The next Die Hard will be a prequel – but the whole magic of the first film lay in the fact that, until then, nothing remarkable had happened to John McClane at all

The next Die Hard movie will be a prequel, looking at how the young John McClane got to be the badass action hero we met in the original 1988 film. Because, after all, everyone who watched that first movie wanted to know, how did John McClane get his supersmooth spy moves and super-powered radioactive sweat. Right?

No. No, of course not. No one wants to hear how John McClane was bitten by a radioactive sweat gland, or how he was trained by ninjas. The whole point of the original Die Hard film was that John McClane was not trained by ninjas. He doesn’t have a history of super-stunts fighting terrorists. He’s a regular joe cop plunged into a once-in-a-lifetime disaster. When confronted with machine-gun fire, he runs away without even putting on his shoes. He doesn’t try to take out the bad guys all by himself; he pulls the fire alarm and prays for help, just like you or I would. And when he does have to do the action hero stunts, he yells at himself: “Think!”When the bad guys blow someone away, John can’t even rescue him. “Why didn’t you save him John? ... Because you’d be dead too ya fucking asshole.”

Bruce Willis could work with younger actor in Die Hard 'origins story' Read more

John doesn’t have an origin story, because John isn’t a superhero. Instead, he’s your average white guy working-class cop in a world that doesn’t care much about average white guy working-class cops. The backstory of Die Hard, the radioactive spider that sets things up, is John’s schlubby castration. His wife has gotten a job in LA; she’s now out-earning him. He comes out to visit her for the office Christmas party and experiences a series of small humiliations; he discovers she’s using her maiden name; he hates the foofy champagne; a drunk man (possibly gay) rushes up to him and kisses him on the cheek. He learns his wife got a big promotion.

John’s irrelevant; a shambling relic of east coast, blue-collar masculinity. His wife’s boss, Mr Takagi, is kind, polished and sophisticated in his John Phillips suit from London. Meanwhile, John wears a wife-beater and starts haggling with his missus about her career almost as soon as he sees her. “Very mature, John,” he mutters to himself in despair at his own uncouthness as she stalks off.

But uncouthness turns out to have its virtues. The very things that make John a toad out of water at first turn him into a hero when the guns come out. His everydude cop grit and cunning save him – even as Takagi, and the big-time trader who leered at John’s wife, are both tragically, and conveniently, shot. The smooth upper-class guys who threaten John’s masculinity aren’t fit to survive in a die-hard world. Neanderthal masculine possessive instincts alienate McClane from Holly initially, but those very same plain-guy atavistic impulses are what wow her, and everybody else as the film goes on.

In short, John’s specialness is his lack of specialness. He’s a superhero not because he’s got some intricate backstory, but because, in the film, to be a white working guy– a Roy Rogers cowboy, as he calls himself – is its own superpower. Holly, John’s wife, proudly declares that he’s just doing his job; he’s a cop and cops keep you safe. Die Hard is consumed with anxiety that men like John will be have their jobs taken by the Japanese, or by their own wives. But then the evil Eurotrash terrorists come in, and suddenly good old-fashioned American violence is back in style. “Now I have a machine gun,” as John writes in blood on the shirt of one slaughtered terrorist.

John’s a throwback. He’s the standard, the regular fella, staring at the progressive future with skepticism and those Bruce Willis pursed lips. He’s the rock solid everyman hero who isn’t a hero anymore because the world turned progressive and upside down. But then the crisis comes, and the everyguy is back where he should be. “Trust me, I’ve been doing this for 11 years,” he says early in the film.

The Die Hard sequels have belabored the point, as sequels do, but they don’t really undermine the first film. John is always, at least that once, the everydude finding the transcendent power of everydudeness within him.

A prequel, though, seems designed to turn McClane into a chosen one, looking forward to a destined heroic specialness. Even before he was a hero, he was already a hero, a prequel says. Whereas, McClane’s whole destiny, in Die Hard, is that he has no destiny. The future belongs to the women and the Japanese and the Eurotrash. But still, despite every sign of progress, when the chips are down the white guy always wins, and kills, and gets the woman. Things change, Die Hard says, but you don’t need to worry – they don’t change as much as all that. John McClane doesn’t need a prequel past, because he is the past – with guns.