It’s the holiday season and we’re busy celebrating some of our favorite movies as part of our 12 Days of Christmas coverage. But just because a movie involves Christmas doesn’t always make it a holiday movie. We need a chance to celebrate those movies too, and so we have a double feature of Christmas Action movies.

While Buddy the Elf is saving the holiday spirit, others are actually doing what action heroes do: saving the world from terrorists, or masked freaks. The fact that their adventure takes place at Christmas time is just an environmental bonus, but there isn’t much in the way of “Peace on Earth” involved in these movies. Just lots and lots of fisticuffs and explosions.

This is probably the first Double Feature I’ve written where I put as much stock in the additional pictures listed below as I do in the two featured pictures. It was almost impossible to pick which two to feature, and you could easily do a major marathon on this week’s theme.



Die Hard

It’s easy to forget that John McClane started out fighting bad guys at a Christmas party, but both of his first two adventures take place in the holiday season. While you have huge explosions and gunfights at the Nakatomi Plaza, the Christmas setting gives the movies some great moments, such as the classic “Now I have a machine-gun. Ho Ho Ho” message, delivered by way of a sharpie and a sweatshirt. The later movies in the franchise had to go out of their way to shut down locations the same way a Christmas Eve setting managed – after all, security, leading cops, and most of the public are typically scarce the night before the big holiday, so it’s not outside of the realm of disbelief to think the police and FBI would be as slow to respond (and poor in their response) as in the movie. Thankfully the urban cowboy John McClane is on the scene to blow up the bad guys, save the day, and Christmas along with it. If you really have movie-watching stamina, pop in the second Die Hard chapter for an extended Double Feature.




Batman Returns

Following in the footsteps of John McClane, the caped crusader took on the Penguin, Catwoman, and Christopher Walken while Gotham attempted to celebrate the holidays with city-wide decorations, adding a festive element to Tim Burton’s gothic take on Batman’s haven. Much like Die Hard, the use of the holiday season adds some nice elements to Batman Returns, including the chaotic attempts at lighting the city’s Christmas tree. The repeated line about mistletoe seemed a little weak as a way to unmask Batman to his nemesis, but it isn’t much different than how Chris Nolan revealed Bruce Wayne’s alter ego in Batman Begins. For some people Burton’s more grotesque approach on the Penguin is a little much, detracting from some of the movie, but there’s no real way to avoid enjoying Walken’s campy performance as Max Schreck or just how gorgeous Michelle Pfeiffer is in that Catwoman costume; it’s worth a little bad to get to the good, but if you disagree, again, there’s several other equally enjoyable options listed below to pair up for your second picture. (Random Thought: Can you imagine being the guy Penguin jumps onto when he leaps off the platform after going nuts late in the film? That’s the character’s claim to fame – “I’m the guy the Penguin jumped onto!”)



Other Christmas action pieces: Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Lethal Weapon, Gremlins




Enjoy our Double Feature suggestions? and maybe we’ll use them in a future column.