The classic Bruce Willis movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “It’s a mess, and that’s a shame”
In a time when anyone with an internet connection and an opinion can say whatever they want about any movie and have it seen by an audience that potentially reaches into the millions, film criticism is arguably less important than it’s ever been. There may never be another critic who reaches Roger Ebert-like levels of fame, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t get things seriously wrong on occasion.
His job may have been to approach every film unbiasedly and dissect the positives and negatives, but it’s never been an exact science. While there are countless awful pictures that Ebert tore limb from limb with completely accurate assessments of how terrible they are, there are also a smattering of stone-cold classics he placed himself in the minority by panning.
Of course, nobody is obligated to say a movie is good just because most other people think so, but that doesn’t make it any easier to find a crop of cinemagoers who thought Die Hard was the pits. It’s heralded as one of Hollywood’s greatest-ever action flicks because that’s exactly what it is, evolving from a box office smash into a timeless favourite and a staple of the Christmastime viewing calendar.
Bruce Willis was way down the casting wish list when it came to hiring the perfect John McClane, with virtually every major leading man in the business turning their noses up at the prospect of crawling through the Nakatomi Plaza’s air ducts before the actor landed his defining role. The action genre has always been driven by escapism, which makes Ebert’s issues with Die Hard seem strange and out of place.
Not a fan of the protagonist, Ebert compared McClane to “another one of those Hollywood action roles where the hero’s shirt is ripped off in the first reel so you can see how much time he has been spending at the gym,” but there was one character in particular that turned him off the film.
Paul Gleason’s deputy police chief, Dwayne T Robinson, is admittedly a walking cliche who exists to repeatedly throw a spanner into McClane’s plan to save the hostages from Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber and his cabal of European goons. Suspension of disbelief is key for any blockbuster, something Ebert struggled to reconcile.
Gleason’s character is indeed “so willfully useless, so dumb, so much a product of the Idiot Plot Syndrome,” but that’s the point. “Without the deputy chief and all that he represents, Die Hard would have been a more than passable thriller,” Ebert wrote in his review. “With him, it’s a mess, and that’s a shame.”
There aren’t many people who’d call Die Hard a mess, but Ebert was among that hardy few who didn’t think it was an action extravaganza worthy of glowing praise.
