Die Hard

what the film does

john mcclane (bruce willis), a new york city police detective, flies to los angeles on christmas eve to reconcile with his estranged wife holly (bonnie bedelia) at her company’s holiday party in the nakatomi plaza skyscraper. minutes after he arrives, a group of heavily armed men led by hans gruber (alan rickman) seizes the building. gruber and his team pose as terrorists but are actually thieves executing a heist: they plan to steal $640 million in bearer bonds from the building’s vault. mcclane, barefoot and alone, slips away into the building’s upper floors and begins picking off gruber’s men one by one. he uses the building’s systems, improvised weapons, and a radio to communicate with the lapd and, eventually, with gruber himself. on the ground, only sergeant al powell (reginald veljohnson) believes mcclane’s story. the fbi arrives and cuts the building’s power, which is exactly what gruber needed to bypass the vault’s final lock. mcclane kills gruber by dropping him from a window and reunites with holly. the film ends with powell shooting the last surviving henchman. christmas is saved.

why this one

die hard changed what an action hero could be. before 1988 the template was arnold schwarzenegger or sylvester stallone, men who looked like they were carved from granite and never bled. mcclane bleeds. he walks on broken glass. he gets scared. he cracks jokes to keep himself from falling apart. the film’s genius is in the geometry of one man versus a building full of professionals, the vulnerability baked into every scene. it is also a perfect machine of a script: every setup pays off, every character serves a purpose, and the pacing is relentless. alan rickman, in his feature film debut, made hans gruber the blueprint for the sophisticated action villain. the film became so influential that “die hard on a” is its own subgenre (speed is die hard on a bus, under siege is die hard on a battleship, etc.). it is also, definitively, a christmas movie. the library of congress preserved it in the national film registry in 2017. few action films from any era hold up this well.