The weather outside is frightful - but Bruce is stuck indoors

Rating: 8/10 (12 April 2010)

Bruce Willis plays John McClane, a swaggering New York cop who arrives in LA to patch things up with his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia, who would be sorely missed in the second sequel). Unfortunately, Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) has also come to town. He takes Holly and her work colleagues hostage on the 30th floor in a bid to bide time while his goons break into the vault to steal 600 million dollars in bearer bonds. McClane, meanwhile, is loose amongst the building's lift shafts and air vents, picking off Gruber's men with a pistol and a one-liner.
Let's leave aside the Nakatomi Plaza's phallic presence (complete with climactic rooftop explosion) and concentrate on the people in it. John McClane: he's the sort of action hero who can chain smoke filterless European cigarettes before sprinting up four flights of stairs, having a fist fight and then leaping off a 40-storey building with a fire hose wrapped round his waist. Gruber, paradoxically, and yet strangely likewise, is precisely who we would want to be if we were a ruthless global criminal: suave, literate, deadly; an "exceptional thief".
Events build up and up until we have a proper cat-and-mouse story. The odds are stacked against McClane: he's outnumbered, out-gunned, and out-shoed. But he's also a resilient fellow - a stubborn working man stuck in his ways - and he doesn't care much for foreign types trespassing on the ranch. For all the incredulity of many of our hero's actions, he is an everyman; forget juggernauts versus jet fighters - this incarnation of McClane huffs and puffs and bleeds. It HURTS jumping off a building, and he's modern enough to show it.
Along the way we meet some neatly written side characters, most of whom belong to the bumbling good guys. Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson (Paul Gleason) is scoping for promotion; journalist Richard Thornburg (the hilarious William Atherton, effectively reprising his role from Ghost Busters) sniffs a Pulitzer; and FBI agents Johnson and Johnson (Robert Davi and Grand L. Bush) just want to chew gum and get the job done with acceptable hostage losses.
McTiernan is a peerless action director when he's on form (see also Predator and Die Hard With a Vengeance), and this is his pinnacle, harking from the days when stunts meant stunts, not green-screen. Thumbs-up to cinematographer Jan de Bont, too, for proving that his best work is done on another director's leash. And Michael Kamen's score - foreboding and triumphant in equal measures - is so good it barely changed a note for three movies.