If being ungrateful was an Olympic event Holly Gennaro (Bonnie Bedelia) would be its Usain Bolt. In the history of cinema never has a character been so singularly unimpressed with being saved from certain death. It is perhaps not all Holly's fault. John McClane (Bruce Willis) would be no picnic to live with. The man is clearly a raving lunatic whose solution to every situation seems to be shooting the nearest German and smoking some cigarettes. If he approached family arguments in the same manner, one can see why Holly may want rid of 'Roy'. Or maybe Ms Gennaro had a premonition that by Die Hard 5 the everyman hero we all knew and loved would mutate into an indestructible, mumbling monstrosity and wanted out long before then. Yet taking all this into account, she still comes across as a pretty ungrateful human being. The 'scrapes' McClane gets himself into across the first two films are intrinsically linked to Holly. In the first film he flies to LA to attend her Christmas 'work do' when Rickman and company attack. In the second film he is due to collect her from the airport when naked tai chi enthusiast Col. Stuart decides to hijack the entire airport. In both films his main motivation for saving the day and killing all of the evil-doers is to rescue his wife from certain doom, and he is quite willing to die (hard) in the process. Across the two films, John McClane's quest to save his wife sees him orchestrate and endure the following: being shot in the shoulder, getting glass stuck in his feet, pulling glass out of his feet, jumping off a building, falling down a lift shaft, blowing up a 'sh*tload of screen doors', firing himself out of a cockpit, crashing a snowmobile, crawling through an air vent (twice), getting stabbed in the shoulder and being kicked off the wing of a plane all in the name of love. He also guns down, blows up and stabs 34 terrorists. His reward for all of this heroism? To be divorced by Ms Gennaro who, by Die Hard With a Vengeance, won't even return his calls. Yippee Ki-Ay-Mother...of my children.
