Welcome to The Hollywood News Advent Calendar! Join us for the next 25 days as we run down the top Christmas movies and guide you to the perfect festive viewing. Featuring some of your favourite Christmas movies and some you’d probably forgotten (maybe even on purpose), but hey, it is Christmas after all… Yippi Ki Ay, Father Christmas…
If you were to come up to me in a bar, and then partake in a drunken conversation, which somehow got onto the subject of Christmas movies, and then if you were to suddenly ask me ‘What’s your favourite Christmas movie?’ I would probably slur back just two words: DIE. HARD. You see, I know the 1988 action movie is not a film that involves elves, or even Santa himself (although a ‘Ho, Ho, Ho’ does get in there), but every year the film is the very first to go into the DVD player to start the countdown to the festive season. This is why we’re kicking off our inaugral THN Advent Calendar with John McTiernan’s and indeed Bruce Willis’s finest hour (well, actually, two hours and eleven minutes in the PAL version), DIE HARD.
We all know the story by now, right? Bruce Willis plays the part of New York cop John McClane, who we are introduced to on a cross-country flight to Los Angeles. He’s on the way to his estranged wife’s Christmas party, which is taking place at the Nakatomi Plaza in the heart of Century City (actually the old Fox building in real life – a landmark I made a point of visiting on my first trip to LA). Shortly after arriving, stripping down to just a vest and pair of trousers, and just after he makes those ‘fists with his toes,’ the building is taken over by a group of hostile terrorists, who plan to steal the millions of pounds worth of bonds secured deep in the vault. All of the building’s inhabitants that evening are taken hostage, bar one John McClane, who was washing behind his ears as the building was compromised. At the head of the European terrorist gang is the suited and booted, indeed John Phillips-attired Hans Gruber, played by Alan Rickman, possibly the baddest bad guy to have graced our screens in the last 25 years. Then you have Theo, the brains of the outfit who is tasked with hacking into the safe, Karl the blonde-haired German, his brother Fritz, who has feet smaller than McClane’s sister, Marco who cops it from a Bruce-bonus under a conference room table, plus Heinrich, Uli… and many others who one by one get bumped off as McClane attempts to take back the building.
On the good guys’ side you have Bonnie Bedelia, who is now best known for her television work in episodes of CSI and the recent PARENTHOOD series. Here, she plays McClane’s wife Holly (geddit), who now has a very important job in LA, which has seemingly led to the issues with her marriage to John. Probably the distance thing. She is among the hostages, along with the big boss Joseph Takagi, his right hand man Ellis, and a couple of dozen others. Downstairs in the parking lot, you have Argyle and outside, alongside the cops and eventually the FBI, you have McClane’s new partner in crime, Sergeant Al Powell of the Los Angeles Police Department….
So why is DIE HARD my favourite Christmas movie? Well, really the whole thing has nothing to do with Christmas despite the fact that it is all set on Christmas Eve, but for me personally it has a twenty-year old history, dating all of the way back to around 1989, when the film became one of the first ’18’ certificate films that I rented on VHS, and then owned shortly afterwards. I remember that my walk to school passed an old video shop, and I remember seeing this awesome looking poster of a building on fire, and a rugged looking man’s face next to it holding a gun. Just by seeing that one-sheet poster, I wanted to see that movie… and see it I did, annually making a pilgramage to view it pretty much every December from then until now. Sure, I’ve owned it a couple of times, on a couple of different home formats, from that original ex-rental VHS, through to a proper retail version, then laserdisc, then region one imported DVD (which I still have), and then in the box sets, along with the equally enjoyable, but less impressive sequels.
I love everything about this film. I love the opening, underplayed shots of Willis on the aeroplane clutching an oversized bear, and as he gets his luggage at LAX to the words ‘DIE HARD’ slamming into the centre of the frame from opposite sides of the screen. I love the fact that this is a story built on the classic tales of old about a man drifting into an unknown territory, to a party where he knows not a soul, and then it all kicking off with our hero saving the day. You could almost imagine John Wayne or even Roy Rogers in an old western doing the same – drifting into an unfamiliar town, into a bar and then it all going the shape of the pear with the cowboy left to save the day… I love Argyle’s almost immediate warming to the stranger he greets at the airport, and waiting nearby just until everything settles down and McClane’s okay. I love the relationship, largely by CB between Reginald Veljohnson’s LA cop Al Powell, and the mutal respect he shares with McClane… but I adore Alan Rickman’s bad guy almost as much as McClane himself. For every superhero, there has to be an equally, or indeed almost superior villain, and Rickman nails it. In fact, the movie works so much because of the characters placed into this world for that one night, all of whom have some pretty decent dialogue for the actors assuming their roles to he their chops around.
Actually, the film does have Christmas nods all of the way through. Besides the fact that you know that it’s set on Christmas Eve, you have Al Powell singing Christmas songs as he buys his doughnuts, you have the big football game playing on the screens down in the lobby, you have the dirty journalist Richard Thornburg visiting the children who are all tucked up ready for Mommy and Daddy to come home for Christmas, you have McClane strapping a gun to his back using Christmas wrapping tape, and you have that awesome visual gag where McClane ties up a hostage with Christmas lights penning the words ‘Now I have a machine gun, ho, ho, ho’ on his victim’s sweatshirt.
DIE HARD is one of those movies where I struggle to find a negative aspect of it at all. The film is so etched in my brain as being the perfect action film that remains timeless year after year and that superb Christmas movie that has to be played every year. My only regret is not seeing it at a cinema (I was just eleven when it was originally released). It makes me sad.
I introduced the film to a new viewer just a couple of months ago, and by seeing the film through another set of eyes you almost get to see it yourself again for the first time. You can’t do that with a lot of movies, especially those awkward Christmas films that you roll out once a year. With DIE HARD, you can watch it any time of the year and still get a buzz out of it (although I really do try and save it for the month of December). It’s truly unique, and we have never seen anything like it (excusing the sequel and many rip-offs) before, or indeed since…
So come on Fox, do the decent thing and re-release it. Just make sure you do it at Christmas.
