"What's next, colonel: the neutron bomb?"

Film Joe Queenan considers the collateral damage in the Die Hard film series in an interesting spin on the kind of articles that tend to fill column inches whenever some new film is released and there's not much else going on:

"Collateral damage is the largely overlooked theme of the entire Die Hard series - the recognition that even though John McClane always gets his man, usually in some spectacularly macabre fashion, he never gets his man until dozens of innocent people have died, until an enormous number of trains, planes, trucks, ships and automobiles have been destroyed, and until he has laid waste to the infrastructure of whatever hapless metropolis in which he is currently operating. McClane's triumphs call to mind the famous words of antiquity's king Pyrrhus, who once quipped, in not so many words, "If victories are going to be this expensive, maybe we should try defeats for a change."

I'm always obsessing about these things when I watch films -- when characters obviously haven't paid a taxi fare or take advanatge of people in the service industries and exploding stuff is always the limit. One of these days someone is going to make a film about a bystander in an action film -- perhaps it starts with the finale of a Die Hard-style film then carries on from there, but the main character does not in the end do anything heroic.