How Die Hard Trilogy brought three great action movies home
Die Hard Trilogy (1996)
Die Hard Trilogy (1996)
Oh yes, I remember the days when Die Hard was indeed a trilogy, and a trilogy to be proud of. Of course, in keeping with Hollywood’s tried-and-tested tactic of reviving long dead franchises and bringing back the now-geriatric leading men, we’ve had another two Die Hard movies since the 90s.
Die Hard 4.0 wasn’t awful in any sense, it was just wholly unnecessary, so there's no point in us mentioning it anymore. Not unless you want to talk about the merits of using cars as ammunition against enemy helicopters. And I might as well be honest here, I’ve never seen A Good Day to Die Hard, and I don’t think I want to, either.
I hope you’ll still consider me a die-hard fan of the series, though. After all, during the mid-to-late 90s, one of my most prized possessions was a VHS tape of Die Hard With A Vengeance, recorded directly from the TV. This means that my copy of the 1995 blockbuster started out in fairly poor quality, which only got worse as I nearly wore the tape out through rewatches.
But sometimes you’d have to wonder what my parents were at, letting me go around with an 18s movie like that. I know it’s not unique to me, either. How many of you out there got absolutely traumatised after your dad let you watch Robocop one night? I know I was left traumoed after I insisted I stay up to watch Arachnophobia. Was it because the 90s were a different time? Or did they just not care?
Were they really so willing to turn a blind eye to the sheer violence in Die Hard 3? Not to mention the amount of claret pouring out of Bruce Willis near the end, as well as all of the bad language and racial slurs. Well, whatever about all that, I loved that movie at the time, and I still do now.
Perhaps rewatching that tape a zillion times, along with my Terminator 2 tape, made me the macho man I am today. I suspect parenting like this wouldn’t fly nowadays though, not when parents want to wrap their little weans up in as much cotton wool and bubble wrap as possible.
Better to have the kids indoors, playing video games and rotting their brains, right? Probably not, but if they’ve got a bit of class, those kids could do a lot worse than going back and checking out the Die Hard Trilogy for PlayStation 1. It was also on PC and Sega Saturn, but around my way, it seemed to be a staple in absolutely everyone’s PS1 collection, so it makes sense we pick up the old grey controller and play some Die Hard there.
Let’s start from the start with the original Die Hard film, which seems like it should never have been successful. At least, not unless you were in a certain demographic; it was originally touted as a sequel to Commando, which sealed 100% interest from me. But how exactly did it become a box-office smash hit?
Seemingly, once the script was written, no actor in the world wanted anything to do with it, and it wasn’t based on the most famous of books either. That’s OK though - I doubt any author who took themselves even half-seriously would have been capable of writing Commando or Predator, or Van Damme’s Blood Sport. It takes a special sort of Hollywood manchild to write those kind of capers. It was probably the very first script they ever churned out, only to be left long-forgotten until, suddenly, Bruce Willis needed a Hollywood vehicle.
So is Die Hard 1 a Christmas film or not? I’d say it is, but I’m not looking for a debate about it just this minute. And there can be no debate that this is a great film, whatever time of year. A lot of this is down to the brilliant villainous turn by Alan Rickman, God rest him, and in his feature film debut if you can believe that.
As for the PS1 adaptation contained in Die Hard Trilogy, the first movie becomes a third-person shooter as you make your way up the Nakatomi Plaza, blowing away baddies and rescuing hostages. It’s one of those games that gives you great fun just messing around with the enemies, and there’s some great cheat codes to use too, although the whole thing definitely looks and feels quaint these days.
Die Hard 2 is an enjoyable film too, I’m sure it is. I just can’t remember any of it. No, I’m serious, I do think the film is good, at least I have nothing bad to say about it, other than the fact that I find it incredibly forgettable. I could barely tell you a thing that happened in it, apart from Colm Meaney crashlanding the plane and when McClane ejects from the plane and pulls that ridiculous face. I suppose it just lacked a great villain.
They adapted it for the video game by turning it into an on-rails shooter, first-person style. It’s kind of interesting, but you needn’t expect anything cool like Time Crisis. Actually, you can’t even use the Time Crisis gun. Not to mention, of course, that you’re unlikely to have a TV that can even interact with a light gun. A forgettable game adaptation for a forgettable movie, eh?
Last of the trilogy is Die Hard With a Vengeance, where Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson race around New York City, trying to diffuse bombs and keep themselves alive. They adapt this for Die Hard Trilogy by having you take control of the police car in first-person and driving around after the bombs, making it an arcade-style city-driving game.
Just like in the movie though, you really will be pulled this way and that. The game is more of a struggle than the film, honestly. Even when McClane and Zeus were a little slow and clearly weren’t going to make it, they always had that last-second reprieve from the crazy Simon Gruber, who would inform the two protagonists that he never said ‘Simon Says’ and so the bomb was never going to explode anyway.
No such mercy in this game, where the bombs are going off thick and fast and you’re blessed if you can get around the samey NYC backdrops with even five seconds left to spare. When you do reach the bomb location, you just blow it up anyway, which doesn’t make much sense, but at least you avoid a Game Over. I don’t know, I think it’s far more fun to just mow down the civilians and allow the blood, or rather the blackcurrant juice, to wash all over your windscreen.
DHWAV’s plot, by the way, involved the villains making off with massive gold bullions, carried by truck convoy. Now, I don’t know a huge amount about horsepower and torque, especially where trucks are concerned, but I’m kind of doubting that they had enough grunt to carry Fort Knox around in their trailers.
Gold weighs a right boatload you know, to use a technical term, and you’d smash the clutch to pieces trying to pull away a truck with millions’ worth on board. The Goldfinger novel made a similar mistake, where the eponymous villain was just going to stroll into Fort Knox, pull the Americans’ pants down, pick up a few pints of gold each and then hop on out.
Even in 1964, when the film adaptation was being made, they were clever enough to know that this fiendish plot wouldn’t really wash. Mr. Goldfinger wanted to irradiate the gold in the movie instead, so that his own considerable stocks would increase in value tenfold. That’s a bit more like it, and makes far more sense. But nobody told Jeremy Irons this.
Anyway, none of that really matters, I just wanted to rant about film inconsistencies and plot-holes, as we all like to do. I’m also trying to cover up the fact that I never beat even one of the games on this trilogy disc, let alone all three. They’re just too hard for a dumb Irish flatfoot like me. The games are fun, but the films are funner. And watching the trilogy around Christmas time gives you fun with a vengeance.
8 December 2023