I wrote last week about the troubles plaguing Willis and how we should remember his career. Well, it’s my job as a film critic to help along that remembering: Here’s my essay at Law & Liberty, focusing on Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), the third installment in the franchise, trying to show that action movies were very serious about the threats to the American regime–prophetic about financial crisis and terrorism both–the need for citizen virtue, and the dangers of arrogant elites who don’t quite represent the people, but don’t quite master events, either. Indeed, action movies are the proper thematic preparation for the populist politics we’ve all lived through since 2016, we just didn’t take them seriously because we like popcorn too much, I guess…

Also, I talked to my pal Scot Bertram at Radio Free Hillsdale about Willis’s career in the ’90s, really starting with Die Hard. Scot comes prepared with questions that get at the important themes, so, on the one hand, the chat turned out to be longer than we had planned, but, on the other, you really get in concentrated form something that would have been a series of reviews, or a long-form profile in an intellectually pretentious magazine. You can listen to it here:

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