Still pretty entertaining, but hardly a white knuckler.

Rating: Null/10 (27 November 2002)

6 out of 10
Die Hard's plot has pretty much been the springboard for the action movies we see nowadays. Basically, a group of terrorists hold lots of civiliant hostage so they can steal some money. The premise has been done over and over and more elaborately than Die Hard, which uses the simplicity to its advantage. It's one cop vs. a dozen terrorists, nothing particularly hard on the noggin about that. While the action scenes are well executed, the movie is constantly shot in darkly lit areas, making some of the shootouts and fistfights harder to make out.
But most damning of all is the fact that, off the top of my head, I cannot recall a big-studio action film that featured as many annoying supporting characters as the number in this movie. There are the by-the-book FBI agents, the idiotic police captain (who, when hearing of a body being thrown at a building, actually suggests it may have been a guy who committed suicide), the drug-addled businessman who's out to save his own skin, and the cutthroat, no-mercy reporter who tries exploiting the story even at the risk of the hostages' lives. It's hard to concentrate on the action when all I can think of is how each of these characters' is going to get his comeuppance. It's also pretty insulting to see each of these people act stupid only to drive the plot forward.