Review of Krepkiy Oreshek (1968) by Joe C — 03 Jan 2017

In the 1980s, action movies tended to be the preserve of steroid-addled muscle men, machine-gunning their way to body counts of infinitude. At the decade's close, a TV comedy star and a sci-fi/horror director made a movie about a regular schmoe (albeit with a specialized skill set) in the wrong place at the wrong time and inadvertently made one of the greatest action movies of all time.

Jeb Stuart's homegrown screenplay based on Roderick Thorp's novel maximizes the witty bantering between Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, but never slows the action in doing so, blessing Die Hard with a humorous machismo unique to the genre.

In short it's big, noisy and exploitable fun but retains that sense of fury that shoots adrenalin through your system. Just the way it should be. It's sometimes easy to forget that John McClane was a product of the 1980's (only Holly McClane's hair and Elli's cocaine habit really signpost the era) but that's what you get for being a timeless classic.