Thanks to Netflix, I spent the weekend watching Die Hard, Die Harder, and Die Hard With A Vengeance. Awash in testosterone, I have to say that these films have aged well. But the prespective that comes from time makes me wonder how I could ever have enjoyed the third film as much as I did. Scratch that. I enjoyed the film again this time, too. But it was a brain-dead kind of enjoyment, because I had to disengage my brain completely to enjoy it at all. I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's start at the top.

Die Hard
Die Hard is more than a modern classic. It is a genre-shaping example of how action movies ought to be made. It's hard to imagine now, but my only image of Bruce Willis before this film was of a comic wiseguy. In Moonlighting, he exchanged witty repartee with Cybil Shepard over the head of the rhyming, whining receptionist. And now he's in an action film? Like Stallone and Schwarzeneggar? Ha! But it worked, better than most people could have imagined. Willis changed the formula for action films. Instead of a super-man waving a bazooka in each hand and hardly getting scratched as he plunged through death-defying obstacle after death-defying obstacle, Bruce Willis was the everyman, in over his head in a situation he could bareful understand, but still able to come out on top. Sure, the movie had plenty of scenes where our hero improbably manages to duck a rain of bullets from fully automatic machine guns. No movie is perfect.

In the original, Die Hard, John McClane (Willis) has been living apart from his wife for the last six months. He is a New York Cop, she works as a Director for a Japanese company in Los Angeles. Remember, this was 1988. Those Japanese companies were eating our lunch back then. He shows up at a Christmas part to see how things are going, and is quite disappointed to find things going so well for her. He had hoped things would fail and she would move back to New York. While he is trying to relax in an executive washroom, barefoot, a team of apparent terrorists led by Hans Gruber (played by Alan Rickman) take over the building, holding 30 or so hostages. McClane escapes into a stairwell, and the game is on.

McClane doesn't always know what is happening, and the terrorists are very organized, but they don't even know he exists at first, which puts him at an advantage. Grabbing something the bad guys need from one of the first people he kills is also a lucky break. The fact that the LA police chief and the FBI agents are moron is unlucky, but it just means that McClane will have to work harder, because he is on his own. Rickman's Gruber is well-played and well-written, a worthy adversary for McClane. His plan has a backup plan, and his backup plans have backup plans. Everything is well-scripted and able to withstand a little bit of bad luck. Gruber is also adaptable, able to escape from McClane's own clutches and take advantage of McClane's bare feet, providing one of the most excrucriating scenes of the movie. Still, McClane provides far more than just a little bit of bad luck, and our hero lives to see Christmas with his family.