‘On The Seventh Day of Christmas, My True Love Gave To Me…Die Hard (1988)’
Watching Die Hard will be a form of pilgrimage this Christmas, an act of tribute to the much-missed Alan Rickman who made a most effective screen big debut in this, John McTiernan’s action masterpiece.
Since 1988, Die Hard, set as it is on Christmas Eve, has become part of the great grown-up Christmas movie tradition. Once the kids have been fobbed off with The Santa Clause 2, fed and forced to go to bed early, the adults finally get to take charge of the remote control (if they can find it).
Christmas is something of a bit-part player in Die Hard, slinking off and popping up again in the form of sleigh bells in Michael Kamen’s score, or on the blood-stained jumpers of dead terrorists – ‘Now I have a machine gun…Ho, Ho, Ho.’ It’s also there in the redemptive stories hidden underneath all the smashed glass and exploding helicopters. This is after all the tale of a man who repairs his broken marriage by killing an army of terrorists and saving his wife. Reginald VelJohnson too needs to atone for accidentally killing a kid by shooting an André Rieu lookalike.
Die Hard is the perfect Christmas Eve movie, best enjoyed with mulled wine and a fire in the grate but be warned: Bruce Willis’s ingenious use of a roll of ‘Season’s Greetings’ sticky tape at the end will probably remind you that you haven’t wrapped any of the presents yet.
