Crisis and Representation in `Die Hard: the Just Man, the Right Place, the Right Moment

Abstract

This article aims to study the five films that, up to date, composed the franchise Die Hard — namely: Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988), Die Hard 2: Die Harder (Renny Harlin, 1990), Die Hard: With a Vengeance (John McTiernan, 1995), Live Free or Die Hard (Len Wiseman, 2007) and A Good Day to Die Hard (John Moore, 2013)— through a multidisciplinary approach. We intend to analyze and highlight the evolution of the franchise within a cinematographic field—he Hollywood action cinema of the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first centuries— but also in context with social, economic and political issues. We will look at the evolution of the saga and its influence on contemporary cinema; we will examine the unequal reception, in terms of consumption, of the franchise; and we will discuss how certain political, cultural and social changes have influenced the construction of the plots in successive films. For this we will focus on the analysis of several essential elements in the articulation of the Die Hard universe: the protagonist, the villains, space and time. The twenty-five years that the series has covered since its birth in 1988 until the release of the fifth installment in 2013 allow us to trace a coherent route and to extract some relevant readings from it.