I have never seen Die Hard. But I have an opinion about its status as a Christmas movie. I was recently asked my opinion as many of us are asked around Christmas. I thought you might be interested in my reply.
The first thing I considered is what makes a movie a Christmas movie. I put together the following short list. Any one of these traits can make a movie a Christmas movie:
- The whole movie takes place on or around Christmas
- The whole movie involves Christmas celebrations
- The story involves Santa or the birth of Jesus
- Part of the movie involves Christmas celebrations
- The movie includes scenes that take place on or around Christmas
- There is a tradition of watching the movie on Christmas
Any of the first three items on this list make it an obvious Christmas movie. The next two are the ones where there can be some argument. I think the main thing that Die Hard has going for it is that it takes place on Christmas Eve. I think this is enough to make it a Christmas movie. This also makes Lethal Weapon a Christmas movie too.
I understand that this might not be good enough for some people. It might be too much of an action film to allow it to be a Christmas movie. Then I compared it to some other films that I consider to be some of my favorite Christmas movies to decide if Die Hard wasn’t Christmasy enough. The movie that immediately came to mind is The Bells of St. Mary’s. I first saw this movie when I was growing up. The local movie channel showed it around Christmas time which made me decide it was a Christmas movie. But only 8 minutes of the 126-minute run time takes place around Christmas. It is a very funny scene with kids telling the story of the birth of Jesus. But that scene seems to be an aside from the main stories of the film. Part of the reason that it might be considered a Christmas film is that it was released in early December of 1945. There is also a scene in It’s a Wonderful Life that shows The Bells of St. Mary’s on the marquee of the theater in Bedford Falls. This association with another Christmas movie might give it more clout as a Christmas movie. Ultimately, I think an argument could be made that Die Hard is more of a Christmas movie than my beloved The Bells of St. Mary’s since more of it takes place around Christmas. You can make a similar argument against Holiday Inn since only a few scenes of it take place around Christmas, although the song White Christmas gives it a closer association to the holiday.
So, with the little that I know about Die Hard, I think there is a strong argument to say that it is definitely a Christmas movie. Now, you might we wondering why I’ve never seen it. I like to watch movies, and a lot of people assume that I’ve seen every big or important movie ever made. This is not the case. There are many movies that I have intentionally avoided over the years for a variety of reasons. Die Hard is one of these. It was in 1988 at a time when action movies with Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Chuck Norris were all the rage. I watched a lot of movie review shows at the time and they rarely gave these films good reviews. Even when they gave some good reviews, I could tell that they were not the kind of films I would enjoy. I like action films, but I like them to have some substance and a lot of these seemed to have none. They seemed like stupid formula movies just as much as the Halmark movies that I detest. I still realized that some of these were good movies that I was missing because of my aversion to this type of film. So now, it has become a thing for me to avoid watching Die Hard just like it is a thing for my friends to champion it as a Christmas movie.