McClaine is back into destruction

DIE HARD 4
STARRING: Bruce Willis, Timothy Olyphant, Maggie Q
DIRECTOR: Len Wiseman
writer: Mark Bomback
RATING: PG 13
GENRE: Action

In Renny Harlin’s boisterous Die Hard 2, Dennis Franz has the thankless role as the inept, tubby, obstructive airport security chief who locks horns with Bruce Willis’ charismatic Big Apple vigilante, John McClane.
A balding, bumbling, bureaucratic boob, Franz ceaselessly warns his superior – played with crusty aplomb by US presidential hopeful Fred Thompson – that McClane is a loose cannon, a live wire, a ding-dong, and a lunatic, whose maverick policing techniques will certainly end in disaster.
A figure of mirth, the lardbutt par excellence, Franz’s dopey, gutless, tight- assed, by-the-book security chief only belatedly comes to realise that without McClane’s unauthorised intervention into the Yuletide seizure of the air traffic control system at Washington’s Dulles Airport by conscience-free terrorists, the situation could have ended in tragedy.
But wait a minute: the terrorists’ seizure of the Dulles air traffic control system does end in tragedy, and most of the tragedy results from John McClane’s maverick policing techniques.
Any way you look at it, it is McClane’s capricious taunting of the turncoat colonel who heads the terrorist group that leads directly to the destruction of a jet plane with 230 passengers on board, not to mention a full compliment of crew members. And because of McClane’s decision to bypass conventional negotiating procedures and resort to a juvenile wisecrack – “What’s next, colonel: the neutron bomb?” – an unspecified number of policemen and military personnel are subsequently gunned down.
With this in mind, one must reluctantly concede that the seemingly witless Franz was right all along, that those 230 passengers burned to cinders on the icy runway might very well have survived the evening had Willis been sent on his way as Franz first suggested, and had the situation been handed over to seasoned negotiators trained to deal with the scum of the earth in a professional fashion that minimises risk to the general public.
Collateral damage is the largely overlooked theme of the entire Die Hard series – the recognition that even though John McClane always gets his man, usually in some spectacularly macabre fashion, he never gets his man until dozens of innocent people have died, until an enormous number of trains, planes, trucks, ships and automobiles have been destroyed, and until he has laid waste to the infrastructure of whatever hapless metropolis in which he is currently operating.
McClane’s triumphs call to mind the famous words of antiquity’s king Pyrrh us, who once quipped, in not so many words, “If victories are going to be this expensive, maybe we should try defeats for a change.”
Collateral damage on the scale of Gutterdammerung is not limited to the Die Hard series: Armageddon at the municipal level is an integral feature of the Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Terminator, Batman and Superman series as well.
In all of these films, things get blown up, people get killed, lives get ruined, and society is left to do the clean-up after the heroes have cantered off into the sunset. What sets the Die Hard films apart from other entries in the Urban Mayhem genre is that John McClane is not a superhero battling villains armed with extraordinary powers, but an ordinary man battling the arrayed forces of terrestrial evil.
In this sense, he is closer to Rambo or the assorted knock-kneed heroes in Steven Seagal’s numbskull classics. Given the fact that none of these men possesses supernatural powers, the scale of destruction they routinely, almost effortlessly, achieve is jaw-dropping.
In drawing attention to the senseless bloodshed and gratuitous devastation that typify the Die Hard films, I do not mean to be unduly critical of McClane or his tactics.
For instance, when dealing with a terrorist whose underdeveloped sense of humour might not be equipped to deal with a harmless taunt, McClane might have resisted making his pithy remark about the neutron bomb, seeing how it results in the downing of an airliner.
This is another overlooked theme of the Die Hard films, that when policemen allow their attitudes toward remorseless psychopaths to become personal, good judgment goes flying right out the window.
No one in his right mind will deny that the Die Hard series relies on a steady stream of impromptu, highly-personalised destruction to achieve its dramatic goals.
McClane gets off to a good start in the original Die Hard by single-handedly destroying a 40- storey office building, engaging in a thrilling but ethically irresponsible mano-a-mano duel with Alan Rickman and his weird entourage of big-hair Teutons that results in the deaths of several Los Angeles policemen and the murder of at least one hostage.
By the time the film has run its course, McClane has racked up tens of billions of dollars worth of damage. And he’s just getting warmed up.
In Die Hard 2, McClane ups the ante by destroying one jetliner and teasing his adversary into incinerating a second, with the overall loss of life mounting well into the hundreds.
He does this under the steely gaze of the airport chief played by Fred Thompson, who would, if elected president by the American people in 2008, be the jowliest man to occupy the White House since the sow-like William Howard Taft dragged his capacious carcass down to Washington back in 1909.
Thompson spends the entire movie frowning and looking serious without ever once making a sensible decision.
He would make a truly excellent president.
For whatever the reason, Die Hard 3 features considerably less loss of life than its predecessor – a few cops, a colleague or two on the police force, at least one innocent bureaucrat, several security guards at the Federal Reserve Building – but the damage to New York’s infrastructure is apocalyptic.
By the time Willis has hung up his guns, an entire subway station has been destroyed, a cargo ship has been incinerated (with immense damage to the local ecosystem), at least one helicopter has flown its last mission, large sections of the Manhattan highway system lie in ruins, and the 60-mile-long aqueduct that supplies New York City with water drawn from upstate reservoirs has deliberately been flooded by terrorists, annoyed at McClane’s persistence. And that’s not mentioning all the fireworks up in Quebec, where the film concludes.
Though the loss of life depicted on the screen in Die Hard 3 only figures in the low double figures, there is simply no way of telling how many innocent bystanders perished when that Seventh Avenue subway car went up in flames, or when the aqueous contents of that doomed aqueduct finally exploded – right in my neighbourhood in suburban New York.
It is almost as if John McTiernan, who directed the first and third films in the series, went out of his way to minimise the onscreen human carnage, cannily reasoning that audiences don’t really care how many buildings get blown up or how many subway cars go flying off the rails as long as they don’t have to see any small children or cuddly puppies or earnest environmentalists splattered against the windshield.
John McClane is living proof of the dictum that if you want top-flight police protection, it’s going to cost you.
How much is it going to cost you? Well, in addition to all the high-rise buildings, bridges, highways and subway stations that are going to have to be replaced, there is the niggling subject of lawsuits both against the police department and against John McClane himself.
Recently I reviewed the Die Hard carnage tally, and determined that McClane could easily be tied up in court for decades due to his madcap, unauthorised escapades.
The legal issues are muddier in the follow-up to Die Hard. Though McClane’s meddling in Die Hard 2 leads directly to the death of 230 airline passengers, plus a full compliment of crew members, it is not clear that he could ever be held legally responsible for their deaths, nor for the destruction of the aircraft on which they were travelling.
Still, by taking it upon himself to intervene in the hostage crisis without consulting the authorities, McClane could certainly be accused of professional malpractice and would almost certainly be purged from the police force at the end of Die Hard 2.
Any professional hostage negotiator knows that you should never joke around with terrorists, because, frankly, you just never know how these clowns will react.
Backed into a corner, most audiences would admit that John McClane is a major head case, a Grade A loony, the living, breathing apotheosis of overzealous policing, and exactly the opposite of what most of us want in our lawmen. Why then are the Die Hard films so popular?
Basically, I suspect it’s all about insurance. Because insurance companies charge such ridiculously high premiums, and because aeroplane crashes and aqueduct floodings and subway explosions and skyscraper implosions caused by freelancing coppers are so rare, none of the devastation in the Die Hard movies really adds up to much. If there were a dozen John McClanes acting with this kind of impunity, society would be in big trouble.
But because McClane only ravages the metropolitan infrastructure once every five to seven years, insurance companies can lay off a lot of the liability on reinsurers scattered around the globe. In short, society can relax.
Though I am always loath to suggest that a movie produced by Joel Silver possesses a deeper meaning, in this case the underlying message of the Die Hard movies comes through loud and clear: American society is so prosperous that it can not only survive inflation and recession and the dotcom meltdown and the current collapse of the housing market and Donald Rumsfeld, but it can even survive John McClane’s latest madcap escapade.
In a society with this much money, money is never going to be much of an issue. So bring it on, Bruce. Blow up the entire Eastern Seaboard this time around. Take the West Coast down with you. See if we care. We just checked our disaster insurance policies. We’re covered.
Die Hard 4 opens in Bahrain today.

By Joe Queenan