“I already gave it a try. You guys go ahead; I think I’ll call it a night.”

“Are you sure?” Somers said.

“No,” Noah said, wriggling on the cushion so that he looked like he was in danger of falling off. “No way, this is a matter of principle now. This is one of the best action movies ever. Emery, everybody loves this movie.”

“Not everybody,” Hazard said.

“Pretty much everybody. I mean, look, you’ll be in really good company. Lots of smart people like Die Hard. Lots of really smart filmmakers and screenwriters and directors. Those are the kind of people who like this movie.”

Dropping into an armchair, Somers kicked up his legs and said to no one in particular, “That was probably not the tack I would have chosen, but I’m interested to see how this plays out.”

“Don’t be smart,” Hazard said to him. Then, to Noah, “Judging by the commercial,” he pointed to the screen, “and the way TV marketing groups target advertisements to audiences based on statistically likely demographics, it would also put me in the same group as people who need yogurt to complete a bowel movement.”

Noah’s jaw dropped.

“More or less what I expected,” Somers said, “although the poop angle was a nice twist. I was anticipating something along the lines of ‘moral and intellectual degeneracy.’”

“I told you not to be smart.”

Somers beamed up at him.

“Emery,” Noah said like a man who’d received a blow to the head. He turned to Somers and said, “I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Ree,” Somers said, “it really is a pretty good movie. Will you stay and watch it with us?”

“No.”

“You can appreciate it as a historical artifact.”

“No. It has cheesy dialogue. ‘Yippee ki-yay.’ I mean, come on, John.”

“You can acknowledge it as a cultural marker, a shift in a film genre’s trajectory.”

“No. The lone-hero trope is ridiculous bullshit, John. People need to recognize and value cooperative heroism, the teams of people like police who work together to keep us safe.” Hazard tried to stop there, but words spilled out of him. “And besides, it has an unnecessarily complicated plot. The bad guys have to pretend to be terrorists to get the power cut to get into a bank vault, so they’re really just thieves, but they draw all this unnecessary attention, when they could have completed most of the robbery without drawing any attention and then shut off the power independently. And John McClane makes bad decision after bad decision. I’m not just talking about walking on broken glass. I mean, all he had to do was sneak down to the garage and call for help, but instead, he fights a guy with a gun, barehanded, and somehow he wins. I mean, that’s really teaching people some terrible lessons about combat strategy and survival.”

Somers’s eyes glittered, tropically blue.

“I, uh,” Hazard said. “I mean, that’s what I’ve heard.”

“You watched the whole thing.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”