The Guns of "Die Hard"

The 1988 Bruce Willis action classic Die Hard is every serious gun guy’s go-to Christmas film. Forget A Christmas Story, Miracle on 34th Street, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and It’s a Wonderful Life, Die Hard included something all those other Christmas staples did not — guns, lots and lots of guns.

In case you’ve been living underneath a rock, the basic narrative has a New York cop named John McClane traveling to the West Coast to visit his estranged wife and kids for the Christmas holidays. His wife Holly has a successful career with the Nakitomi Corporation, and the two plan to meet at the annual corporate Christmas party held in their high-rise LA office building on Christmas Eve. Unbeknownst to Officer McClane, on that very evening, a group of bloodthirsty European thieves plans to take over the building and steal $640 million in negotiable bearer bonds from the Nakitomi vault.

To cover the theft, the criminal ringleader, Hans Gruber — played to perfection by the inimitable Alan Rickman — has his team impersonate terrorists. Knowing that the authorities would relentlessly pursue them once they make their getaway, Gruber plans to blow up the building and kill the hostages to help cover his escape. Combining refinement, class, breeding and ruthlessness, Rickman’s Gruber is the perfect villain.

Backstory

Die Hard was inspired by a 1979 novel titled Nothing Lasts Forever written by a private investigator-turned novelist named Roderick Thorp. When the film was first pitched to studio executives it was described as “Rambo in an office building.” In the book, the protagonist is a 60-something security consultant. The writer, Jeb Stuart, adapted his character into John McClane and wrote it around Bruce Willis.

The filmmakers took a big risk when they cast Willis for the part. He had already made a name for himself on television in Moonlighting, but this was to be only his second big screen foray. It was Rickman’s first. Schwarzenegger and Stallone were considered for the part, but they wanted a believable everyman rather than some over-the-top musclebound action hero. Willis and Rickman alongside psychopath Alexander Godunov, conflicted cop Reginald VelJohnson, career-minded police supervisor Paul Gleason, Devoreaux White’s Argyll, the lovable limo driver, and James Shigeta’s chief executive Joseph Takagi, collectively captured lightning in a bottle.

Handguns

Bruce Willis’ character John McClane packed a Beretta Model 92F throughout the film. In the book, his character carried a Browning Hi-Power. The Beretta used in the movie was upgraded with an extended slide release and magazine catch to accommodate the left-handed actor. Willis suffered permanent hearing damage from the scene where McClane kills the terrorist by shooting him from underneath the boardroom table.

The Beretta 92F was an anomalous choice here. In 1979 when the book was written, the 92F was not yet on the commercial market. Additionally, New York cops were not authorized to carry autoloaders until 1993, five years after the movie debuted.

Alan Rickman’s uber-villain Hans Gruber packed a sound-suppressed, nickel-plated HK P7M13. This weird squeeze-cocking German pistol was the perfect tool for a classically educated European super-criminal who buys his suits at the same place as does Yasser Arafat. The gun used in the film was internally threaded, so the sound suppressor could be mounted up without that annoying stubby bit of barrel sticking out the end.

Karl was my personal favorite. Exquisitely played by the professional ballet dancer Alexander Godunov, Karl exuded a sinister grace. His long blonde hair somehow enhanced his exotic European persona. When he made entry into the building, Karl terminated the first security guard with a sound-suppressed Walther PPK. He then deployed some kind of weird flash bang grenade that looked suspiciously like a hockey puck before similarly dispatching the second.

Serious Heat — The MP5

While the pistols were neat, the long guns were epic. In the book, the protagonist wielded a Thompson submachinegun and, later, an AK47. For the film, the producers opted for the HK MP5.

Forget Bruce Willis’ snappy comebacks, Alan Rickman’ sinister intensity, and Alexander Godunov’s epic flowing locks, the real star of the film was the HK MP5 submachine gun. These 9mm roller-locked German weapons were both exotic and rare back in 1988 when Die Hard hit the big screen. The fact they had plenty of them just made Hans Gruber’s robbery crew seem all the more professional.

Factory MP5’s were unobtainium on this side of the pond back in 1988. Nowadays factory-perfect semiauto MP5 clones are readily available and reasonably priced. The AP5 from Century has my full-throated endorsement. The original semiauto German 9mm HK 94 was first imported in 1983.

Prior to the cursed machinegun ban of 1986, these roller-locked HK rifles were some of the easiest full-auto conversions on the market. The original castrated HK 94 had a lame 16″ barrel and a restrictor shelf that prevented installation of a factory full auto fire control group. Legally transforming these weapons into machineguns prior to 1986 involved obtaining an approved BATF Form 1, swapping out the semiauto bolt carrier for the full auto sort and trimming off the front of a GI fire control box with a milling machine or Dremel tool. As swapping out a factory barrel on an MP5 is a massive butt-whooping, most of these converted movie guns just had their 16″ tubes pruned back. They can be differentiated at a glance by the lack of a 3-lug suppressor mount on the stubby barrel.

One of the most compelling scenes in the film has McClane commandeering an MP5 from the dead terrorist Tony Vreski played by Andreas Wisniewski. McClane sends Tony’s cooling corpse down the elevator to his friends with, “Now I Have a Machinegun. Ho, Ho, Ho” written on his sweatshirt. While this is a lovely mind game to play with the remaining terrorists, in the book he actually writes, “Now We Have a Machinegun” simply to obfuscate the tactical situation yet further.

The Steyr AUG

Karl was a compelling villain. He needed a compelling weapon. The moviemakers settled on the Austrian Steyr AUG.

First launched in 1977, the AUG (Armee Universal Gewehr — Army Universal Rifle) represented a quantum advance in small arms design. Stuff like polymer frames, plastic magazines, bullpup architecture and integral optical sights are all de rigueur today. All that was initially pioneered in the AUG.

The fire selector was built into the trigger mechanism. A partial pull resulted in semiauto fire, while a full pull was rock and roll. Few other combat weapons have embraced this system.

The AUG featured a tool-less quick-change barrel system demonstrated to good effect in the movie. When Karl first retrieved his gun, we see him slide the barrel into position and lock it in place. One side benefit of the bullpup design was its center of gravity resided near the midpoint. As a result, Karl was shown in several cases firing the weapon one-handed. During the climactic surprise ending, Karl was thought to be dead but rises dramatically, AUG in hand. It does make one wonder why the cops might see fit to stow the terrorist’s assault rifle with what they thought was his corpse.

Ancillary Iron

The SWAT guys who made the ill-fated assault on the building were armed with fake MGC M16 rifles and live Colt SP1 AR15s. The fake sort-of M16s can be distinguished by a 3-prong flash suppressor and gimpy non-standard forward assist. If you look really close, the hammer and trigger pins are in the wrong place as well. Normal people would never care, but I naturally do.

When the FBI agents, a Caucasian and African-American both named Johnson (“No relation,” they helpfully add), were mistakenly firing upon McClane from the orbiting helicopter, they were wielding a Steyr SSG precision rifle equipped with an AN/PVS-3 starlight scope. The Huey’s door gunner joined in with a GI-standard M60 belt-fed machinegun. Predictably, none of this ended well. It did, however, produce the epic line, “We’re gonna need some more FBI guys.”

The terrorist Alexander opened fire on the cops using an M60E3. This was essentially the same weapon used by Stallone’s Rambo in First Blood Part 2. Unlimbering his pig signaled a sea change in the negotiation process.

Ruminations

The actors playing the German terrorists in the movie were not actually German. Their guttural jabbering sounded real enough but was actually just nonsense. Additionally, for reasons I cannot fathom, the teddy bear John McClane was bringing to his daughter was the self-same bear used at the end of Hunt for Red October.

There is an ongoing dispute online as to whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Let me put that to bed right here — of course it is a Christmas movie. There are Christmas trees, Christmas parties, seasonal decorations and the spectacular rendition of Ode to Joy in D minor from the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It all seems pretty Christmas to me.

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