suspense does not come only from the height. We have spent enough time inside the building to appreciate how poor an escape route this really is.
I also love how unromantic the production design can be. The place is filled with the supposedly tasteful products of international business, yet much of it becomes rubbish within a few minutes of gunfire. The giant vault opening to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ is almost a corporate advertisement for greed, except that the men celebrating are thieves. It remains one of the series’ finest jokes, told largely through design and music.
The man who came to steal Christmas
Hans Gruber is not simply a good villain. Alan Rickman’s performance is the instrument that gives the whole film its tone. He is precise, vain, patient and capable of being funny without ever appearing desperate for a laugh. He arrives with the vocabulary of political extremism and the manners of someone who has spent a great deal of time studying expensive watches. The supposed ideological operation turns out to be a meticulously organised theft. He does not want to overthrow the system; he wants to withdraw its money.
The supporting criminals are equally well chosen. Karl (Alexander Godunov) gives Gruber’s elegant scheme a more volatile physical threat, while Theo (Clarence Gilyard Jr.) supplies the technological confidence that makes the vault operation plausible. Joseph Takagi (James Shigeta), whose calm refusal to help gets him killed, establishes the danger early and without much room for bargaining. Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner), the office’s self-important would-be negotiator, represents another kind of misplaced confidence: the belief that every problem can be solved by treating it like a business meeting.
The most delicious exchange is the encounter in which Gruber pretends to be an American hostage named Bill Clay. McClane initially plays along; Rickman is allowed to change accent and posture, and for a moment two people who understand deception are testing one another in a quiet room. It is a wonderfully economical sequence. The eventual ending, with the watch and Gruber’s fall, completes a pattern in which the film’s objects are never just decoration. Even the expensive gift becomes a liability.
Holly, Al, Argyle, and the people who keep him human
It would be easy to remember Die Hard as a one-man film, but that misses the voices holding it together. Holly is neither a helpless prize nor a cardboard scold. She has made a professional decision, and John’s bruised ego is not automatically treated as righteous. The ending reunites them, certainly, although I think the more interesting part is how much of the film asks John to recognise that his marriage cannot be repaired by being the loudest person in the room.
Sergeant Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) becomes the person at the other end of the radio, a decent policeman who is tired of being told to stay out of the way. His guilt about having shot a child in the past gives their conversations a melancholy undertow. Argyle (De’voreaux White), the limousine driver listening to music in the garage, is almost a second audience member, catching up with the catastrophe in delayed instalments. Between them, these characters give the film different scales of concern: a marriage, a friendship, a police officer’s conscience, a young man’s strange working night.
The institutional characters provide a less flattering chorus. Deputy Chief Dwayne Robinson (Paul Gleason) insists on authority while repeatedly misunderstanding the situation, and reporter Richard Thornburg (William Atherton) is so hungry for a story that he helps put Holly in danger. The film’s contempt for bureaucratic certainty and media opportunism is broad, sometimes cartoonish, but it gives McClane something to argue with besides the armed men upstairs.
Why the blood matters
The scene I return to is not the largest explosion. It is John pulling glass from his feet while talking to Al, finally setting aside the wisecracks long enough to admit how badly he has handled things with Holly. The physical injury and emotional embarrassment occupy the same space. Willis sells both, which is something the later films gradually stop asking him to do.
The original is not beyond criticism. The reconciliation is a little too convenient, the film indulges in some blunt late-eighties character shorthand, and the police and FBI are written as spectacularly foolish whenever the story needs to isolate John. Yet the machinery is so well assembled that these weaknesses rarely loosen its grip. The action has consequence. People are frightened and exhausted. A victory feels like survival, not merely the next item ticked off a franchise checklist.
Die Hard 2: the airport as a bigger, colder trap
Die Hard 2 (1990), directed by Renny Harlin, takes a route familiar to sequels: repeat the premise and enlarge every dimension. It is Christmas again. Holly is in danger again. This time she is aboard a plane circling Washington Dulles International Airport while a military conspiracy takes control of the airport’s communications and landing systems. William Sadler’s Colonel Stuart wants to free the imprisoned General Ramon Esperanza (Franco Nero), and the story adds a second layer of betrayal through Major Grant (John Amos).
The plot draws on Walter Wager’s novel 58 Minutes, originally a separate airport thriller. That repurposing makes sense: Die Hard turns out to be an adaptable format rather than a fixed set of characters. The shift from high-rise office to airport creates a suitably unpleasant variation on the same problem. McClane is surrounded by people with access and authority who insist he is interfering, even while his wife circles above them with the fuel running down.
I have a certain affection for this sequel’s excesses. The snow, the service tunnels, the airport annex and the increasingly preposterous aircraft action belong to a period when blockbusters seemed determined to make every practical set piece a little larger than the previous one. The horrifying destruction of a passenger aircraft briefly restores genuinely cruel stakes. The final solution, however, announces the franchise’s growing appetite for impossible feats. McClane’s escape and the trail of burning aviation fuel are grand theatre, but he is beginning to resemble a man who can survive whatever the writers can invent.
Harlin directs with momentum and William Sadler gives Stuart an icy severity, yet the villains lack Gruber’s wit and the marriage has been reduced to a countdown mechanism. Die Hard 2 is enjoyable, sometimes very enjoyable, but it is the first sign that repetition is not quite the same thing as renewal.
Die Hard with a Vengeance: New York becomes the building
Five years later, John McTiernan returned and made the smart decision not to pretend another Christmas had come around. Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) throws McClane into the humid daylight of New York, where he is suspended from duty, estranged from Holly and apparently in the middle of a hangover that has acquired its own police escort. A bomber calling himself Simon (Jeremy Irons) starts sending him through the city to solve riddles under impossible deadlines. A Harlem shopkeeper, Zeus Carver (Samuel L. Jackson), becomes his unwilling partner.
Jonathan Hensleigh’s screenplay originated as Simon Says, a project not initially conceived as a Die Hard instalment. In practice that borrowed framework helps the film. The city is now the enclosure: streets, subways, parks, tunnels, schools and waterways form the equivalent of Nakatomi’s floors and service shafts. McTiernan reintroduces the pleasure of understanding the trap just as the hero blunders into it.
The opening department-store explosion is blunt, nasty and very far from Christmas cheer. From there the film develops an exhausting rhythm of puzzles and movement. There is the frantic taxi ride, the bomb on the subway, the three- and five-gallon water-jug problem, the threat to a school and the aqueduct sequence, where water itself becomes a pursuing monster. The film may wander into absurdity, but I like how often its action is built around having to think while moving.
Willis and Jackson are the great asset. Zeus refuses to become John’s obedient sidekick, and their irritation gives the journey the conversational energy of an old-fashioned mismatched-partner film. Their relationship also exposes the movie’s clumsy handling of race. Some exchanges have real friction; others lean on provocation without examining it very far. It is one of those unmistakable mid-nineties scripts that wants points for being outspoken but has not always worked out what it is saying.
Simon turns out to be Hans Gruber’s brother, apparently seeking revenge, though his master plan is a spectacular theft of Federal Reserve gold. Jeremy Irons understands the family resemblance: the cultured voice, the elaborate misdirection and the belief that the cleverest man in the room deserves to win. The revelation is more satisfying than the standard revenge plot it initially promises. I do wish the theatrical ending were stronger. The final helicopter confrontation feels hurried after such a carefully constructed urban game; the separately filmed alternative ending is darker and more revealing of what the ordeal might have done to John, even if it is harder to square with the series’ audience expectations.
For me, this is the only sequel that properly challenges the first film’s achievement. It does not beat Die Hard, but it understands the importance of limits, humiliation, geography and a partner who can tell the hero when he is behaving like a fool.
Live Free or Die Hard: the analogue nuisance in the digital system
There is a twelve-year gap before Live Free or Die Hard (2007), also released as Die Hard 4.0 in some markets. That title is a fairly accurate diagnosis. The new threat is technological: former government security specialist Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) sets out to cripple American infrastructure through a coordinated cyberattack. McClane is tasked with escorting hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long), and the old, blunt instrument of an officer finds himself in a world of systems he neither trusts nor entirely understands.
This is a promising generational collision. The plot was shaped in part by ideas associated with John Carlin’s 1997 Wired article ‘A Farewell to Arms’, and director Len Wiseman gives the machinery a glossy, anxious mid-2000s sheen. Maggie Q’s Mai Linh lends the villain’s operation an impressive physical edge, while Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Lucy, John’s daughter, as someone who has inherited rather more of his stubbornness than either might care to admit. Kevin Smith’s hacker Warlock adds another eccentric flavour to an already crowded computer-age plot.
Willis and Long make an agreeable double act. The joke that a bewildered policeman might be the most useful person in a digitally managed disaster has a certain durability; computers can shut down, but a man can still drive through the door. And yet the film repeatedly pushes that advantage beyond the point where McClane seems recognisably mortal. The pursuit with the fighter jet is a spectacular image but also the moment when the character begins to move from tenacious human being towards action cartoon.
Its theatrical PG-13 rating also sits oddly beside the bruised, foul-mouthed texture of the earlier instalments, though a more explicit unrated version was released for home viewing. I do not think swearing is the foundation of Die Hard, and the film is considerably more entertaining than its reputation sometimes allows. My reservation is that its scale keeps turning the hero into something he was specifically designed not to be.
A Good Day to Die Hard: when the name survives the character
The fifth film, A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), sends John to Moscow to locate his estranged son Jack (Jai Courtney). Jack turns out to be working for the CIA, and father and son are drawn into a convoluted operation involving Russian political corruption, Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch), his daughter Irina (Yuliya Snigir), and a final journey towards Chernobyl. John Moore directs from a screenplay by Skip Woods. Large stretches of the production used Budapest as a stand-in for Moscow, and the design team assembled some genuinely elaborate locations and vehicle sequences.
There is no shortage of effort visible on screen. The road chase is huge, the glass keeps breaking and the helicopters have been given every opportunity to make an impression. What is missing is a persuasive reason to care about the people trapped among these expensive objects. The father-son tension is introduced as if it might be the emotional engine of the film, then repeatedly interrupted by another blast or pursuit. The villains are more like plot functions than personalities, and the story’s betrayals make less impact than the demolition around them.
The strangest loss is John’s sense of reluctance. He no longer seems like the wrong man caught in the wrong place. He behaves like an experienced franchise hero turning up for another shift. I can watch some of the spectacle without boredom, but that is a low bar for a series whose first film knew how to make a single flight of stairs feel dangerous. By the time John and Jack are on their way home, the reconciliation has been formally achieved but scarcely earned.
The sound of a franchise changing
Michael Kamen’s score for the original deserves more attention than it sometimes receives. He threads Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ through the criminals’ progress, mixes the music of Christmas with darker orchestral humour, and understands that the film’s most extravagant moments can be both thrilling and faintly ridiculous. ‘Christmas in Hollis’ by Run-DMC and Vaughn Monroe’s ‘Let It Snow’ put the holiday in the texture of the soundtrack rather than merely in the calendar. The third film, with its hot-city mood and use of ‘Summer in the City’, announces the opposite climate almost immediately.
The visual changes are just as telling. The early films are full of identifiable spaces and material objects: radios, glass, metal ducts, snowy runways, electrical equipment, payphones, taxi cabs. By 2007, those objects must compete with invisible networks and screen interfaces. By 2013, the environments are frequently so large that they stop being obstacles to understand and become surfaces to destroy. This is not simply a nostalgic complaint that practical effects were better. Good computer-assisted action can be extraordinary. The issue is whether a film lets us understand the danger before it asks us to applaud the escape.
What the five films leave behind
I think the first three belong to a recognisable era of action cinema, even when they are trying to outdo one another. They arrived in a world of videotapes, multiplex marquees and blockbuster soundtracks that could make an enormous urban disaster feel like an evening’s entertainment. Die Hard stood out because it punctured the fantasy from within. John got tired. His feet hurt. He made mistakes. He wanted to go home, preferably with his marriage intact, and the fact that he kept talking was sometimes a way of keeping panic at bay.
The later films did not destroy that achievement. The original remains a beautifully constructed thriller, and the third is still a loud, ingenious, argumentative pleasure. But as the franchise progressed, it seemed increasingly unwilling to allow its hero the ordinary indignities that made him compelling. The Christmas-movie debate is harmless enough; for me, the more interesting question is why a film about a vulnerable man became a series so determined to prove he could survive anything.
I would rather remember him sitting on a bathroom floor with glass in his feet, speaking quietly into a radio to a person he has never met. He has an entire skyscraper to get out of, a marriage he may have ruined, and absolutely no idea whether he will make it to morning. That is plenty of hero for one film.
Editorial production notes and further reading
- American Film Institute, Die Hard production history: https://catalog.afi.com/Film/55749-DIE-HARD
- Library of Congress essay on Die Hard: https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/DieHard.pdf
- American Film Institute, Die Hard 2: https://catalog.afi.com/Film/67916-DIE-HARD-2
- Walter Wager on the adaptation of 58 Minutes: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-07-28-ca-669-story.html
- Jonathan Hensleigh on Simon Says: https://www.screenwritersutopia.com/article/d180ab02
- Wired on the inspiration for the fourth film: https://www.wired.com/2007/06/live-free-or-di/
- The Motion Picture Association on the design of the fifth film: https://www.motionpictures.org/2013/02/he-builds-it-audiences-come-a-qa-with-a-good-day-to-die-hard-production-designer-daniel-dorrance/
- Michael Kamen’s official soundtrack notes: https://www.michaelkamen.com/die-hard-soundtrack-lll1
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