I Finally Watched ‘Die Hard’ at Christmas. — Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents

Tonight was my first viewing of Die Hard to help ring in my merry holiday.

Die Hard is a 1988 action film where the lone cop foils an international terrorist takeover of a Los Angeles office building. There’s a higher body count that in most Christmas movies and a lot more blood. Bruce Willis rose to movie superstardom as disaffected NYC cop John McClane. McClane travels to LA to visit his estranged wife and their two children for Christmas. His wife played with very little actual material in the tradition of most male action movies by Bonnie Bedelia works for the company that is taken hostage. Of course she does.

The charm of John McClane is that while he’s nobody’s fool, he gets how just plain dumb luck helps him. He’s ingenious, desperate, and wholly unprepared as a street cop to deal with this situation. But he does. He acquires a posse of limo driver Argyle and worn down LA Sgt Al Powell.

In Die Hard, the good guys are the working joe police officers who seem to genuinely understand their power to take the life of another human being. The LAPD upper leadership is ridiculous. The FBI even more so, making jokes about Vietnam in a way that I guess feels authentic for 1988? The media threatens the housekeeper watching the McClane children to draw them on camera for a human interest angle. That’s pretty gross. They threaten her with INS now known as ICE so some things never change.