This is kind of a review, but it’s also an overview, and a re-view, and a speculative view, and a pontification on trends I’m probably not qualified to write about. It’s a lot of things. I guess the movie itself is a vector by which to investigate interesting ideas? A familiar terminal from which we can safely jut off down some historical or analytical vein and perform the necessary work to better understand where stories come from and how they change over time while simultaneously finding reassurance in the knowledge that we’ll be able to return home whenever we want to, to find respite in the familiar, to pull our heads out of the disorienting and vaporous world of details that can be so onerous in the collective and reset ourselves with the restoring air only ever found back at the higher, clearer, more equanimous plateaus? Sure. Those were words. John McClane drops an SUV on someone in this movie. That’s what you came here for. That’s what I came here for. I’ll mention the SUV thing again, because it rules.

Die Hard 4 Review

Die Hard 4 is the story of an illiterate potato being thrown through a series of metrosexual windows by someone who hates people but also craves their approval. Conflict arises when some of the windows prove to be more resilient to unprompted potato-death than others for any number of reasons – tempered glass, thicker material, the window knows karate, etc. There is only ever one possible solution when these problems arise and that is to throw the potato harder and with even more pent-up sexual frustration. This works every time, and could never not work, because failure of the potato-rage paradigm under any circumstance would obliterate the logic, the very reality, on which this film is constructed, the result being something on par with Wile E. Coyote ever catching the Road Runner, or SpongeBob finally just telling everyone in Bikini Bottom to fuck off and then doing a whole bunch of blow with Gary. Die Hard 4 is a temple built in reverence of its own incuriousness, an endeavor whose final product is so startlingly on-brand that they forgot to give it doors or windows, and the entire thing is made of beef.

Actually, we need a decent foundation from which to start if we’re going to use DH4 as a jumping-off point to talk about some stuff, so while everything written above is completely accurate and should be provided without hesitation as a handy primer to anyone considering viewing this movie for the first time, it should also be noted that Die Hard 4 is actually a good film. Moreover, it is a fascinating and historically important one. It is in many ways a kind of beautifully idiotic peroration of the epoch that birthed it, like the Saint Crispin’s Day Speech if King Henry V had been kicked in the head by a horse before giving it, was drunk off his ass anyway, but also truly believed every word he said, even if most of them came out slurred and incomprehensible. That’s the real magic of the movie: its virtuosity in a paleo-to-the-point-of-being-feral sub-language of the larger cinematic discourse, honed by decades of entries so well-informed by one another as each one stripped away more superfluous language, amalgamated more parts into wordlessly-efficient alloys, in an almost caveman-scholarly competition that I’m not sure any of them ever actually realized they were in. We’re talking, like, West-African talking drums levels of efficiency, here, and pared down to that breathless exchange mostly by incidental, moronic competitive instinct. And to hear the movie traffic so fluidly in this timbre and tone while the New Language of action movies, one that somehow would manage to be considered significantly smarter while also being unquestionably louder, twinkled incipient and ambitious on the horizon further embellishes this dynamic with even more accoutrements to consider. It’s so exciting! Let’s do another section name.

The Cinematic Language of Pretending to be so Tough That You Can Bench a Fucking Helicopter  

So what do I mean about this fascinating, sublimated sub-language? Let me try to give the formless thing form, hoist it for a moment from its place down there greasing the wheels of the story and make its time-honed magic explicit, and let me do so with a simple question: what’s the name of that woman in Murdoch’s inner circle? The one in the FBI’s Cyber Security Division? That vaguely Asian lady who is always around whenever the Pointy-Headed Useless People are reminding us of their inability to solve problems while McClane is out ending terrorism and probably also curing scoliosis, both feats somehow involving headbutting a boiled ham, or driving an ice-cream truck full of dynamite into a building full of men who all agree that the crying is a viable form of expression? Trick question, motherfucker! Forget that lady’s name; there isn’t even a character named Murdoch in this movie; the head dude at the Cyber Security Division is named Bowman! But you see, that’s the point. That’s the language made explicit. You knew exactly who I was talking about before I even started offering more specific details about the lady in question, and more importantly you knew exactly where this woman and Burdoch/Murbman stood in the film – literally and figuratively – relative to McClane (Burdochmurb is just the grizzled police chief character – “Dammit, McClane, you’re a loose cannon but you get results!” – being given a slightly different job title, but functioning in the exact same capacity). In fact, you probably couldn’t even conceive of their personalities outside of any sentence that begins with “Well, when McClane…” followed by something about him, not them. I know I can’t! Their entire existence is defined in terms of where they stand relative to McClane. It’s nuts! The language of cinema – or in this case, the sub-language of the ego-driven action movie – reached such a level of butter-smooth sublimity by this point in cinema history that, like when SpongeBob goes into the future and finds everything is made of chrome, the invisible language of this type of film has been polished to a point where characters don’t even have to be given names, backstories, or personalities – all of this is filled in instantaneously based off of what we’ve seen before, and how they respond to our hero. I don’t even think that’s lazy or bad writing! In a drama, sure, it would be bad, because you want a world that exists in depth as well as in breadth, but in a movie that is more-or-less the extension of a single man’s ego? That’s called trimming the fat; making the story a leaner and purer slice of narcissistic hedonism. There is a clarity to the vision of these movies that oftentimes is obscured by how sirloin-stupid they are; almost every review of a movie like Die Hard 4, even positive ones, will mention something about the inherent dumbness of it all. Please don’t fall for that, because in the context of what the movie is trying to do – and we’ll get to the overall thrust of things soon – this type of writing is actually enviably efficient.

And how about those set pieces? Those, too, tip the hand of the psychological state that births a movie like this and those, too, represent a kind of culmination of a process designed to strip away anything that distracts us from the unquestioned point of focus and orientation in this movie’s universe, our hero’s throbbing and kingly crotch-bulge. To examine this let’s do away with the weird pop-quiz thing I did above and instead ask a less dumb question: what is the organizing principle of the set pieces in a movie like this? Everything needs some kind of organizing principle behind it, movie or otherwise. The decision-making process behind some new flavor of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, which member of N*Sync you think about when you’re having sex with your girlfriend – all chosen based off of some invisible value system. So what can we deduce are the values underlying the choice of set pieces in this movie? They get bigger on a literal scale, sure, but that can be considered a consequence of big-budget film-making in general. But I’d like to propose another unifying principle behind the escalation of violence in Die Hard 4, and the entire cultural growth it is proudly a member of and metonymy (this is improper use of the word metonymy) for: Bruce Willis’s unplacatable fear that people might not be taking him seriously anymore. This has the benefit of also escalating the level of absurdity and violence, which appeases the suits (this is the proper use of the word metonymy) who sign the checks, but it also further makes the entire movie seem like a figment of our hero’s imagination, like he’s actually a middle-aged dad who fell asleep on the bus and is dreaming about how much more awesome life would be if he owned a Thunderbird. Much like the supporting characters only really being rendered visible when radiation from McClane’s weapons-grade machismo bounces off of them like some kind of virility-powered sonar, the set pieces also contribute to a cinematic language honed down to the sole purpose of make this man’s dreams manifest, subordinate the rest to his cause. And it makes perfect sense! Just like how the “dumb” screenplay and its paper-thin supporting (and, uh, main) characters are actually signs of the driving force behind an action blockbuster (narcissism!) honed to enviable focus, there is actually a fascinating amount of honesty and humanity in these increasingly-absurd set pieces. Think about it – you know what, you’re tired, it’s the end of the week, I’ll think about it for you: if I reached middle age and somehow still managed to be balanced, however precariously, atop the flaming pile of failed careers that is Hollywood, was still getting invited on the Tonight Show to remind everyone how the happy half live, you bet your ass I would take no comfort from any of my supposed accomplishments and in my anxiety over possible impending irrelevance insist that Goodbye, Cody 4: Cody 4 U (stylized either GC4:C4U or just a stencil of a massive penis) feature a scene in which I punch God so hard all religions are now retroactively based around the life-giving quality of my testicles. The scripts to these movies aren’t dumb, they’re ego flawlessly unfettered by considerations of other people, and the set pieces aren’t cartoonishly stupid, they are fascinating glimpses into the lengths a man will go to in order to convince himself he is actually, literally invincible, even though he knows he’s not, and it’s driving him mad.

Do Man-Droids Dream of Electric Peeps?

(I know I haven’t, actually, reviewed Die Hard 4 yet, or really mentioned anything specific about it. But this is the point I really wanted to get to, and I needed to run through the bizarre way in which visual storytelling and screenplay writing function in movies like DH4 so this section would make sense. So, to quickly reiterate: I like this movie, and I like it specifically for the traits I am describing. All forms of expression are just windows into the person and people who made them, and it’s fascinating to see where their head was at when they were making it, and how the evolution of their chosen form in-formed and shaped what they felt comfortable expressing and how they felt comfortable expressing it. You could portray your machismo quietly, and with great dignity and restraint, but that’s just not how the business of movies and the behavior of people allowed things to shake out. It’s a fascinating vein to follow, historically and psychologically.)

Now that we’re done setting the table, this is what I’ve been trying to get at: the part I find most interesting about pre-2008 action movies, the thing that makes all these supposed flaws or bone-headed stupidities actually riveting and fun to delve into from any number of perspectives: these movies are a collective exercise in fucking solipsism. Nothing is real outside of the massive, desperate ego of the person (McClane, Willis, take your pick, they’re essentially interchangeable from the standpoint of this analysis) around which the entire thing is oriented. In other genres (or in newer action movies) there is a compulsion to add something approximating an egalitarian worldview – or at least a willingness to share the formation of reality with someone else. But in these older movies it’s like we’re strapping on a VR helmet and finding out what it’s like to be a potato with huge biceps and no fear of anything past, present or future and that is also probably God. Movies like this are often called escapism, because it’s fun to pretend you’re John McClane, not taking shit, dishing out disproportionate amounts of your own shit, always having a dick-ish comeback that isn’t clever so much as a terse reminder that you simply cannot be troubled to donate a fuck to the conversation at hand, dropping some lady to her death in an SUV because she kicked you too hard and hurt your feelings (told you I’d mention that again! It was dope!) but I think that is only a surface-level analysis that doesn’t do the real, magnetic appeal of these movies justice: there is also the fascinating and bizarrely surreal feeling that you’re watching someone else’s dream, presented mostly unfettered, with the exact same psychological signposts and betrayals of deeper emotional states that the person having the dream can see, and probably wishes wasn’t so obvious in its deeper meaning – even with all the studio mandates, the beveling of the edges, the sheer artificiality of huge-budget film-making, there is something so human about these otherwise gargantuan, clunky, exercises in cinematic excess. I feel like I found a Monet painted on the side of a bathroom stall whenever I watch one. Or, like, the scribblings of a madman that, owing to some deeper, genetic-memory level of insight, actually contain a properly-structured haiku nestled somewhere in between the line “the babies, I must eat the babies,” and countless pictures of bleeding penises. These movies are a place you simply wouldn’t expect depth to be. I don’t even think they (those burly men making those movies) even planned to put depth there. That’s probably the thing that makes action flicks constructed in such a manner so human and relatable: the people attempting to make these movies rock-dumb testaments to their own enviable lack of self-reflection or capacity for doubt have actually seeded the entire thing with evidence of their own fragile humanity. It’s like writing a book entitled Reasons Why I’m Definitely Not Gay – you’ve only, in your fervor to make irrefutable one side of the argument, contributed evidence to the counter-argument! It’s a sham, basically, a weird crystal palace constructed by the mind of a man (not just Willis, but the power-players who live vicariously through him by making these movies) who probably never thought they’d achieve the level of cultural relevance they currently enjoy. These movies may not aspire to (or come anywhere close to achieving) Citizen Kane-levels of depth or complexity, but the psychological primordial ooze from which they used to so often spring had more than a little Kane to it: the sincerity, the ego, the embellishment, the hell-bent determination to live in a world crafted entirely by your own hand, sharing nothing, not even reality itself, with anyone else, the tragically-fleeting and necessarily-incomplete flashes of self-awareness and regret, reflexively subsumed back into a drive that feels it has gone too far, sacrificed too much to hesitate now. If someone were to edit the final stand-off in this movie with McClane whispering “Rosebud” before shooting Gabriel instead of yelling “yippee-ki-yay” I honestly think the scene would make exactly as much sense.

You Cannot Face-Punch That Which Has No Face to Face-Punch, or: When Dumb Has No Meat to Eat

I was on the fence about this section, because I wanted to focus on Die Hard 4 and Die Hard 4-adjacent phenomena. But to acknowledge these types of movies is to acknowledge that they are mostly dead (except for Tom Cruise movies, but those don’t count because of his exceptional thetan levels) and it only makes sense to touch, at least briefly, on what killed them, and how. OK, take a second to consider – yeah, you’re right, it was Marvel movies. I don’t want to talk at huge length (or, like, any length) about the merits of Marvel’s cultural ubiquity. There are so many articles about that. But what I do want to do is contrast Marvel’s approach to action movies with that of its Die Hard forerunners, and see how the older action movie was displaced, and what form, if any, that Die Hard DNA has taken in the modern context. 

With respect to writing, the entire sublimation process, the rendering of supporting characters into our protagonist’s ego-wallpaper, has mostly been replaced with a more egalitarian approach. This is a fancy way to say that something approximating real writing, with characters and arcs and what-have-you, are the order of the day. This is due mostly to the nature of shared universes: Burmurdobroch and his co-worker Asian lady would be given backstories and possibly sub-plots in the MCU simply because Marvel would want to be prepared in case one of the actors became a viral sensation on Twitter and in doing so primed their character for a standalone movie, or at least a larger role in subsequent films. But this whole process rings hollow for me: the turgid-levels of stupid from earlier movies, the almost sociopathic refusal to admit that people besides our ego-fueled hero even exist make for a compelling subtextual reading. The rote applications of “real” writing, conversely – you’ll never guess it, but the Avengers need to learn to work as a team, and also we’re a family, and families stick together, fart, fart, wheeze – to me actually come across as more artificial in many ways. It’s like one of those faux-woke companies that purports to put out locally sourced, humanely-produced organic ice cream, and the owner of the company has a beard and everybody at the company gets Kwanza off or whatever, but then you do some research and find out that all of the healthy, “superior” ingredients are just the company using some legal loophole to rename the same usual garbage that you find in older ice creams, and also that guy’s beard is fake. At least the older ice creams acknowledged that they were trying to kill you! It’s a weird inversion: older action movies promised you they were about nothing more than machismo and incuriousness even as they laid bare the insecurities of the men behind them, whereas newer action movies insist that it’s OK to cry sometimes even as their screenplays are written by logical computer programs that only even bother to mix in 2% character development because that’s what the algorithm calls for.

Even the set pieces of newer action movies have that algorithmic quality to them. There’s no Bruce Willis whispering in the director’s ear while the latter is trying to frame a shot, “a Harrier jet! I need to fight a fucking Harrier! I’m not getting any younger!” The set pieces in the MCU, and so many other modern franchises – Fast and the Furious and, and I can’t believe I’m writing this, the fucking Conjuring movies – all have this meticulously-focused-grouped dynamic at play, this constant effort to make everything, let’s call it generically stylish. Outside of Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible movies (again, the lone surviving Man-Ego Franchise) where our favorite try-hard cooks up set-pieces specifically to remind you what a fit and powerful lad he is there just doesn’t seem to be any room in the landscape for anything other than set pieces designed to make sure everybody can “oww” and “aww” at demographically-appropriate times, like watching fireworks or something. And those MCU set pieces are still undeniably well-done! But for someone like me who obsessively tries to mine whatever I’m seeing and hearing on screen for evidence of the mentalities of the people making those images all I can picture is an assembly line worker being fed notes about what is trending on social media and then slightly altering the product accordingly.

This all adds up to a certain type of narcissism on the part of MCU movies and their ilk, but it is a fundamentally different narcissism than the endearingly oafish self-love that typifies the Die Hard crowd. Those movies were the result of a man finding himself in an inexplicable and unrepeatable situation – if a massive studio was willing to finance your ego, and the public was willing to watch you masturbate to pictures of yourself working out, what would you do, and how nervous would you be that this dream condition would eventually collapse, and how would that anxiety creep into the otherwise innocent milieu of you sitting on the edge of your bed slapping the salami to pictures of yourself sitting on the edge of a bench at the gym pounding the peperoni? There’s a lot a play, psychologically, and I am extremely fascinated by it all. But Marvel movies are typified by what I’m going to call brand narcissism – a Cluster B personality disorder for the age of analytics, meticulously-researched, self-aware enough to, however insincerely, undercut its own metastasizing share of the cultural air with performative modesty. There aren’t really any individuals shaping the events to fit their own ego because the spectacle, or the brand, is bigger than all of them. So instead we get this colorless and therefore apparently invincible narcissism that uses cold, beautiful math to avoid the same pitfalls that doom all traditional action vehicles eventually. It’s basically the difference between watching an aging Kobe go 4-26 but refusing to not keep shooting in a 20-point Lakers loss versus watching James Harden shoot 32 free throws in a Rockets/Nets win: the latter might be the result of space-age technology and lead to materially spectacular results but there’s something so human about the former, about the failure inherent in the ego, about how the staunchest of Real Men are driven by nearly catastrophic levels of fear and anxiety. It might be the only thing us norms have in common with them.

The End

I should like modern action movies more than those clunky big-boys from before the formula was cracked. They are, after all, made by people like me, far more than their predecessors, which were probably produced by dozens of men with matching Grim Reaper tattoos flexing as hard as possible until a blank canister of film placed in the center of a pentagram on the floor suddenly and instantaneously was filled with images of a man in a state of constant arousal over himself. But as I walk those high-walled marble halls of New Action Movies, with music from unseen sources always programmed to be playing one of my favorite songs in perfect synergy with my emotional state, the experience is more uncanny than a thrilling homecoming, like I’m watching the result of all of my personal information being stolen and crafted into some weird playpen for me to wander around in. The sheer intensity with which I am being made welcome makes me think the whole thing is a trap, or at least a scam. Conversely, the fact that older action movies like Die Hard 4 seem more intent on staring, transfixed, at their own genitals than even acknowledging my existence, seem to only see me to whatever extent they can use me to confirm their own existence by bouncing loud things off of my pale and inadequate form, is the kind of weird shit I can get behind. New action movies are wonderful in many ways, but they’re just too damn accommodating, too insistent that I should never notice anything strange when I’m watching them. I want to get that chance to see the world as it apparently plays out in front of the eyes of a supremely confident baked potato. I want the disorienting but inexplicably-Zen feeling of having the first few bars of any given AC/DC song – it doesn’t matter which one – blasted into my ears on endless loop, while I enjoy a level of idiot confidence rarely experienced by someone who looks up metonymy to make sure he’s using it right in a sentence and then makes a reference that only he will get about the fact that he used it wrong the first time. The momentary escape soothes me and the freedom of rolling around in my fleeting potato-form replenishes my very soul. So check out Die Hard 4, and its bumbling, kaiju-sized siblings, as they stomp around the downtown of your grey matter doing a baby’s impression of an adult; you just might glean some insight as to why they feel compelled to do this, which should instantly make you feel better about why you don’t.