The Victorian civil engineer, George Stephenson, though not actually inventing the steam engine, perfected its use as a means of locomotion and so became the ‘father of the railways’.
More than a century later - and some thirty years ago from our current timeline - the Hollywood movie director, John McTiernan, made an equally momentous, and far reaching, achievement in the action film genre.
The movie machine he created, Die Hard, invented the template that most action pictures tried to follow thereafter - to this day even (see the recently released Skyscraper) and to hugely varying degrees of artistic success (hello again, Skyscraper).
But there is only one Die Hard. In fact there are - I actually had to go and look this up - five DIE HARDS now? With a sixth - a prequel - currently in development. To reiterate: there is only one Die Hard. 1988 was a time of yore, when a fresh-from-TV Bruce Willis actually gave a monkeys about the films he was making. The result: he was actually great.
A gifted comedy actor, he completely reinvented himself with this one film. An extensive, successful and variable movie career followed. Though, it has to be said, his on set reputation got worse and worse as the years passed. To the point where I would estimate the last Hollywood picture he made where he actually looks like he’s not phoning it in was probably Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Woody Allen allegedly dismissed him from his 2016 picture, Cafe Society, for not completing the simple task of learning his lines.
Again, Willis can be SO good. But he doesn’t care anymore. It’s everybody's loss.
Ah Alan Rickman! Die Hard’s other career-making performance. Can you believe it was his movie debut? Hans Gruber, is the one-man Citizen Kane of action movie bad guys. All villainy aspires the the heights Hans reaches in the tower of Nakotomi Plaza. He achieves this not by chewing the scenery (though he does blow a lot of it up late in the film), but by simply being a ruthless and charismatic, tailored bastard. A greedy one at that: a common thief pretending to be a terrorist. Much greatness was to follow. And fair dues to the late Rickman for not cashing in on every evil role he was offered there after, including James Bond movies.
- Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber
The director himself, John McTiernan, is responsible for three stone cold classics, one before Die Hard and one after: 1987's Predator and the best submarine movie ever made, 1990's The Hunt For Red October. Despite returning to the Die Hard series for the mostly-fun third movie, his career has essentially evaporated following a stint in prison. He pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the infamous Anthony Pellicano wire-tapping scandal, and was sentenced to four months in lock up in 2007. In its own warped moral logic, Hollywood has deemed not not hire him again.
And since then, the art of the action film, that meticulous machine he built, has mutated to such an extent there is no actual engineering involved. Now the only tools are a green screen and feck load of servers. There is no danger anymore. There isn’t even any physics. As amiable as Skyscraper star Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson may be, leaping, with one leg, from a collapsing crane into - not onto - a building is an empty experience. Meh.
Try jumping off the top of an exploding building, with cut and bloody feet, tied to a firehouse, while an burning helicopter drops out of the sky and make it all seem... real. Yippee ki-yay. That’s how they did it in my day.
