Die Hard is a Christmas movie about a man who never wanted to be at the party

John McClane gets off a plane in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve to make peace with his wife Holly at her office party. He is a New York cop, tense, out of his element, in a building he does not know. By the time the elevator stops on the 30th floor, the tower has been taken by twelve armed men led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman, in his first feature role), and McClane is the only person on the floor with a pistol and his shoes off.

Directed by John McTiernan two years after Predator, written by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza from Roderick Thorp’s novel Nothing Lasts Forever, Die Hard is a 1988 action film built almost entirely on geometry. The Nakatomi Plaza (filmed at Fox Plaza in Century City) gives the movie its second protagonist, a vertical maze McClane works floor by floor, with the elevator shafts, the air ducts and the rooftop as the only routes the captors cannot see.

The action moves because the building moves with it. There is no army, no air strike, no second cop coming to help for two thirds of the runtime. The dramatic engine is one man learning a building faster than the people who already own it. The famous bits (the C-4 down the elevator shaft, the fire-hose jump, the rooftop standoff) only work because the geography has been earned first.

Michael Kamen’s score keeps just enough of the Beethoven Ode to Joy in the background to give Gruber’s plot a small absurdity, the same kind of absurdity Alan Rickman gives the line readings. Rickman never plays Gruber as a villain who knows the script. He plays him as someone managing a complicated job whose plans keep failing in mid-sized ways. The film has the patience to let him talk, and the talk is what makes the violence land.

Bonnie Bedelia as Holly is the part that often gets overlooked. She is the reason McClane is in the building and the reason the third act stops being an action sequence and becomes a question of whether anyone in the room actually walks out. Reginald VelJohnson, on a parking-lot radio outside, gives the film its other voice, the one McClane talks to when there is no one else.

Thirty-eight years on, Die Hard is still the movie a lot of action cinema borrows from without saying so: the single-location siege, the wisecracking working-class hero, the villain who is smarter than the cops and not quite smarter than the building. It is shorter and more economical than most of what came after. Whether it counts as a Christmas movie is a debate Die Hard does not bother to settle. It just keeps playing the carols.

Tags: thrillers, action, bruce willis