Review of Die Hard (1988) by Ven-Wede — 28 Feb 2012

In spirit, this is the simple story of a man who saves Christmas; a kind of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians scenario, in which the greedy German terrorists are defeated by the noble and just bullets of Bruce Willis' MP5 - delivering the meaning of sharing and caring right into their heads.

Of course, trying to define Die Hard as nothing more than a hollow-day (!) movie would be doing it a great disservice. The characterisation of both McLane and Gruber (or Grinch - a coincidence? You decide) is done superbly by their respective actors.

They draw you in with their personalities so well, that you find yourself cheering both of them on, just to see them continue to snap at each other. It's like a bizarro buddy-cop routine that took the 'good cop, bad cop' play a little too seriously.

It's not incidental that the characters themselves often refer to cowboys and Westerns - this is a veritable wild-west duel, taken at a number of vertical paces rather than a standard back-to-back reflex test.

That being said, however, some of the best moments are when McLane is just talking to himself, cracking wise while in the middle of a seemingly impossible situation. You don't have to convince anyone that you're a badass when you've just jumped off an exploding rooftop, Roy.

You could try and make a case for the ending being cheesy and unnecessarily joyous, or that there are many implausible moments, but that would just be ill-spirited pedantry. This is action at its finest, and you better take what Mr.

McTiernan gives you. There's no CGI or giant robots flying around - just good old-fashioned action, and it quickly becomes very obvious that films these days are just plain old doing it wrong. So sit back and plug in for two hours; you'll be yippie-kai-yaying in no time.

Written for: www.webbinghaus.tumblr.