Hey, Kids, It’s a Genuine Fake!
There’s something fundamentally un-Die Hard-ish about the latest entry in the Die Hard franchise. Oh, it’s an action movie all right, and it stars Bruce Willis as a cop named John McClane, but that’s where the similarities end. This John McClane isn’t much of a wisecracker; wisecracking has been reassigned to a character named Matt Farrell, who’s played by Justin Long. This John McClane doesn’t seem to have any problems with authority; in fact, he gets along with government types just fine. This John McClane zips all over the landscape, never getting trapped anywhere. And this John McClane faces a villain with amorphous motivations and ill-defined goals. Only the last issue is a problem with Live Free or Die Hard as a movie, but all four mean it’s anything but a real Die Hard flick.
Lajos Egri opens his excellent book The Art of Dramatic Writing with one of my favorite passages on the subject:
A man sits in his workshop, busy with an invention of wheels and springs. You ask him what the gadget is, what it is meant to do. He looks at you confidingly and whispers: “I really don’t know.”
Another man rushes down the street, panting for breath. You intercept him and ask him where he is going. He gasps: “How should I know where I am going? I am on my way.”
Your reaction — and ours, and the world’s — is that these two men are a little mad. Every sensible invention must have a purpose, every planned sprint a destination.
Yet, fantastic as it seems, this simple necessity has not made itself felt to any extent in the theater. Reams of paper bear miles of writing — all of it without any point at all. There is much feverish activity, a great deal of get-up-and-go, but no one seems to know where he is going.
Everything has a purpose, or premise. Every second of our life has its own premise, whether or not we are conscious of it at the time. That premise may be as simple as breathing or as complex as a vital emotional decision, but it is always there.
We may not succeed in proving each tiny premise, but that in no way alters the fact that there was one we meant to prove. Our attempt to cross the room may be impeded by an unobserved footstool, but our premise existed nonetheless.
Whenever it comes in your particular version of the writing process, eventually you have to figure what it is you’re really writing about — what point you’re trying to make, how everything in your story ties together, and why any of it matters. (Personally I call this “theme” rather than “premise”, but that’s a subject for another day.) Some writers manage this subconsciously, at least some of the time, but I always prefer to understand what I’m doing so that I can be sure to do it again next time.
But to get back to the subject at hand, what does this have to do with Die Hard?
Die Hard is about doing the right thing even when everyone thinks you’re wrong. Die Hard is about fighting the system — and everyone who wants to destroy it. It’s about being the fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the pain in the ass, remember?
Live Free or Die Hard, however, is about none of those things. It’s a pretty entertaining action movie (albeit often a silly and poorly shot one) but it’s not a legitimate entry in the Die Hard franchise.
The irony is that by choosing the subject of computer hackers, the filmmakers had the opportunity to make a perfect addition to the series. A lot of hacking is about publicly and visibly breaking the system to prove that it’s vulnerable and force the powers that be to fix it, and every hacker knows that corporate and government types Just Don’t Get It. Hackers are the quintessential iconoclastic outsiders, just like John McClane, and McClane and Farrell should have had to contend with a bunch of misguided “my way or the highway” government types who were sure they knew exactly how to deal with Thomas Gabriel but who were actually playing right into his hands. That would’ve made Live Free a real Die Hard, and just as importantly, it would’ve rung true and genuinely resonated with our fears about crackers, computer terrorism and a government ill-prepared to protect us from them instead of just paying them lip service.
Oh, well. Chalk up another one to the Department of Missed Opportunities.
Tags: Audience Expectations, Box Office, Bruce Willis, Die Hard, Lajos Egri, Len Wiseman, Theme