Kritiken

It’s hard not to be impressed by how persistently satisfying the movie is. No matter how many times I watch it or how well I know the plot beats, each time it begins, it’s like my mind gets wiped clean, and I’m surprised anew by every pivot in the story, by the way the movie’s deceptively simple setup steadily grows into a monster of a premise, full of complicated relationships.

The movie lost me at a single moment, about a third of the way in—when McClane, falling down an elevator shaft, catches himself by the fingertips on the recessed inside of an air vent. At that moment, the rules of the game change—the drama passes from heroics to superheroics and McClane's exertions rise from extraordinary to incredible.

There's a remarkable strain of satire coursing through the picture, and what's being made fun of (and simultaneously celebrated, for audience-pleasing purposes) is machismo itself. Character after character gets himself wounded or ends up dead because he gives into preening male rage and cocky overconfidence.

What ultimately makes Die Hard such a great, re-watchable experience (and a Christmas staple, in my book) is that, while Willis and Rickman carry us through the film, all the good guys—Argyle, Al, and Holly—get a worthy payoff in the final moments.

[It's] inarguably a modern masterpiece of both structuralist and psychoanalytic semiosis. As an n-dimensional mythological lattice posing as an unpretentious, violent movie, DIE HARD simultaneously pits East Coast vs. West Coast, Eastern capitalism vs. Western capitalism, work vs. family, local vs. global, working class vs. upper class, white vs. black ad infinitum, all entirely immersed in the sacred moment of the pagan Winter Solstice.

Action movies are usually designed to offer their male heroes opportunities for personal redemption, and Die Hard, as a sort of revisionist action movie, does so quite elaborately. For one, its semi-real-time plot, which holes up the hero, his wife, and her colleagues in a Nakatomi Plaza occupied by well-financed European terrorists, gives the film a minute-to-minute immediacy that few films of its genre have.

While the film's showstoppers still dazzle, Die Hard isn't a great film simply because it delivers bang for your buck; it's great because its action is built atop a foundation of wit and emotion.

From its trailer, "Die Hard" looks like a typical action movie of the `80s... As directed by John McTiernan, it turns out to be something more-the archetypical action movie of the `80s, the perfection of the form. Sleekly engineered, impeccably staged and shrewdly dosed with humor and sentiment, "Die Hard" has everything but a personality.

Most of the action is run-of-the-mill Hollywood blood and thunder, but a couple of scenes are unusually reprehensible: one in which the villains kill an innocent person, and another in which a peaceable man turns to gunplay. In both cases, the audience is coaxed into cheering by techniques that have as much to do with Pavlovian conditioning as with the art of cinema.

A serviceable if rather overextended and overblown adventure thriller (1988), with Willis stripped for action like Rambo and doing his best as the only hope of the hostages held captive, this features a spectacular Cecil B. De Mille-like conclusion and makes good use of its skyscraper set (portions of which exhibit a Frank Lloyd Wright influence), but the script by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, adapted from Roderick Thorp's novel Nothing Lasts Forever, is fairly routine.