Die Hard - Christmas presence

Yippee-Ki-Yay, motherlickers!

What will you be doing on Christmas Eve?

Snuggling up with the kids, looking forward to the Big Day? Out with friends for a drink? Desperately trying to find cranberry sauce in your local supermarket?

I prefer my plan. I’ll be in a cinema, watching 1980s action blockbuster ‘Die Hard’. In case you have somehow missed this oft-repeated classic, it stars Bruce Willis as New York cop John McLane. He’s meeting up with his estranged wife and daughters at her Christmas Do, when terrorists (not really – they’ve come to rob the vaults but decided to do it the flamboyant way) take over the high-rise building of her employer making everyone a hostage, and McLane very, very, annoyed.

Cue explosions, destruction and mayhem as he goes on a one-man, wisecracking, rampage to take down the bad guys and rescue everyone. It’s a stone-cold classic romp.

I can’t think of a better way to spend the evening, and I’ll be all happy and warm inside and out once the end-credits have rolled. But wait – there’s a problem. Some people don’t think it’s a Christmas movie.

What? Sure, some baddies get shot/blown-up, but it’s a movie about a man going above and beyond to be with his family at Christmas. It’s even got a lady in it who’s about to give birth.

Not enough evidence? OK – there’s snow, Christmas trees and decorations. True, some of them are on fire, but that’s a minor issue. It has Christmas songs, and McLane’s wife is called Holly. Our hero even goes down a chimney. Kind of. OK... it’s an air vent.

Historian, author and Twitterer @greg_jenner summed it up well last year, when the annual debate raged again, saying “...it’s a family redemption story about personal suffering in the service of fellow man, in defiance of systemic avarice. It’s pure Dickens. But with machine guns”.

It’s star may have recently said “Die Hard is not a Christmas movie! It is a goddamn Bruce Willis movie!” but to be honest, he’s a bit biased. Isn’t he? Vest-ed interest.

So, what do you think? Christmas movie or not? It might lack much in the way of peace, and goodwill may also be in short supply towards the villains, but I’ll take it over some schmaltzy-fluff rom-com any day.

Whatever your view, I wish a very Happy Christmas to you all. Hope you have a Yippee-Ki-Yay day.

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 21st of December, 2018. The version used on the paper's website ran it as "Die Hard is a real Christmas movie".

We did indeed watch the film at the cinema, in Edinburgh, in the evening of Christmas Eve. There was a ripple of applause, cheers and a sense of shared joy when McLane uttered his infamous "Yippee-Ki-Yay..." line. Fabulous - and what a treat to see is on a big screen with booming sound.

I hope you had a fantastic Christmas..?

(CD A-Z: Romping through the box sets, pulled out of storage, with Chris Rea's mammoth "Blue Guitars" set.)

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