Four Movies on TV, Part 2

[Bruce Willis in Die Hard]

I put off watching Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis, for more than twenty years. Finally, on a night that I was glued to my recliner, it came up and I watched it in its entirety.

One of the factors that had earlier been working against me watching Die Hard was the fact that I didn’t particularly like the character that Willis portrayed in his successful prime-time mystery/romance series Moonlighting. But that character, presented as a counterpoint to co-star Cybil Shepherd’s, wasn’t really a good enough reason to avoid Willis in the movies. This was strongly borne out when I saw his riveting performance as an international terrorist in The Jackal. After seeing what a complete actor Willis was, it was only a matter of time and opportunity before I saw him in Die Hard.

Die Hard is a story, set in a Los Angeles skyscraper, that deals with terrorists/crooks who take over the building and use the novel ploy of terrorism as a cover to commit a large robbery there. I was stunned to see that their leader, the arch-villain Hans Gruber, was played by Alan Rickman, the same actor who has played Severus Snape so well in the Harry Potter movie series. Although his voice as Gruber was identical to Snape’s, Rickman’s appearance was very, very different. I understand that Rickman is primarily a stage actor in Britain whose only two major film credits to date are: Die Hard and the Harry Potter series! With his enormous talent, he should be appearing in many more movies. But then again, Rickman’s paucity of cinema appearances may be by his own design.

In Die Hard, Willis portrays a New York policeman who is visiting his somewhat estranged wife, who works in the aforementioned skyscraper and is attending a large company party there. While Willis is sulking around his wife, the bad guys sneak into the building and take the partygoers hostage. But by sheer luck, Willis isn’t in the hostage group when this happens and then spends the rest of the movie as a Rambo-type warrior hiding within the building, knocking off the hoods one by one and generally aggravating Rickman’s Gruber character.

Meanwhile, on the outside the police (except for one officer), FBI (whose chief agent was the villain in the James Bond movie License to Kill), and media behave collectively as a bunch of counterproductive morons, each with its own special agenda that has little to do with aiding Willis in rescuing the hostages and stopping the criminals.

The action was great, Willis’s character was very compelling and easy to sympathize with , and I couldn’t argue with Hans Gruber as a character embodying pure intellectual evil. And the fact that a sequel to Die Hard came out a few years later should give a clue as to how the movie ended.

The next movie from that night that I saw (for the umpteen millionth time) was the 1967 Arthur C. Clarke/Stanley Kubrick collaboration 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ll write about it in a few days.

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On a completely random note, I received a comment from my Summer of 1969: So What? entry a couple of days ago, but decided not to publish it. The submitter had nothing to say about my article, but instead promoted his/her video presentation on YouTube. I have nothing against that per se, but the substance of the comment needs to be pertinent to my article. To that individual, I suggest a resubmission of your comment that at least demonstrates that you read my article and have some type of reaction to it, agree or disagree.