Right time for a quick bit of blog post "shifting" which I will call it, as it seems a bit silly to keep calling it robbery, as all I'm trying to do is shift most of the reviews from other blog onto this one (OK so there is a bit of laziness involved in this somewhere!). So I've decided to add my reviews of the Die Hard franchise films, which certainly deserve a place here, so I will start with Die Hard 1, or just Die Hard.
The film starts with New York
police officer, John McClane (Bruce Willis) arriving in Los Angeles on
Christmas Eve to meet up with his estranged wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia)
who has a very prominent job working for the Nakatomi corporation. McClane soon meets up with Holly at her work, and is greeted by her boss Joseph Takagi (James Shigeta) who arranged his ride in, in a company limo. Pretty soon however, a group men in cars and a truck pull
into the plaza, two of the men in the car, Karl (Alexander Gudonov) and
Theo (Clarence Gilyard) enter the building and shoot the security guard
on the front desk. Theo locks down the building using the computers in
the security office, and the other men enter the building from the
parking lot in the basement of the building, who are
terrorists lead by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) who soon take the workers at the officer party hostage. Hans once having identified Takagi takes him upstairs to the
boardroom where he asks for the code to their vault as he wants to enter
the vault to steal $640 million dollars in negotiable bearer bonds.
Takagi however refuses to cooperate and Gruber shoots him, leaving Theo to try and hack the locks and break into the vault.
At this
point McClane has managed to sneak away from the terrorists and listens in on Hans conversation with Takagi. McClane
then sets off a fire alarm which attracts the attention of Hans, who
sends one of his men to investigation, who soon finds McClane, they
fight and in the ensuing struggle, the
terrorist is killed. McClane then takes the terrorist's gun
and checks his pockets to find he has a phoney ID and a CB radio. The
terrorist however is revealed to be the brother of Hans main henchman,
Karl, who is furious at news of his death. McClane runs up to the roof where he uses his
radio to call the police, who respond to his call, but don't believe his
call is for real. By then Karl and his men engage McClane in a
gunfight on the roof, which McClane narrowly escapes and makes his way
back into the building, via the elevator shafts. The police dispatchers
however send an off duty officer, Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) to
investigate the Plaza, on arriving he speaks with one of the terrorists,
who has assumed the role of the security guard, and reassures nothing
is up. During this point, McClane having re-entered the boardroom, and after a gunfight with some of the terrorists, with McClane killing them, takes one of the bodies and dumps it out the window onto Powell's car to get his full attention and the LAPD's.
Pretty
soon the police arrive on the scene and try to take control of the
situation by sending their SWAT team into the building, however Gruber's men shoot and maim the team members who try
to make their way in the front door. The SWAT team also try to send in a
reinforced vehicle (RV) to the building, which the terrorists destroy with rockets. McClane outraged retaliates by
using some of the C4 he found from one of the terrorists, and throws
it down the lift shaft, which kills the two terrorists, James and
Alexander. During all this McClane keeps in contact with Powell by
radio, and gives him an assumed name to protect his identity. However
one of the execs at the party Ellis (Hart Bochner), a cocky negotiator
for the company, in attempt to end the seige, gives McClane's real name
away to the Gruber, and tries to reason with McClane to give himself up,
but McClane refuses, and pleads with Ellis to tell them he isn't
McClane's friend, however Gruber shoots Ellis. After the debacale with
the SWAT team, the FBI are sent in to try and mop up the situation, lead
by special agents Johnson (Robert Davi) and Johnson (Grand L. Bush) who
arranged to cut the building's power and go in with armed choppers to
take out the terrorists, who they have agreed to meet with on the roof,
allegedly with choppers for transport.
Gruber however
has planned a double cross to blow the roof. McClane soon enough finds
C4 in the floors above wired to blow, and Karl finds him and they engage
an intense fight, which McClane finally escapes from after hanging Karl
up in chains. McClane gets to the roof, where the hostages have been
sent to and gets them to go back down, which prompts Hans to blow the
roof. McClane dives off the roof with a firehose attached to his waist,
he manages to smash back into an office floor below. McClane makes his
way back upstairs to the 30th floor where Hans now holds Holly hostage,
and the two men have the final showdown.
Die Hard is
without a doubt one of the best action movies of the 1980s and it
signalled the start of Bruce Willis's film career. John McTiernan, who
directed the excellent Arnie action flick Predator, does a terrific job
here in keeping up the suspense, and brilliantly stages some great
action scenes, that include McClane's fight with Karl, and the famous
scene where he jumps off the roof, with a fire hose attached round his
waist. Although admittedly it is a rather silly way for McClane to try
and get off the roof, surely he could have just ran back down the stairs
and tried to stay out of sight from the terrorists. However Die Hard
is about all things proposterous, and what it does very well, is take an
average joe like McClane and turns him into a hero in an impossible
situation. Of course as the Die Hard films progressed the situations
got even more and more ridiculous, right up until Die Hard 4.0 where
McClane faces off a Harrier jet plane, as you do! McTiernan also uses
the sets very well and the building to utilise the cat and mouse chase
between McClane and the terrorists, and there some really well stage
gunfights, especially in the roof scenes and the scene in the office
where Gruber and Karl shoot out the office windows to force McClane to
walk on the glass. The Fox Plaza building of course also doubles as the
Nakatomi Plaza building, although I doubt they used it to blow the roof
and blast out the windows!
In terms of
performances, Die Hard has a pretty strong cast, and Bruce Willis is
perfect for the role of John McClane, a wise-cracking cop, who is very
down to earth and quite likeable and has plenty of lines we can all
remember such as "Yippe ki-yay motherfucker!" and "I'm not the one that
just got butt-fucked on national TV, Dwayne!" and "welcome to the party,
pal!!". Although at the start of the film I have to say Willis's take
on McClane is somewhat cold, as he refuses to engage in conversation the
limo drive Argyle (De'Voreaux White). However as things progress
McClane really emerges and becomes the affable character that he
remained in the rest of the franchise. Alan Rickman is just great as
the Hans Gruber, a quintessentially smooth, suave, intellectual villain
who as Holly says at one point in the film is no more than a common
thief. Rickman gets his fair share of the best dialogue in the film and
plays Gruber with a dry wit and a cold calculating persona.
The
supporting cast are also very good, with Reginald VelJohnson playing
the desk jockey cop Al Powell, as a decent cop who got off the street
after making the mistake of shooting a kid in the past. Bonnie Bedelia
too is very good as McClane's wife, Holly, a headstrong woman, and she
keeps a cool head during the seige, and she gets one of the funniest
moments in the film where she punches the sleazy news reporter Dick
Thornburg (Richard Atherton) on TV at the end! Paul Gleason is also
quite amusing as Dwayne T. Robinson, the deputy chief of police, who
despite his authority, is pretty incompetent in the film, and he gets
one of the all time best lines in the film, when the FBI chopper is
blown up, "Holy Christ! Looks like we're gonna need more FBI guys I
guess!". And finally Alexandar Gudonov is quite effective as the steely
cold henchman, Karl, and he too gets some good lines, when he argues
with Hans for example about killing McClane, Hans says "We do not alter
the plan!", and Karl replies "And if he alters it?????".
Although
if there is one critcism that can be levelled at Die Hard is its
depiction of the police in the film, as they are pretty much all
potrayed as idiots, except McClane and Powell. The SWAT team in
particularly make the silly decision to go in to the Nakatomi building,
despite the drastic repercusions they will face if they do, and did face
when the terrorists retaliated. And one of the more amusing scenes
shows the dim-witted qualities of Dwayne Robinson, when Gruber contacts
him with his list of "demands" which are to release political prisoners,
such as the Asian Dawn, and Robinson carries on following it up,
despite the fact Gruber is just bluffing them to keep them away. And
the FBI aren't much brighter as they use as Powell describes "the
universal terrorist playbook and play it step by step" in cutting the
building's power, which lets the terrorist access the vault to get their
money. But again it is an action movie and the writers are poking fun
at law enforcement as they have a tendacy to do.
And
finally here's a bit on the score written by Michael Kamen, which is
very good and has plenty of fine dramatic passages, Kamen of course went
on to score the 2nd and 3rd films as well, before he sadly passed away
in 2003. However if you listen closely near the end, you can hear a
passage that was nicked from James Horner's score for Aliens, which was
apparently left in by the studio as a temp track (according to the ol
Wikipedia). The other tracks in the film are also pretty memorably
used, especially Beethoven's 9th Symphony when the terrorists finally
crack into the vault and raid it, and of course "Let it Snow, Let it
Snow, Let it Snow!" at the end.
Rrrrright well
that's my analysis of Die Hard over with and it remains one of my
favourite action films. Die Hard 2 will soon follow.....
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