With the release of A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth film in the Die Hard series, the cinematic life span of John McClane has been elongated to a robust ten hours— longer than sturdy pop icons like Ellen Ripley, Indiana Jones, and John Rambo (four films each) and Michael Corleone (three films and nine hours). Once you add in the fact that McClane has appeared on-screen in four different decades, he’s arguably the most durable contemporary American film character not named Batman or Rocky Balboa.
Thanks to multiple rewatchings of every Die Hard film, I personally have spent many more than ten hours in McClane’s company. I’m embarrassed to admit— though probably not nearly as embarrassed as I should be— that I’ve spent more time watching, contemplating and analyzing John McClane than I have, say, Hamlet. I don’t say this lightly. This devotion confuses me. (Not my devotion to the original Die Hard— that film could be playing on a staticky video screen in a sauna full of lava and piranhas in Hell and, should I happen to pass by, I would sit down and watch it to the end.) Rather, it’s my devotion to the character.
A character like Rocky I totally understand. Rocky’s the underdog. Batman? He’s the haunted vigilante: the hero we deserve, but not the hero we need right now, as Commissioner Gordon once put it. (Who then is the hero we need right now, but not the hero we deserve? Aquaman?) And Hamlet. He’s melancholy. I get that. But who exactly is John McClane?
Sure, he has his catchphrase (Yippee-ki-yay, et cetera), his quips, his bloodied brow, and his sleeveless tees. (In the third movie, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, McClane shows up in his first scene wearing only his trademark undershirt, and no explanations are offered or needed, any more than anyone at this point asks Superman to explain his cape.) But what does McClane stand for? What is he an icon of? Unlike Rocky or Batman (or Hamlet), McClane is tricky to pin down. Or perhaps it’s my affection for McClane that’s tricky. Who is this man I’ve spent 25 years with, whom I met as a teenager and still hang out with in my forties? Yes, he has his Everyman appeal. But who among us really aspires to be an Everyman? For Pete’s sake, I’m already an Everyman.
Except for the first one, I don’t even especially like the Die Hard movies. The second one’s not so good. The third one is pretty good. The fourth one is slightly better, especially if you happen to catch it on a plane or FX. The fifth one... well, the fifth one just came out, and let’s just say it’s less a coherent movie than it is a snuff film for cars and helicopters.
It’s difficult to evaluate the Die Hard series as a whole, however, because, by all logic, none of these sequels should exist. With Rocky, each installment makes narrative sense: he’s a fighter, so it follows that there should be more fights. But the very premise of the original Die Hard precludes continuation. That’s part of the genius of the film. It completely flips the standard action-movie narrative, in which some world-class expert (the gunslinger; the safecracker; the ex-Green Beret) is lured out of hiding to tackle one last mission, to slay one last unslayable foe. The premise of Die Hard is that a regular New York City cop is stuck unexpectedly in a building full of bad guys. The idea that this same guy finds himself in the same situation again, well, that stretches credulity.
Of course, in Hollywood, credulity bows to— nay, is the manservant of— profitability, which is how we ended up with Die Hard 2, with its memorable tagline, Die Harder. In this film, McClane is trapped in an airport that has been taken over by rogue American soldiers, and he constantly wonders aloud how the same thing could happen to the same guy twice, which exactly echoes the reservations of the audience.
For the third, fourth, and now fifth films, the producers wisely ditched the Die Hard trapped-in-a-blankety-blank constraint (had they not, we would most likely be watching Die Hard in the Center of the Earth at this point), which both freed the franchise but also sent it spiraling toward the black hole of generic action-adventure. It’s important to remember, as action heroes go, just how radical McClane seemed in 1988. He arrived in the shadow of Schwarzenegger’s Teutonic (and, in The Terminator, literally robotic) unstoppability, and the hoo-rah fantasy of Rambo leaping up from a river to cut down entire armies with bow and arrows. The quintessential scene in the first Die Hard is one in which McClane is pinned down in an office cubicle, and Hans Gruber, noticing McClane’s unshod feet, instructs his sidekick to schiess dem Fenster: shoot the glass. Cut to McClane hobbling and trailing great globs of blood into a bathroom, then prying shards from his sliced-up soles. By contrast, the quintessential scene in the most recent James Bond film, Skyfall, occurs when Bond jumps onto the ripped-open backside of a moving train car, then pauses to adjust his cuff links.
It has long been said that much of McClane’s allure lies in the fact that he’s just an average dude— he’s just like us— though in reality that doesn’t quite explain it, either. Most of his appeal lies in the fact that he’s just like Bruce Willis. Whatever your opinion of Willis as an actor (and mine’s pretty high, actually), you have to root for a guy who struggled to make the leap to movies from television, went bald and doesn’t hide it, and has the weirdest-looking movie-star nose this side of Owen Wilson. There’s a DVD extra that comes with some of the recent Die Hard films, in which John McTiernan, the director of the first and third films, says: “The John McClane character was built out of Bruce. We said, ‘Okay, who is this guy?’ A lower-middle-class kid from New Jersey with a lot of spunk. We better try and build John McClane out of that.” And it’s true: whatever pleasures remain in the maxed-out Die Hard franchise are all a result of Willis’ residual charm. To borrow a presidential metric, McClane’s not the smartest, toughest, or savviest action hero, but he is the one you would most like to have a beer with.
One reason I’ve seen Die Hard so many times (besides the fact that I own it on DVD, and will watch it pretty much any time I have two free hours and there’s no one around to stop me) is that it came out when I was a teenager working as an usher in a cineplex. Once I finished my rounds of wiping down the bathroom and sweeping up stray popcorn with a Bissell, I would slip into the back of Theater 5 and watch Die Hard again. I knew the exact timing of all the best scenes, clocked with a Hans Gruber-like precision: the interrogation of Takagi (“You’re just going to have to kill me”); the scene in which Gruber smiles and introduces himself as Clay, Bill Clay; the part where Willis sends the dead guy down in the elevator with a Santa hat on and Ho-Ho-Ho written across his sweatshirt.
It’s not hard to decode McClane’s appeal to me back then: I, too, was a budding wiseacre who often felt overwhelmed and even victimized by the (largely benign) forces of the world arrayed against me. Muscular übermenschen like Rambo or Schwarzenegger certainly held a fantasy appeal, but McClane felt like a reasonable facsimile of who I might actually become, should I ever find myself trapped in a Los Angeles high-rise with a bunch of bespoke-suit-wearing European terrorists.
Over the years, this appeal faded. But watching all the films again, I was struck by another aspect of the McClane mythology, another way in which he stands in contrast to, say, James Bond. The Bond films, like most action-adventure movies, are, in essence, about order triumphing over chaos. Bond represents order. Bond bests Blofeld (or whomever). Chaos is beaten back. Order is restored.
The Die Hard films offer a different promise: not that everything will go right, but that there’s always hope that something will go wrong. Most often, that something is John McClane. “Just a fly in the ointment,” as he describes himself. “The monkey in the wrench.” His adversaries are consistently personifications of bloodless efficiency. They’re not watch-the-world-burners like the Joker, but a lock-step group of automatons— accented terrorists, rogue American special-ops soldiers, or computer hackers— who roll in wordlessly to enact some implausibly elaborate scheme: snipping wires, setting explosives, plugging in passwords, popping open vaults, and shooting people using silencers. McClane, ultimately, is the meddlesome kid who messes up their careful plans. He owes less to Marshal Dillon than he does to Scooby-Doo.
Not only that, but McClane’s world is chockablock with tangential incompetents— egghead shrinks who offer up thumb-sucking explanations for evil; television reporters who are slithery charlatans; FBI agents who turn out to be myopic dim bulbs; even wayward spouses and bratty offspring are revealed as surname-dropping double-crossers. At the center is McClane, always McClane: hindered from every angle, thwarted, undermined, disregarded, and rebuked. In fact, once you strip away the familiar action-film accouterments— the explosions, the gunplay, the sneering bad guys— the Die Hard films, taken together, seem primarily designed to evoke the desperate clammy sense of frustration you feel during a visit to the DMV, times a million.
Desperate, beleaguered, cornered, aggrieved, battered, frustrated, fed up: Put that way, is it any wonder the character of McClane has persevered? That he outshone all those cartoon musclebound saints of the 1980s? That he has become our national hero of happenstance: relatable not because he’s powerful but because he’s powerless yet still manages to prevail?
I no longer question my ongoing fondness of John McClane. Even as the movies keep getting worse, the idea of McClane becomes all the more appealing. In fact, he makes more sense to me at forty than he did at seventeen. All those heroes who once stood for certainty, fearlessness, and unwavering confidence have been swept away, their statues toppled— and the one still standing is the one who represents fear, anxiety, frustration, uncertainty, and, despite it all, irrational hope. This is a jittery world, and increasingly so, and complex beyond understanding, and at times it all seems stitched together by the barest of threads, and this feeling only gets worse as you get older. Expertise, it turns out, offers little solace. So it makes sense that the best, most enduring modern hero is not one who vows to wrap his muscular arms around the world and hold it all together. It’s the one who promises that, when it all falls apart, you can still hope to hobble away from it, limping on your glass-shredded feet, bloodied but somehow still intact.
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