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Die Hard
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Kissing, Marriage, Christmas, and Chocolate Bars.
There's a two-part episode from Season 1 of Stargate: Atlantis called The Storm and The Eye in which the Pegasus Galaxy's biggest ********, The Genii, take over the city of Atlantis with the intention of robbing it, taking everyone as hostages except Colonel Shepard who uses unconventional means to traverse the city-building and knocks off the baddies one by one until he can ace the Big Bad who goads and threatens him over the radio.
This is what I call a Die Hard Foil, it's essentially the premise of Die Hard repackaged to fit a television episode and it's a damn good episode, but no shortage of credit goes to Die Hard being a great premise to begin with.
As a mandatory third-person observer you gotta imagine what the bad guys are seeing in this situation, they send off a couple dudes to go take care of something and suddenly they're not answering their radios and instead some smartass starts wisecrackin' and making threats. You don't know who this guy is, but when parts of the building begin getting cut off, locked down, blacked out, or simply blown up in a consistent path towards you and you begin losing track of your guys, this man becomes a massive setback to your plans, especially when you think you have him cornered and suddenly you turn a corner and he's several floors away in a ventilation shaft, HOW IN THE **** IS HE DOING THAT!?.
But also AS a third-person observer we get to see that it's just one extremely lucky/unlucky random bastard who's resourceful and can improvise well enough under pressure to get out of hot situations.
It takes the full standard 15 minutes for there to be any remote hint of dilemma, but once the baddies take the building it's a slow burn to an explosive climax.
I'll be honest, I was never a huge fan of Die Hard, I thought it was a cool concept, but a bit generic in it's plot and characters, the action never really reached the awesomely absurd heights set by other much-less-serious action movies either such as you would expect from Jackie Chan or Schwarzenegger.
On this rewatch though, even having seen it several times before now, I have to admit my appreciation for the movie has significantly improved.
I mainly cite the multiple subtleties in the movie, the numerous little Chekov's Guns which are all granted permission to fire by the end of the movie:
After Hans sees John is barefoot it inspires him to seed the floor with broken glass.
Al's cleverly concealed exposition about never wanting to shoot a gun again is called back when he's forced to kill again.
Holly folding down the photograph of her and her husband (which has always been a rather blunt trope) later serves to delay Hans' realization that he has someone he can threaten John with.
Your Movie Sucks put it well in his review of The Walking Dead, reincorporation is great WHEN it's not transparent that what you're telling or showing is just a plot device that exists purely to be reincorporated.
The photograph is symptomatic of John and Holly's strained marriage, Al's admission of shooting a kid is part of a desperate attempt to retain communication between John and the police, and even John getting his feet cut up well over halfway into the movie is foreshadowed as early as the very first scene of the movie wherein an airline passenger recommends an unconventional cure for relieving stress from air travel.
Did I really WANT to see Bruce Willis pull bloody shards of glass out of the bottom of his feet? No, I really didn't, but I can respect the fine attention to detail the movie has.
And really it's that which pushes it over the edge for me, you got your tension, you got your release, you got your punching, shooting, explosions, BIGGER explosions, you got your one-liners, and you even got your solid acting from Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, Reginald VelJohnson rounds them out while Paul Gleason, William Atherton, and Robert Davi play up stereotypical police, FBI, and media ****buckets. You love to hate 'em and they all get their due in the end which is the karmic ribbon on the proverbial package that is Die Hard.
I like Die Hard and I put it in that category of movies that shelters the likes of Strange Days. It's not yet one of my favorite movies, but it's so well made that I have exceptional difficulty complaining about it.
Final Verdict: [Pretty Good]
Die Hard
Action Thriller / English / 1988
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
"Yippee-ki-yay, mother****er."
Kissing, Marriage, Christmas, and Chocolate Bars.
There's a two-part episode from Season 1 of Stargate: Atlantis called The Storm and The Eye in which the Pegasus Galaxy's biggest ********, The Genii, take over the city of Atlantis with the intention of robbing it, taking everyone as hostages except Colonel Shepard who uses unconventional means to traverse the city-building and knocks off the baddies one by one until he can ace the Big Bad who goads and threatens him over the radio.
This is what I call a Die Hard Foil, it's essentially the premise of Die Hard repackaged to fit a television episode and it's a damn good episode, but no shortage of credit goes to Die Hard being a great premise to begin with.
As a mandatory third-person observer you gotta imagine what the bad guys are seeing in this situation, they send off a couple dudes to go take care of something and suddenly they're not answering their radios and instead some smartass starts wisecrackin' and making threats. You don't know who this guy is, but when parts of the building begin getting cut off, locked down, blacked out, or simply blown up in a consistent path towards you and you begin losing track of your guys, this man becomes a massive setback to your plans, especially when you think you have him cornered and suddenly you turn a corner and he's several floors away in a ventilation shaft, HOW IN THE **** IS HE DOING THAT!?.
But also AS a third-person observer we get to see that it's just one extremely lucky/unlucky random bastard who's resourceful and can improvise well enough under pressure to get out of hot situations.
It takes the full standard 15 minutes for there to be any remote hint of dilemma, but once the baddies take the building it's a slow burn to an explosive climax.
I'll be honest, I was never a huge fan of Die Hard, I thought it was a cool concept, but a bit generic in it's plot and characters, the action never really reached the awesomely absurd heights set by other much-less-serious action movies either such as you would expect from Jackie Chan or Schwarzenegger.
I mainly cite the multiple subtleties in the movie, the numerous little Chekov's Guns which are all granted permission to fire by the end of the movie:
After Hans sees John is barefoot it inspires him to seed the floor with broken glass.
Al's cleverly concealed exposition about never wanting to shoot a gun again is called back when he's forced to kill again.
Holly folding down the photograph of her and her husband (which has always been a rather blunt trope) later serves to delay Hans' realization that he has someone he can threaten John with.
Your Movie Sucks put it well in his review of The Walking Dead, reincorporation is great WHEN it's not transparent that what you're telling or showing is just a plot device that exists purely to be reincorporated.
The photograph is symptomatic of John and Holly's strained marriage, Al's admission of shooting a kid is part of a desperate attempt to retain communication between John and the police, and even John getting his feet cut up well over halfway into the movie is foreshadowed as early as the very first scene of the movie wherein an airline passenger recommends an unconventional cure for relieving stress from air travel.
Did I really WANT to see Bruce Willis pull bloody shards of glass out of the bottom of his feet? No, I really didn't, but I can respect the fine attention to detail the movie has.
And really it's that which pushes it over the edge for me, you got your tension, you got your release, you got your punching, shooting, explosions, BIGGER explosions, you got your one-liners, and you even got your solid acting from Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, Reginald VelJohnson rounds them out while Paul Gleason, William Atherton, and Robert Davi play up stereotypical police, FBI, and media ****buckets. You love to hate 'em and they all get their due in the end which is the karmic ribbon on the proverbial package that is Die Hard.
I like Die Hard and I put it in that category of movies that shelters the likes of Strange Days. It's not yet one of my favorite movies, but it's so well made that I have exceptional difficulty complaining about it.