Die Hard

This article is about the 1988 action film. For other uses, see die hard.

Die Hard
Directed by	John McTiernan
Written by	Roderick Thorp (novel "Nothing Lasts Forever") Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza (screenplay)
Produced by	Lawrence Gordon Joel Silver Charles Gordon (executive producer) Beau Marks (associate producer)
Starring	Bruce Willis Alan Rickman Alexander Godunov Bonnie Bedelia
Cinematography	Jan de Bont
Edited by	John F. Link Frank J. Urioste
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release dates	July 15, 1988
Running time	131 min.
Country	USA
Language	English German
Budget	$28,000,000 (est.)

Die Hard is a Hollywood action film released in 1988. It was written by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, starring Bruce Willis, Bonnie Bedelia, Alan Rickman, Reginald VelJohnson, William Atherton, and directed by John McTiernan. A huge critical and commercial success, Die Hard propelled Willis' film career, giving him more credibility in action, dramatic, and musical roles, and established Alan Rickman as a popular portrayer of villains in American film.

The movie is based on a 1979 novel by Roderick Thorp titled Nothing Lasts Forever, itself a sequel to the book The Detective, which was previously made into a 1968 movie starring Frank Sinatra.

Plot

John McClane (Willis), a detective with the NYPD, arrives in Los Angeles to attempt a Christmas reunion with his estranged wife Holly. He is taken by limo to her workplace, the highrise Nakatomi Plaza. Joining the Nakatomi Christmas party, McClane finally finds Holly (after discovering she is now using her maiden name, Gennaro), and they immediately get into an argument. Holly leaves John alone in a small room near the party.

A "terrorist" gang led by the German Hans Gruber (Rickman) invade and secure the building. The party-goers are subdued and it is revealed that the group are really thieves who plan to steal six hundred and forty million dollars in bearer bonds from the building's security vault. When Holly's boss Takagi does not provide the vault combination, he is killed and Theo, the gang's technical mastermind, begins disabling the sequential vault locks.

McClane manages to slip away during the round-up of the party-goers, albeit without his shoes. His attempt to summon help via the building's fire alarm brings him into confrontation with a gangmember named Tony. He kills Tony, prompting the man's vengeful brother Karl to lead a hunt for the policeman through the building. McClane secures the attention of LAPD Sgt. Al Powell by dropping the body of one of his pursuers onto the hood of the officer's car.

Nakatomi Plaza (in real life, the Fox Plaza)

The LAPD responds in force, but this merely accelerates Gruber's original timetable, and the thieves break open the safe. McClane continues his fight from within, with Powell as his only ally outside the building. After McClane captures Gruber's vital supply of explosive detonators, Gruber finds himself in an unexpected face-to-face confrontation with him; the mastermind's attempt at pretending to be an escaped hostage is successful enough to recover the detonators. Back outside the building, an irresponsible TV reporter named Richard Thornburg accidentally alerts Gruber to the fact that Holly is McClane's wife. He takes her aside as a special hostage.

McClane realizes that Gruber's plan is to blow up the hostages on the roof of the building, covering the gang's escape. McClane gets the hostages back off the roof, but Gruber still sets off the explosion. McClane escapes the blast by jumping over the side of the building with a fire hose around his waist and blasting his way into an office a couple of stories down.

The film climaxes with McClane confronting Gruber one last time high up in the tower, with Holly being held at gunpoint. McClane suckers Gruber with a faked surrender, then shoots the man, who falls thirty-two stories to his death. As McClane and his wife leave the building, Karl reappears one last time, and is shot down by Powell, who had earlier confided that mistakenly shooting and killing a teenager had rendered him emotionally unable to draw a gun. After Holly expresses her anger to Thornburg, she and McClane depart the scene in his limo.

Sequels

• Die Hard 2: Die Harder
• Die Hard with a Vengeance
• Live Free Or Die Hard

Cast

Actor	Role
Bruce Willis	Detective John McClane
Alan Rickman	Hans Gruber
Bonnie Bedelia	Holly Gennero McClane
Reginald VelJohnson	Sgt. Al Powell
Alexander Godunov	Karl
Paul Gleason	Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson
William Atherton	Richard Thornburg
De'voreaux White	Argyle
Hart Bochner	Harry Ellis
James Shigeta	Joe Takagi
Dennis Hayden	Eddie
Clarence Gilyard Jr.	Theo
Bruno Doyon	Franco
Andreas Wisniewski	Tony
Al Leong	Uli
Robert Davi	FBI Special Agent Johnson
Grand L. Bush	FBI Agent Johnson

Trivia

• During the final scene in which Karl suddenly reappears for one final attempt to kill McClane, a music cue from James Horner's score of Aliens is heard. The cue is "Resolution and Hyperspace" from the Aliens soundtrack, in which the first part of the track was ultimately unused in the original Aliens film.
• In the German dub the names and backgrounds of the German-born terrorists were changed into English forms (mostly into their British equivalents): Hans became Jack, Karl became Charlie, Heinrich turned into Henry etc. The new background depicted them as radical Irish activists having gone freelance and for profit rather than ideals. (This led to some odd plot holes in this movie and continuity problems with Die Hard with a Vengeance; there, the villain is considered to be the brother of Hans Gruber, yet he's German.) This was because German terrorism (especially by the Rote Armee Fraktion) was still considered a sensitive issue by the German government in the 1980s.
• The Nakatomi building is actually Twentieth Century Fox headquarters, and the company charged itself rent for use of the (unfinished) building as if the production were simply another tenant of the building, as well as damages for the destruction of the sidewalk guardrail destroyed by the LAPD armored personnel carrier.
• During one of the final scenes, in which Gruber is dropped from the building, Alan Rickman's surprise is genuine. The director chose to release Rickman a full second before he expected it in order to get genuine surprise, a move which angered Rickman.

Reception

When Die Hard was released, it was considered one of the best action films of its era. This is probably in part due to the fact that there are few artificial plot points in the story. It is said to have reinvented the action genre and set the 90s for action/thriller movies such as Under Siege, Passenger 57 and Speed. "Die Hard on a _____" became a common way to describe the plot of many of the action films that came in its wake. The movie was also responsible for creating the "action star" archetype that is a far more fallible and human hero, wearing few pieces of clothing, speaking few words (including "one liners") and always having a rough look across their face. Die Hard grossed $80,707,729 at the U.S. Box Office.

It was highly acclaimed by critics and spawned three sequels Die Hard 2: Die Harder (1990), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), and Live Free or Die Hard, which is currently scheduled for release on June 27th, 2007.

In the June 22, 2007 issue of Entertainment Weekly, it was named the number one best action movie of all time.

Video games

Main article: Die Hard games

A number of video games based on the Die Hard series of films have been made, including Die Hard Trilogy, Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas, Die Hard Arcade, Die Hard: Vendetta, and Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza. There was also a NES video game based on the original movie.

Parodies

• On the Ben Stiller Show, the Die Hard series was parodied in a fictional film trailer of Die Hard 12: Die Hungry. Stiller took the place of John McClane, defending a supermarket against terrorists, demanding millions of dollars of coupons on Christmas Eve.
• In National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 (mainly a parody of the Lethal Weapon franchise), Bruce Willis (in a similar under shirt and pants as he had in Die Hard) emerges from a trailer that exploded from heavy gunfire waving a white flag, surrendering (thus in turn parodying Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 2, where Riggs' trailer home is shot to pieces).
• The Dexter's Laboratory episode "Trapped with a Vengeance" is similar to Die Hard.
• A seventh-season episode of Charmed, "Scry Hard", spoofed the title of the Die Hard movie.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 2 (1997-98) Episode 3 "School Hard" is so named because of an unlikely 'Die hard scenario' in which Buffy and Friends defend the school from a pack of vampires taking their parents hostage.

(Watcher's Guide Golden/Holder Pocket Books 1998)

See also

• Spy Hard

External links

• Die Hard at IMDb
• Script
• Script analysis of the film
• RottenTomatoes Aggregate reviews of Die Hard