Review: The Cleveland Show “Die Semi-Hard”

To help pass time while posing in a holiday nativity scene, Cleveland tells his version of one of his favorite holiday stories: “Die Hard.” In it, terrorists target Waterman Cable on Christmas Eve. Guest voices include John Slattery as Mayor Box.

Spoilers Below

The year was 1988…and this is the Cleveland Show’s first parody! It’s a Die Hard parody, and if you know the movie, Cleveland is John McClane, Rallo is Argyle, Tim the Bear is Hans, Colt is Harry Ellis, and Donna is Holly Gennaro with the rest of the cast are terrorists with the exception of Junior and Roberta who are both police officers, the former playing the more important role of Al Powell.

If you don’t know the plot of Die Hard, a bunch of Russian terrorists take over Nakatomi Tower to break into a vault, and steal a couple hundred million dollars worth in negotiable bonds. All the popular scenes are here too, the opening airport scene, the Harry snorting coke routine, and the walking on broken glass routine.

Our Take

The episode plays out pretty similar to the Family Guy-Star Wars parodies where they take the basic premise of the movies and have all the parts played by the main characters, and when they run out they use recurring ones(Consuela as the maid was a nice touch), but this episode didn’t even mention why the terrorists were there until the end which in Die Hard you pretty much know from the beginning what they are after. Also, the Star Wars-Family Guy episodes had a chock-full of jokes to go along with the episodes, and this didn’t really have that, the only one that I liked was the “Scooby-Doo motherfucker” line. Maybe the next time they do a parody, it will be called “Try Harder”.