Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

Tonight was my first viewing of Die Hard to help ring in my merry holiday.

Die Hard is a 1988 action film where the lone cop foils an international terrorist takeover of a Los Angeles office building. There’s a higher body count that in most Christmas movies and a lot more blood. Bruce Willis rose to movie superstardom as disaffected NYC cop John McClane. McClane travels to LA to visit his estranged wife and their two children for Christmas. His wife played with very little actual material in the tradition of most male action movies by Bonnie Bedelia works for the company that is taken hostage. Of course she does.

The charm of John McClane is that while he’s nobody’s fool, he gets how just plain dumb luck helps him. He’s ingenious, desperate, and wholly unprepared as a street cop to deal with this situation. But he does. He acquires a posse of limo driver Argyle and worn down LA Sgt Al Powell.

In Die Hard, the good guys are the working joe police officers who seem to genuinely understand their power to take the life of another human being. The LAPD upper leadership is ridiculous. The FBI even more so, making jokes about Vietnam in a way that I guess feels authentic for 1988? The media threatens the housekeeper watching the McClane children to draw them on camera for a human interest angle. That’s pretty gross. They threaten her with INS now known as ICE so some things never change.

The “good” guys are so appalling that they make the bad guys far more interesting. Alan Rickman is fantastic. And his gang of long-haired German minions are caricatures, but amusingly so.

I watched pretty closely, but can’t explain the plot. There are explosives, some sort of paper bond, hostages.  John McClane saves the day and most of the hostages. Then Argyle saves the day. Then Al really saves the day.

But is it a Christmas movie? Yes. It is set on Christmas Eve, during an office Christmas party, with a Christmas family visit as a significant point. There are Christmas decorations and music.

The plot seems to offer some points on the impact of greed in modern society, dance around the nuclear family unit, and the immigration storyline of the woman protecting THE CHILDREN feels Christmassy. John’s badass attitude melts a little like Scrooge. Sgt Al has a redemption arc. Also his wife is pregnant. Alan Rickman could easily be any or all characters of Scrooge. Well, he could have.

It is also very much an action movie in that I could not keep up with the logic or the plot. So I just sit back and wait to see how it work outs while enjoying the dialogue. Sort of like church.

I am firmly in the ‘Yes, Die Hard is a Christmas Movie’ camp. No, I do not plan to watch the sequels. There’s only so much blood I can offer to these cultural debates.