NOTHING LASTS FOREVER (Part 1 - Our Love Will Never Die Hard)

A Good Day to Die Hard (or as I'll refer to it from here on, Die Hard 5, or DH5) opens today and is sure to have monster-size opening weekend attendance.  I mean, of course... Who doesn't want to see a good John McClane movie again?  You remember good-old John McClane!  He was the NY cop from the seminal 1988 action film Die Hard who was a breath of fresh air because he wasn't like any other movie NY cop we'd ever seen!

"Come out to the coast. We'll get together. Have a few laughs."

Here's a guy who's afraid of flying, hates L.A., his wife has a skyrocketing career and he isn't used to that idea yet.  But he's been working on it and now all he wants is to go to LA for Christmas to see if he can somehow show her.  And maybe he can even convince her to move back to NY and restore their family under one roof.  The love's still there, after all, it's just...complicated.  So, how hard can it really be to fix?  Of course, then he screws up and slips back into old patterns, doesn't he?  Damn.  But at least he reprimands himself for it.  He is still trying.  But he's  imperfect, vulnerable, only human.  Then, AW, MAN! Terrorists lock down the building!  He didn't come to LA to save the world, he just came to save his marriage.   Now he can't do that unless he keeps these robbers from killing his wife.  This problem is above his pay grade, so he tries to report it and stay alive long enough for the cavalry to arrive and handle it.  He'll only step in if it becomes necessary and he'll only take the minimum action required to get from A to B.      

Man, I love that guy!  And audiences love that guy!  You know why?  Because, dammit, we're all imperfect and trying to be better, too.  We all want to avoid trouble so we can focus on getting or keeping our lives happy and worry-free.  When faced with trouble, we all want it resolved with a minimum of effort, too.   He's just like us in that way.  So, yeah, if they want to tell more stories about this guy, then Yippie-ki-ay.  Let's do it.

BUT...if the hard-to-avoid reviews are accurate, then John McClane isn't in this DH5.  Oh, sure, Bruce Willis is using the name John McClane.  But apparently he's using it to represent a chaos-seeking, indestructible robot.  By all accounts so far, the guy we know, love and identify with is nowhere to be found in the smear of car wrecks, explosions and shattered glass.     

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I haven't seen DH5 yet, but I do want to.  Or, more to the point, the nostalgic, masochistic boy in me wants to.  But not having seen it doesn't disqualify me from talking about the McClane character's replacement with a genetically identical, but inexplicably soulless copy.  I saw that happening in Live Free For Die Hard - henceforth, Die Hard 4 or DH4.  In fact, the first shades of his transformation were already visible in Die Hard With a Vengance or DH3.)

When DIE HARD hit theaters, it was the culmination of lessons learned well over nearly a century of moviemaking.  It was based on a book nobody had read, "Nothing Lasts Forever" by Roderick Thorp.  There was an attempt to make the film many years earlier with Frank Sinatra as the lead, but it never panned out.  Over the years, they retooled the character, gave him a wife instead of an adult daughter, and went in a new direction.  When it finally got a release date in 1988, Bruce Willis was best known for his turn as snarky-romantic P.I., David Addison, in TVs "Moonlighting." It was hard to imagine what kind of action star he'd be.  The pre-release posters featured the building.  No face.  They eventually released this version:  

We all felt it.  Hollywood was afraid they would scare us off with a mere TV star, so they were easing into the idea, using their tools carefully to manufacture a movie star.  What none of us who sat down in theaters realized until the film started rolling is that they didn't have to work too hard to make that happen.  Willis exuded relatable, everyman charm - the key component to making John McClane who he needed to be.  The movie itself crackled.  Director John McTiernan had found the precise balance between character, action, space, time, truth, spectacle, tension, humor, immediacy and resonance that movies must strive for to stand the test of time.  It was The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 meets The Towering Inferno.  It was an event.  You just knew there would be sequels.

The key to the Die Hard, in the end, was not the stunts or gunfire or swinging or running or jumping or the exploding helicopters - those elements were all just fun, necessary pieces of activity.  The foundation upon which Die Hard was built on how important it was for John McClane to be good enough to deserve his marriage to Holly Gennaro.

"As long as you love me so...Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow."

Bruce Willis and Bonnie Bedelia were a couple so believable, so ordinary and inconspicuous, that they became us, our parents, our grandparents.  They argued like us and, when they worked out what was coming between them, they made up like us.  In the end, it was those two against the world.  And the world just wouldn't leave them alone.  When John realized he was wrong, when he thought he was going to die and asked his new best friend, Al Powell (Reginald Veljohnson), to tell Holly he was sorry, he became the man she knew he could be.  From that moment on, their marriage was healed for the rest of their days.  He'd been through hell putting things right and he wasn't going to lose her twice.

This essential truth is what makes the film's follow-up, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, arguably its most successful sequel.  (It's also the thing nearly all the imitators missed when they started pitching their "Die Hard in a [Insert Location Here]" ideas.  It was never about the lockdown.  It was always about who was locked down.) In DH2, they found a new sandbox in which to play - Dulles Airport in Washington DC - and a new way to keep Holly in on the action - when the airport is taken over by paramilitary terrorists, she's on one of the planes that can't land.  As time ticks on and her plane's fuel runs low, John is once again determined to get her back in one piece.  Saving the lives of hundreds of other passengers is a close second.  Stopping the terrorists remains the merely incidental activity that needs to happen to accomplish goals one and two.

Now, the action and dialogue were not as elegant as the DH1 (outside of one of the most efficient recap/exposition scenes in modern movies to open things up - he moved to LA, despite not liking it, he did it for Holly and he still cares about what her parents think of him as a husband - all good stuff).  And maybe director Renny Harlin didn't move with the grace and confidence that McTiernan did.  There was a somewhat silly-by-today's-standards anti-technology motif, for example.  (I excuse it, in the end because it became a key part of the film's climax.)  The villain (played by William Sadler) is less unique.  (Hard to top Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber.)  But at its core, DH2 was far truer to its characters than anything that came after.  Because it knew what the central conflict was in the world of Die Hard movies, it was able to recapture the magic to some degree.

"Why does this keep happening to us?"

Not only that, they did a clever job of substituting characters from the first film. Al Powell makes an appearance, but his sidekick role is taken over by airport employee Leslie Barnes (Art Evans).  Airport Police Capt. Carmine Lorenzo (Dennis Franz) provides as formidable (and comical) an obstacle to McClane as Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson (Paul Gleason).  Also William Atherton's Richard Thornburg is a welcome return.  These are the players that make a Die Hard movie.  (Of course, they can't all be in every film, but this one managed it.  Maybe some future episode will bring back Thornburg or Powell, for old times' sake.)  That fact that consideration was given to all these roles helped make DH2 feel like its predecessor.  In a way it was like the feeling you get when you cook one of your mother's old recipes.  You didn't get it just right, but it takes you right back.

And again, the fact that John McClane takes a serious beating in his quest for his share of domestic bliss, allowed us to identify.  It allowed us to say, "Yeah, I'd go through that for the person I love.  If I really had to."

So, what happened next?  Well, after going through hell TWICE to keep his marriage intact, John McClane would be faced with his greatest challenge yet...how to do it again.

We all agree another terrorist mastermind taking Holly hostage in a contained space wouldn't really work. "We gave it to you once," we'd have said, "But this time you gotta do something new." That was the bridge between the first two films, but to go there again would be a bridge too far.  So what did the keepers of the Die Hard franchise do?  They blew up the bridge.

UP NEXT: WHAT'S WRONG WTH THIS PICTURE?