Everyone’s OTHER favorite Christmas movie, right? I know people who say “It’s not Christmas until I see Hans Gruber fall from the Nakatomi Building.” (Yeah, okay, you got me…I’m one of those people). But seriously, sometimes you just need an antidote to all of the more schmaltzy Christmas fare (I’ll get to the Hallmark Channel in a minute), and nothing fixes that more than Bruce Willis yelling “Yippee–ki– yay–Mother–@#%*&#!”
But seriously, I never knew that this was based on a novel; I always thought it was a movie that Hollywood had just happened to get right for a change. I was very surprised to find that is was actually based on a novel written by Roderick Thorp in 1979, which itself is a sequel to a 1966 novel.
Kind of interesting side note: the author got the idea for this book after watching the 1975 movie The Towering Inferno, so if you are really looking for a disaster/action holiday, you could watch both movies and track the author’s thought process. Skip some of the Die Hard movie sequels, though; nothing compares to the original.
The plot of the novel is extremely familiar: a retired New York City Police detective is visiting a family member in a 40-story skyscraper in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve when a group of terrorists take over the building. The political motivations of the terrorists are different from the movie, but the exploits of the hero are the same.
If this is your kind of holiday entertainment, you should definitely check out the original novels that are the genesis of the Die Hard franchise. For a change, Hollywood actually transferred characters, memorable scenes and large chunks of dialogue directly from the novel into the movie.
Based on: Nothing Lasts Forever, written by Roderick Thorp (1979)
By the same author: The Detective; Rainbow Drive
Also take a look at: 58 Minutes by Walter Wager (the basis for Die Hard 2); Twelve Red Herrings by Jeffrey Archer