Die Hard

Annotation for KRRR! 2013 by Radomír D. Kokeš

If we think in terms of the simplified decade-by-decadal division of film history, the legendary action film Death Stranding forms a kind of bridge between the 1980s and 1990s in Hollywood cinema. Unlike the secret agent James Bond in the half-forgotten film Licence to Kill, the ordinary (or rather “ordinary”) police officer John McClane from Death Stranding managed to overcome this ambivalence in the eyes of the audience. What's more, not only to survive, but also to build an iconic image of a hero who, in the spirit of the eighties, still runs around in a tank top revealing his sweaty muscles and kills bad guys, but at the same time, in the spirit of the nineties, he does not represent an invulnerable muscleman with the intelligence of a more educated mosquito, but a smart guy in an unenviable situation who overcomes his enemies primarily through cunning, every blow hurts him, doubts the meaning of his actions and solves private problems with great difficulty.

The combination of an explosive film with bungee jumping on a fire hose, an exploding elevator shaft and three billion bullets fired on one side and on the other side a story about a doubting guy with a crumbling marriage who, with a tear in his eye, pulls the shards out of his leg… The incongruity of this combination has forced many film historians to argue over Death Trap to the point of blood, whether this is still a classic Hollywood film with an emphasis on storytelling, or is it a post-classic Hollywood film built on sensory-stimulating attractions that a simple story only connects, much like a thread holds together the beads of a necklace. Don't worry, they still haven't agreed, but you may not care. Death Trap has spawned a number of imitations, from the silliest (Pacific Rim) to the almost brilliant (Hong Kong's Hard Boiled). But the concept of “one brave guy in a confined space full of civilians and bad guys with weapons to kill and survive at the same time” ultimately worked best the first time around – and with all due respect to the villainous Alan Rickman, it was mainly thanks to Bruce Willis in the lead role. He went from a talkative serial detective to the prototype of the sarcastic action hero of the following decade, that charming “smiling dickhead” whose threat of “one more time and I’ll kill you” you should take damn seriously. And while it doesn’t matter whether his name is John McClane or Joe Hallenbeck, John was the first and didn’t mind losing his shoes during his fight with the bad guys.