NOTHING LASTS FOREVER (Part 3 - Nothing Lasts Forever)

Twelve years passed since Die Hard With a Vengeance.  Then, in June of 2007, we were given DH4, with the somewhat cumbersome (and oddly New Hampshire state motto-ish) title Live Free or Die Hard.

Its not your father's Die Hard...or yours either, come to think of it.

The titel alone was the first bog indicator that something had changed.  It implied history, the freedom of this great nation threatened by tyranny.  (Deep-throated trailer voice: "And only one man can stop it." Yippie-ki-yay.)  This would be a big story, with the security of the entire country at stake.  Let me repeat, THE ENTIRE COUNTRY.  Not a building in Los Angeles, or an airport in DC, or the subways and city blocks of Manhattan.  No, this time, it was that which makes America America that was being threatened.  This time, the danger would cross state lines.

So, how do you finagle a story line to justify a NYC Police Detective getting wrapped up in what is essentially a federal cyber-terror manhunt?  Well, you make him a babysitter.  See, when some anonymous hackers (see what I did there?) knock out the power at the FBI's Cyber-Security Division, the G-men look to the usual suspects only to find most of them have been murdered. The ones that are still alive need to be taken into protective custody stat!  

Justin Long plays one of these top-rated hackers.  A stammering, but charming young fellow named Matt Farrell. (We buy him as a hacker, by the way, because he played a computer on TV...)

"Hi, I'm a PC." "And I'm a Mac."

So, he knows about these things.

Naturally, when a single hacker needs to be taken into protective custody and transported from New York to DC, you get the guy who stopped terrorist attacks in both of those cities.  (I feel like if they could have figured out a way for him to swing by Avenue of the Stars between Olympic and Santa Monica on the way, they would have.)  You get, Detective John McClane.  Naturally.

So, on his way, McClane gets dressed down for being a lousy absentee father and husband by none other than his now college-age daughter, Lucy, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead in an inspired casting choice... 

"McClane residence. Lucy McClane speaking."

...before she storms off to let him think about what a loser he's been to her and her brother and her mom all her life.  (I guess she only saw DH3...)  In any case, it's good she stormed off when she did because a second more of arguing would have kept McClane from reaching Matt Farrell's apartment and saving his life in nick of time.  At this point in the theater, I was squirming in my chair, wrestling with mixed feelings.  I was excited to get more Die Hard and I was still assuming that once the setup business was all in order, we'd start seeing some.  I sat through the Lucy/John confrontation, preparing myself to accept the truth that the studio and I simply disagreed on the direction of John and Holly's marriage and since they had all the money, and in the battle of who McClane was in 1 & 2 vs. who he was in 3, they decided to go with 3 and that was just how it was going to be from here on out.  I decided to give it some time and see if maybe they could make it still feel like a Die Hard movie.  And to be honest, the next thing that happened didn't disappoint.  McClane got to Farrell just as the bullets started to fly and in short order he was throwing Justin Long around the room, telling him what to do to stay alive.  I bought this.  McClane knows how to avoid a bullet or two.  He's a man of quick thinking action.  All Matt Farrell knows is his keyboard.  It was fun to see John McClane coaching this kid on survival in the middle of an intense gunfight.

Crazy things happen for the next several minutes.  You remember this exchange from the trailer, don't you?   

"You killed a helicopter...with a car?"

"I was out of bullets."

Sigh...

Okay.  It's gonna be that kind of movie.  Now, look, I'm not opposed to a big crazy over-the-top action movie AT ALL.  I love 'em.  But when that movie also had Die Hard in the title, I guess I just hope for a little something extra.  Again, DH1 came out and people were blown away because it was a big action blockbuster that also had great characters. There were peaks and valleys, ebbs and flows of emotion that made you invest in, nay really care about, these people.  Let me state that again with the appropriate emphasis.  They made you care about THESE people:

Let's take a walk back in time for s moment.

At this point in 1988, I knew McClane was nervous about being in a strange city, his wife was back to using her maiden name (ouch), he was hoping to show her he'd evolved enough to win her back, a rich coke-head (Hart Bochner)... 

"Sprechen sie talk?"

...was trying to put the moves on her, she was eclipsing him in every way and there was nothing he could do about it.  This was looking like it was going to be be the worst Christmas of his life.  THEN hostages take over the building and the one person he cares most about becomes a hostage.  And here he is on the run with not even the shoes on his feet.

At this point in 1990, I knew McClane had transferred to LA, despite misgivings, but because it was the good thing to do for his marriage and family (take note, grown-up Lucy).  He had gone ahead to visit the in-laws in DC with their two kids and Holly was coming on a later flight because, well, work is work.  He borrows his in-laws car to pick her up at Dulles and it gets towed.  Great.  As he waits for the flight to land, he spots some suspicious behavior, goes to report it, and is summarily dismissed by the local PD.  

"You'd be surprised what I make in a month."

Because nobody messes around at an airport, ever, let alone when your wife is n the air headed that way, he investigates himself.  Not the smartest idea, but he's always been a bit of a cowboy, hasn't he?  THEN, terrorists hijack the control tower, crash a jumbo jet and issue their demands in order to be kept from crashing more jumbo jets.  The one person he cares about most is a hostage again, only this time, IN THE AIR, with fuel running out.  At least he has his shoes on this time.

At this point in 1995, shaky start.  Holly' not really in the picture.  John's kind of given up.  Harder to root for a guy who's given up on the person he cares about most.  But bombs are going off on New York City.  It has to stop.  The police are at their wits' end.  THEN the bomber demands that McClane be brought in.  Nobody wants him there, but they want bombs going off in Manhattan less, so they comply.  They do what the bomber wants and put him on a street corner in Harlem in his boxers and a sandwich board that declares a bomber-prescribed hate for African Americans using the worst worst there is for them.  Local man of conscience, Zeus Carver, steps in to keep him from getting killed and soon they're tied together in a series of puzzles orchestrated by the big crazy bad guy.  Not exactly 1988 or 1990 is it?  What keeps Zeus invested?  Conscience alone?  Maybe.  But now we're getting into questions of why and how and what...and we're thinking, we're doing math.  Summer vacation is over.

So here we are back in 2007, and hackers we don't know - who themselves attacked a government security division - are getting murdered by someone.  McClane (and presumably a handful of other cops in other regions of the country - what are their stories?) is sent to take one of them into protective custody.  But first, his daughter is mad at him.  Not in danger or anything, just mad.  McClane and the hacker get shot at, they flee, reach the FBI in DC and on the way to being moved to a safer environment, they get ambushed and kill a helicopter with a car.  THEN the cyber-terrorists start shutting down computer systems and networks all over the country and they have to drive to West Virginia to stop them from blowing up a power station and then...and then... and then...  I'm sorry, who am I supposed to be caring about right now?  (Too...much...math...must...remember...it's...summer...)

Over the next hour they go to Maryland, trade words with Kevin Smith, figure out that the bad guy, Thomas Gabriel, (a pre-Justified Timothy Olyphant) used to work as a hacker for the government and was drummed out because they didn't believe we were vulnerable to a cyber-attack and now he wants to steal the social security information of everyone in America or something... Eventually, he kidnaps Lucy - because...we...need to make it personal for John?  Finally?  Somehow?  And we get the first and only scene in the entire movie that feels like Die Hard.  Gabriel puts her on the phone with John to prove she's alive.  She looks around the room, taking a head count, then blurts out, "There's six of them..." and goes on to list some vital information she knows he'll use to find them and kill them.  I loved her in that moment.  She's daddy's little girl all right.

Blah, blah, blah...they track her down, McClane kills Maggie Q by dropping an SUV on her in an elevator shaft - as one might expect - and it comes down to a showdown designed to echo the one at the end of DH1.  And this is where McClane finally says Yippie-Ki-Yay Mother--  Ah, but in the theatrical version, the second half of his word is covered by the sound of a gun.  DH4, it seems, is rated PG-13.  It is he first Die Hard movie not to get an R rating.  It's the first one that wasn't made by adults for adults.  Rather it was made by adults for 13-year-olds.  And this goes a long way to explaining why it's devoid of the kinds of complex themes that made the original films so compelling.  Kids just don't want to hear a bunch of grown-ups dealing with grown-up things, right?  I mean, we all know that.  Right?

You would think.  But, a friend of mine recently showed his 14 year old son the original Die Hard and the response was not what you would expect.  The boy said, "The beginning was slow, but the rest was really great."  My friend wisely told his son that it's because the beginning was slow that the rest was really great.  The kid got it.  It made perfect sense to him that he was invested in the characters and their outcomes because he was given time to get to know them first as people.

I mean, as an action movie all by itself, DH4 is still better than your average straight-to-cable whatnot.  But as a Die Hard movie, it's a big, fat, missed opportunity.  The secret to Die Hard is that the spectacular action set-pieces were incidental to the more important and far more satisfying personal stuff.  

Who could forget the moment when Sgt. Al Powell beat his own personal demons?

Who can forget this guy...

...realizing something was seriously wrong and punching out this guy...?

Or this working relationship?

Or him...

...being so mad about this...

...that he wants a one-on-one fight to the death with McClane.  Then there's this charming fellow...

"You let me in or I call INS..."

Everyone who played a role in this movie is memorable.  None of them, besides John and Holly, were more memorable than this guy, of course...

"Nice suit. John Phillips, London. I have two myself. Rumor has it Arafat buys his there."

...but that's as it should be.  (I wanted to do a whole paragraph on Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber, but to be honest, a paragraph just isn't enough. And anyway, heroes and villains are interconnected. So for him to be this good, John and Holly had to be as well.  And they were.  And he was.)

So, what's the point of all this?  The point is that when Die Hard was made, in 1988, there was a minimum basic requirement that movies had to meet to be considered movies at all.  They were required to have a cast of distinct and identifiable characters with genuine concerns.  Those characters had to be stressed into moments where they faced who hey were when nobody was looking and came to terms with themselves.  The had to change because the story they were living demanded it of them and they became better people because of it.  They had to want what everyone wants - to love and be loved.  All of this is baseline.  The job of the movie maker was to do all that, every time, in a fun way that was new to the eyes and the ears.  The job was to make movies you didn't just watch, they were movies you felt and would go on feeling for decades to come. Die Hard not only met that standard, it exceeded it, dwarfed it.

Today, the standard has changed.  Movies are still fun and all, but it's very rare that one will stay with you.  Every time a movie comes out with Die Hard in the title, there's a part of me that hopes it plays by the old rules, just for a little while.  But alas, as the title of the book that started all of this will tell you, Nothing Lasts Forever.

- OO

P.S. - I'm going to see A Good Day to Die Hard. (I expect I'll have a thing or two to say about it, so keep an eye out for Part 4 of this little exploration.)  Now, I don't know if it will be a fun time at the movies yet or not.  I hope it will, as I always do.  But I'm not encouraged by the one criticism I've heard so far that really matters - that John McClane isn't really John McClane anymore.  A Die Hard movie is supposed to be better than the average action flick because John McClane is better than the average action flick hero.  Take him out of the equation and the best you can hope for is an average action flick.  And there's no shortage of those.  There's an exchange in the trailer that may say it all, though.  "Need a hug?" "We're not really a hugging family."  Oh no...?

I beg to differ.