500 words on Die Hard

Yippee kay-ay, Mother F*cker!

My favorite discovery of my freshman year of college, after moving to West LA, was hitting a shopping mall in the shadow of Nakatomi Plaza. Of course, on the first trip I feared the corpses of German terrorist thieves falling from the sky. But I soon realized that the mall had an indoor parking garage and no roof, so I could shop beneath and glimpse up at Nakatomi but my car’s hood wouldn’t meet the fate of late-80s LAPD cruisers.

I love Die Hard. John McClane is one of the greatest flawed heroes of all time and I love how throughout the series his personal failures make him a stronger hero. Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber is one of the best non-singing, non-cartoon villains of all time, challenged probably by Jeremy Irons’ portrayal as his brother Simon Gruber in Die Hard with a vengeance.

It’s the little things I love most in this film; from the sassy and irreverent limo driver to the juxtaposition of a beat-down New York City cop getting in a limo in the first place. You’ll cheer out loud when the mousy but innocent Harry Ellis is shot while trying to negotiate on behalf of the hostages and tear up when the relatively unknown Joseph Takagi is assassinated by Gruber.

The entire series is great because its villains aren’t just thieves, but terrorist thieves with grudges to settle. The motivation of the bad guys is never quite clear but never too confusing to get lost in an action flick or their interesting accents. Those accents – the German ones of con-brothers Hans and Simon Gruber – are a story in their own. In the German dubbed version of Die Hard, the heritage of the terrorist mastermind and his flunkies is swapped from German to English.

If anything, you know that Die Hard will take you farther than most action films. In the non-CGI age of 1989, when Die Hard was released, the film was still rich with explosions, elevator shafts, and tv-dinner-esque journeys through ventilation systems. The excitement and feats only continues through the series, climaxing with a little fighter jet surfing along California freeways.

But really, as you can already tell, the single best reason I love Die Hard is because it launched the only movie franchise in which I like all of the films. Die Harder, Die Hard with a Vengeance, and even Live Free or Die Hard, all are worthy successors to the formula created in the first Die Hard film.

I love when something I grew up with is only made better with each new vision. Hollywood so rarely treats its history with respect, let along artistry. The Die Hard films demonstrate this excellently. While there may be weak points across the four films, the series holds up and I look forward to sitting down with my kids – okay, my nieces and nephews – and helping them appreciate John McClane and company as they blow some stuff up and kill Germans!