'Most things would have killed him': the grisly science behind Die Hard
Die Hard is now 35, just a couple of years older than Bruce Willis was when he made it. As we all know, it holds up like gangbusters, especially at Yuletide, when it becomes a curiously cosy watch – well, insofar as that’s possible, with the necks of goons being snapped by John McClane, and the brains of a Japanese businessman blown out all over an office door by Hans Gruber.
For all the naysayers who refuse to accept that John McTiernan’s taut 1980s sleeper hit affords the sentimental comforts of your average Christmas film – a losing argument even on those terms – something about the blood-and-tinsel combination really does click, better here than anywhere.
“It might be as close as you can get to a perfect action movie,” reckons the Geordie comedian Chris Ramsey, who sticks it on every year while he’s wrapping Christmas presents. “It has stood the test of time.”
Ramsey and fellow comic Paul Chowdhry, in their forthcoming Sky special, go a few rounds on the evergreen, meme-spawning question of whether Die Hard is or is not a Christmas movie. Chowdhry, playing the grump, points out that it was a July release, with Ramsey briskly rebutting that the original Miracle on 34th Street came out in June.
But all this is by way of ambient banter. Getting down to business, the pair strip down to their grimy vests to front The Unofficial Science of Die Hard, alongside the chipper material scientist Zoe Laughlin, who last year scrutinised Kevin McAllister’s booby-traps, in a companion show about Home Alone (in a nutshell: Kevin would have been in juvenile prison for manslaughter).
The main focus this time is Die Hard’s iconic stunt work. How many of these situations could John McClane realistically have survived? The answer: not a lot. “Most of the things would have killed him,” Chowdhry declares, bluntly. They put one instance to the test by tying a fire hose around the middle of a mannequin and flinging it from the top of a crane, à la McClane’s death-defying jump from the top of Nakatomi Plaza. The results aren’t pretty. Sections of the dummy litter the floor afterwards, after the hose severs it clean through the torso.
Other stunts, less potentially life-threatening for Chowdhry and Ramsey, are restaged by them personally – even the epic skyscraper-tumble of Alan Rickman’s Gruber at the end, which was done on camera in those pre-CGI days, onto a pressurised airbag, from a height of 40ft.
“I did it about 15 times,” says Chowdhry. “I can still really feel it. I’m in physiotherapy for the rest of my life now, but it was worth it.” Laughlin adds that Rickman was expecting a “three, two, one” countdown on set that day, but stunt coordinator Charlie Picerni arranged to have him dropped on the stroke of two, so that look of shock on Rickman’s face as he plummets is unfeigned.
Laughlin confesses that she’d never actually seen the film before being commissioned here to put the comics through their paces. “Watching it with adult eyes,” she says, “I just found it really fascinating, because you realise those things have leached into our culture. Whether it’s those quotes – oh, that’s from Die Hard! You could even watch this show if you haven’t seen it. There’s something about people leaping away from explosions that’s a bigger trope in film, which we’re having fun playing with.”
Beyond the casting of Willis, whom it instantly propelled to A-list stardom, the film’s masterstroke in boosting McClane’s vulnerability is so simple – it removes his shoes. Later in the film, he tries someone else’s on for size only once, otherwise resigning himself masochistically to barefoot heroics across broken glass. As the Gogglebox-style viewers in the programme mutter, in this entire high-rise office building were there not even a couple of soft pencil cases to slip onto his feet? Chowdhry did attempt McClane’s bare-foot broken-glass walk of agony - but with fake foam feet stuffed with blood pouches.
Ramsey, clearly a mega-fan, was “worryingly young” when he first saw Die Hard – like many of our generation, I suspect – and looks like he’s having the time of his life in recreating many of the standout moments. He puts in a word for the ahead-of-its-time diversity of the film’s supporting cast, and the “multiple heroes and villains”, including the feuding law enforcement folk, De’voreaux White’s happy-go-lucky chauffeur, and Hart Bochner’s weaselly sleazebag, Ellis.
But it’s Die Hard’s restraint that really makes it a keeper, even more than the high-octane thrills McTiernan unleashed. “It never goes too far,” agrees Ramsey. [John]’s got the one-liners, but they’re more like what a bloke would shout in a pub fight.”
Part of Die Hard’s continuing allure is surely rooted in nostalgia for the heyday of practical action cinema, which started getting phased out in favour of CGI from the mid-1990s. Come the decadent Marvel era, it’s hard to know where real footage stops and digital amendments start – but even a seamless special-effects job can have less impact, in some hard-to-measure way, than an honest-to-goodness stunt. “Our eye knows,” Laughlin agrees. “Our brains are smart. You know if you’re looking at something real.”
For Sky to have built a mock-up of the Nakatomi Plaza rooftop invites everyone, the viewer included, to treat Die Hard as a kind of adventure playground – which it is, of course. For all the wince-inducing spectacle of Willis picking out shards of glass from his poor feet, sinking into the story is as familiar a ritual by now as donning a pair of Christmas slippers. Now they would have been handy, John.
The Unofficial Science of... Die Hard is on Sky Max on 23 December; Die Hard is available to stream on Disney+