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    Nostalgia Central
    Home»Movies»Movies by Decade»Movies - 1980s
    Movies - 1980s Movies - D 2 Mins Read

    Die Hard (1988)

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    When it was first announced that Bruce Willis – late of Moonlighting and the dismal Blind Date – was pairing up with John McTiernan to do an action flick, who could have predicted that it would propel Willis into A-list stardom and make a fashion statement of white vests?

    Die Hard single-handedly revived the twitching corpse that was the disaster movie genre and gave it a healthy injection of humour, stunning action set pieces and a hero that wasn’t afraid to cry and look pretty useless from time to time.

    It didn’t hurt that in Alan Rickman’s ultra-suave yet lethal terrorist Hans Gruber, the film had a truly dastardly villain that the audience was happy to hate: Intelligent, witty and cunning, Rickman’s Gruber is arguably the perfect movie villain.

    Willis plays John McClane – a New York cop who arrives in LA on Christmas Eve to patch up his marriage to his estranged wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia).

    While he’s in the bathroom of his wife’s Nakatomi Plaza office freshening up, the entire high-rise building is invaded, seized, and sealed off by a group of European terrorists (don’t you just hate when that happens).

    The poor guy then spends the rest of the movie scaling elevator shafts, crawling through heating ducts, and crashing through glass doors to save the hostages.

    All the action clichés are present – foreign baddies (German in this case), an overweight, black, doughnut-eating cop (Reginald VelJohnson) as McClane’s CB sidekick, and an intermittent stream of wisecracks interspersed with hard-boiled violence.

    Die Hard 2 (1990) and Die Hard With a Vengeance (1995) worked the genre even harder – topping the special effects up to the truly eye-popping subway train crash in Vengeance, which used real trains and warned stunt people if they didn’t hit their marks, ‘little could be done to help them’!

    “Yippie-ki-yay-mutherfucka!”

    TRIVIA
    Die Hard was released internationally under some pretty funky translated titles, including Die Manly (Serbia), Chrystal Jungle (Spain), The Glass Trap (Poland), and Give Your Life Expensive (Hungary).

    diehard_000

    John McClane
    Bruce Willis
    Hans Gruber
    Alan Rickman
    Holly Gennero McClane
    Bonnie Bedelia
    Sergeant Al Powell
    Reginald VelJohnson
    Dwayne T Robinson
    Paul Gleason
    Argyle
    De’Voreaux White
    Thornburg
    William Atherton
    Harry Ellis
    Hart Bochner
    Takagi
    James Shigeta
    Karl
    Alexander Godunov
    Franco
    Bruno Doyon
    Tony
    Andreas Wisniewski
    Theo
    Clarence Gilyard Jr
    Alexander
    Joey Plewa
    Uli
    Al Leong

    Director
    John McTiernan

    Video

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