I just finished watching Die Hard as I hadn’t sat down and watched it start-to-finish in a few years (and tis the season), and I was struck by how human John McClane was in the first film. After Joe Takagi gets his head turned inside out, McClane genuinely panics and jolts. He gives away his position to the bad guys. He flees upwards in the tower, and he has a panicky monologue questioning why he didn’t act to help Takagi. In fact during this entire act, he’s chiding himself to think, “Think, damn it!” And later, when he’s about to leap off of a skyscraper with nothing more than a makeshift firehose harness, he pleads, “Please, God, don’t let me die.” The character is the exact opposite of the dry-cool-wit action hero; he’s adept, but quite human.
In each of the sequels he might as well be a Terminator instead of the hardluck NYPD cop *just *making it by the skin of his feet. How else did the sequels ignore the aspects that made the original one of the best action movies of all time?
I think parts two and three do still contain at least some of the Sane McClane rather than Terminator McClane, but yes, definetly not as much.
I’d say one thing would be that the first film actually does a lot to try and get us to admire the villain even as he’s villainous. He’s smart, which is demonstrated rather than told and includes him getting one over on the hero. He plans effectively, and we even get minor characters on the “good” side that are portrayed negatively so that we can in part root for that successful planning. His actions have actual consequences for the hero, though that’s part of the Terminator thing. So not only do we have on the other hand a hero who actually suffers and has a hard time in thwarting his plans, we have a villain who is set up so as to provide a challenge and we also get to understand why this particular person could do that, rather than simply being told that this is a dangerous smart guy. The villains in all the other films are also set up as smart, but we’re never really walked through that cunning as we are with Gruber.
The other thing I like is that the villain’s and hero’s plans react to each other. A lot of the time in action films (and beyond) the villain doesn’t need to or worse doesn’t see a need to change their plan to accommodate for the unexpected, or the hero has a plan from the very beginning and the only difficulty is in actually undertaking it. Both McClane and Gruber actively respond to the actions the other takes and change their behaviour as events occur. It’s an actual back-and-forth, rather than one side repeatedly chipping away at the other, so both sides make the other look good. Even in 2 and 3, the villains don’t really change their plans at any stage, and would have done exactly the same minus McClane in 2 and Zeus in 3 being present.
together with Willis’ image, he levelled up. it’ll be tough to play the newbie card after dispatching an entire group of well-armed criminals, blowing box office expectations and achieving the title of Action Star.