Review: Die Hard

Die Hard

My rating: 5 of 5 stars






 My husband can't believe there are all these cinematic classics I've never seen. I prefer to think that I had to wait to see them until my art-sense was mature enough to really get them.

One of the reasons I write reviews online is because I love, love talking and thinking about books and movies and themes and how everything ties together, but I have a congenital inability to say what I mean, clearly. It gets better with practice, of course, but I haven't had nearly enough practice yet. And my mother-in-law is an English teacher, who raised her boy to see these things and talk about them clearly over the dinner table. I feel profoundly NOT up to the challenge. So, you see, I also need to prove to myself that I can think clearly. Just, apparently, not fast enough for real-time conversation.

(It would not hurt either one of us a bit to edit our blog posts, rather than (mostly) just spewing them out. )

So, Die Hard. Alan Rickman is an amazing actor; his role could have been ironed out flat, but with him it was genius. Most of the characters are complete tropes, for that matter, but they're so excellently done it doesn't even bother me. I hear there's also a book -- possibly one of those rare cases where the movie is better, but the plots are different, and the book also sounds good.

I have to be at least the seven-millionth person to observe this -- the filmmakers are grinning and mugging and pointing to the idea during the end credits -- but Die Hard occupies sort of the same place in cinema that Beethoven's Ode to Joy (the proper, choral-symphonic version) occupies in music. I can think of dozens of things I ought to like better, and probably even do like better in some ways. But this is the one that not only makes me say "Oh! That was the perfect way to say that!" but also makes me haul my date off afterward to somewhere dark and quiet where he can just be quiet for a minute while I absorb the experience. (I actually did this after my first viewing of both.)

That doesn't tell you much of anything about the movie, and that's on purpose. If you're one of the other four people who somehow didn't already know the plot hooks, this is a fantastic movie to see in that state of blessed ignorance. Just remember that my husband is right: Everything in this movie happens for a reason.