Last weekend, for the umpteenth time, I found myself watching Die Hard again. Perhaps it's a function of my advancing age, but even with the embarrassment of occasional riches available to me on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and On Demand, I still take comfort in watching Bruce Willis shoot Marco in the groin.
That rewatch came on the heels (well, a few weeks or so) of my checking out Lethal Weapon 2 again for the first time in years. And as John McClane worked his way through Nakatomi Plaza, eventually dropping Severus Snape out a window, I found myself wondering how he'd stack up, action hero wise, vs. Martin Riggs, the detective sergeant played by Mel Gibson in the LW series.
For purposes of this comparison, we'll be looking at the first three films in each series (Lethal Weapon 1-3, and Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Die Hard with a Vengeance), because the later entries in each franchise are unbearable shitshows.
And honestly, Lethal Weapon 3 kind of is, too.
I'll be evaluating these American heroes using six not-at-all subjective criteria. The winner will receive a script I've written for the next installment of their respective franchise. The loser will receive...the same.
I also realize calling them "'80s action icons" is a bit of a stretch, since only the first Die Hard and the first two Lethal Weapons took place in that most day-glo of decades, but for better or worse, that's when these iconic characters originated. And, to paraphrase Norman Maclean, a river of bad one-liners and worse hair runs through them.
Category: Durability: The running gag through all three Die Hards is how thoroughly John McClane gets the shit kicked out of him. In the first one, he enters the final showdown with Hans Gruber shirtless, covered in blood and soot, and limping on a foot lacerated by broken glass. In DH2, he gets blown out of/ejected from a cockpit, beaten by various mercenaries, and kicked from the wing of a 747. And in DHwaV, he ... has to run a lot. That's arguably worse than being beaten up.
Riggs is such a stone badass the only bad guys who can lay hands on him are the alpha goons (Mr. Joshua, Pieter Vorstedt). Sure, he gets kills a dozen guys less than an hour after having electroshock applied to his nipples in the first movie, and also survives multiple gunshot wounds at the hands of Arjen Rudd, but these are always climactic fights, not results of a sustained pattern of abuse.
Advantage: McClane
Category: Fashion Sense: It's kind of cheap to give this to Riggs, because all he wears in the LW movies are jeans, denim/flannel shirts, farm jackets, and cowboy boots (though still not enough to draw him even with Danny Glover's 6' 4" frame). Then again, that's practically haute couture compared to the wife beater/slack combo McClane wears in two of the first three Die Hards. He looked a little better in his seasonal ensemble in DH2, but was soon back to his old slovenly ways, gallivanting around in a fireman's coat, of all things.
Still, let's not kid ourselves: fashion in the late 80s/early 90s was no friend to anyone.
Advantage: Riggs, insofar as there has to be one.
