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Sunday, 22 August 2010

The Die Hard Series Reviewed

By Justin Vance

Die Hard movies are a great piece of film history. That is probably where they need to stay, though, instead of having updated versions coming out years after what was thought of as the last one in the series. It is probably time for John McClain to be retired. Let Bruce Willis keep doing action movies, but this franchise has already seen its glory days.

The first of the movies has John going against a charmingly evil Alan Rickman in a building in downtown LA. He tries to get help the whole time, and it is easy to see that he is just a man who doesn't really want to be where he is and is trying to get someone else to come over and help him out the whole time. Eventually he just has to do it himself, but he tries to get help. And that is important to his character.

The second movie gets more outlandish. It takes place in an airport and once again our hero is thrown into something just because he happened to be in the right place at the right time. The premise works, and he is able to save the day, but there are a few more elements of the completely far-fetched that start to pop up. Still, the movie isn't outside the realm of possibility by too much.

The third movie does a good job of being really over the top. There is a lot that is happening in the movie, and John is caught in the middle, although this time because the bad guy calls him out personally. Still, the movie is a good balance of humor and action and wasn't so over the top on action as to be ridiculous.

The fourth movie takes on most of the nation. John goes from being a cop on a certain beat to having to try to be everywhere and stop a national crises. He also has seemed to gain super powers, going from a guy who is hard to kill to a guy that can take out a helicopter by speeding through a tunnel. Of course he gets up and walks away after doing that, and the movie starts to lose some of its mystic.

These movies work best when they are done a little smaller. Why not have John go up against a small group of determined individuals on smaller scale? Why not let him fight by hiding in the air ducts and sneaking around with a stolen assault rifle? This is why people fell in love with the series, not just the over the top nature of them.

Ultimately it is just a difference in the styles of the time. A couple of decades ago it was okay to show an average guy in an unusually situation. Now, with the advent of super-hero movies and an ability to do more with special effects, every action movie is made with an eye to massive explosions and not to making a good underdog story.

The Die Hard movies are all pretty solid action movies. They are meant to be taken as escapism and that is what they are. The new movie isn't awful, but it is just proof that those movies can't be made the same way that they used to be. Let John McClain go into retirement and bring Bruce Willis back as a badass cop in a new movie series.

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