1980s ethnic stereotypes are okay if the movie is awesome?

Action flicks are typically 90 minutes of cliched nonsense, but if done right they are damn enjoyable. Die Hard managed to take all of the nonsense out of the previous statement but still left some of the cliches (most notably Karl returning from the dead and being shot by the guy from Family Matters, but that will be covered in a future post). Despite being the crescendo of the entire action genre for breaking the rules and writing new ones, Die Hard still abided by the time-honored element from action movie story structure: you know everything you need to know about a character from the first 2 minutes that person is on screen. Sure, Die Hard is tits awesome because it actually possesses characterization and has emotional story arcs for every major character, but it still told viewers who the character is in a nutshell in those first 2 screen minutes:

McClane: Socially indifferent/loose cannon that plays by his own rules (a gun on a plane???)
Holly: Stone cold business woman/late 80s hotness
Guy from Family Matters: Good-natured lard-ass/perennial underdog
Ellis: Groveling douche bag/possible sexual predator
Hans: Calm and collected/Nazi-type level of neurotic fashion perfection
Argyle: Happily clueless/likes rap music
Theo: Fan of Los Angeles Lakers/egghead that can solve Rubik's cubes while blindfolded using nothing but salad tongs (he is smart because he wears glasses)

Argyle and Theo stand out the most, if only because of the reinforcement of 1980s African American film stereotypes. Lets see, we meet Argyle and he immediately puts on Run DMC Christmas music (I am mildly surprised the filmmakers did not put an over-sized boom-box on his shoulder). The first words out of Theo's mouth had to do with basketball. So, when we meet the first African American characters in the film, we immediately learn they like rap and basketball. Hmm.


Look, I grew up on the whitest block in the whitest subdivision in the whitest part of town. My primary access to learning about other ethnicities and cultures was film. I learned a lot of important lessons - Nazis were buffoons, anything from the future was sent back to kill me, and anyone living south of the Mexican border was a guerrilla terrorist. I eventually grew out of all of these assumptions (that nice young lad from Guatemala changed by mind - he was just a guerrilla and not a terrorist), and thankfully Die Hard had the foresight to make the African American characters in the film intelligent, compassionate, heroes, or all of the above. In other words, the complete opposite of Germans. They are all assholes.