Die Hard - Jon Lewis (BFI Film Classics)

'Die Hard' by Jon Lewis (BFI Film Classics 104-page paperback)

In 1988, Die Hard provided the blueprint for a new, reactionary Hollywood cinema. In response to an emerging post-Cold War global instability, the film provided fictional redress for a decline in American international prestige post-Vietnam.

Jon Lewis' study focuses on the film's late-1980s variation on a well-worn movie action template, with Bruce Willis' John McClane tragically cast as a man out of time, a throwback to an era when men were (allowed to be) men, now frustrated at every turn by incompetent government bureaucrats, effete and elitist Eurotrash villains and ambitious working women.