One more sleep 'til everyone's favourite guns-a-blazing festive holiday cinematic x-mas tradition returns to the Mayfair - the Die Hard double bill!

I always hesitate to gush too wildly about movies that I love, 'cause seeing a movie that you've been told is 5 stars but then you see it and you think it's only 4 stars somehow makes it seem like 2 stars. And you would think that Die Hard is safe since it was released over 24 years ago, but I'm always shocked as to classics that people have not seen. I am never afraid to put Die Hard up on a pedestal though, seeing as it is unarguably the greatest action film ever made!

If you see Die Hard now, after having seen a couple of decades of the action films that followed, you might not think it to be a masterpiece. What one must take into account though is that pretty much every action movie that came on it's heels was just ripping off the Die Hard character and formula. Before Bruce Willis portrayed the in over his head every-man action-hero cop John McClane, the action movie genre was a very different beast. The hero's were big and strong and cardboard cut-out's, Bruce embodied confident and cool the same way a Steve McQueen did...but he also got the hell beat out of him along the way, showed humanity and humour and fear, and had a weird habit of talking to himself a lot.

Die Hard also just happens to be set at Christmas time, which means that it stands shoulder to shoulder with other greats like It's a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol as one of my holiday favourites.

Die Hard 2 is also pretty cool, and features another Christmas bloodbath as John McClane takes on the challenge of both holiday travel via airports and terrorists. I'm also pretty sure that at one point it had the highest body count in any motion picture (not counting planet explosions like in Star Wars of course). And no, it's not called Die Harder, that was just the tag-line on the poster.

Die Hard double bill at the Mayfair on Tuesday December 18th at 7:00pm. It ain't Christmas without Bruce Willis jumping off the top of an exploding building.