Amazingly Human Action Film

Rating: 10/10 (8 February 2006)

Fresh off Rambo and the Terminator's superhuman exploits, Bruce Willis gives us John McClane, an everyman cop from New York on vacation for the holidays and an office Christmas party date with his half-estranged wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia). Holly has taken a high-level corporate job with a Japanese conglomerate, and the movie hints at her having one foot in her marriage, and the other planting more and more firmly in the world around her. The only notables among the supporting cast are Paul Gleason (Dwayne T. Robinson, Deputy Police Chief) and William Atherton (Richard Thornburg, Channel 5 Reporter).
The danger comes out of nowhere: a group of international criminals led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), and claiming to be terrorists, catches the company napping, taking over the building tower with ease on Christmas Eve, their sights set firmly on $600 million in bearer bonds that are neatly tucked away in their vault. The criminals had expected to just do their thing, get their money, and get out, but John decides to be a "fly in the ointment" and put the hostages at risk as he takes the bad guys out one by one. Only Sgt. Al Powell of the LAPD (Reginald VelJohnson) believes John, and then only after he gets "irrefutable" evidence of the criminals' existence landing on the hood of his car. From then on, Al, John, and Hans dominate the film from the three perspectives (good guys at the scene and with the hostages, and the bad guy). Holly is reduced to a supporting character but her presence is always in John's mind, restricting his ability to act since he can't harm her.
What makes Die Hard the all-time classic it has rightfully become was the lack of extravagance and fantasy: there were no decades-old war grudges, no jungle action, no superhuman powers and only the occasional physics-defying stunts we are usually overloaded with. The characters in this film were regular people, with regular jobs and regular attitudes, confronted with an extraordinary situation, responding as most regular people would, by doing things which go beyond what they would "regularly" consider. Each character's backstory is one that could easily be ours if we were born in their shoes, and we all know at least one or two people like someone from the film. These are the people we live with, work with, and interact with, and the film captured them perfectly. This realism makes it very easy for the audience to believe that it too could have been caught at that party and had to face the situation.
Die Hard took the action genre in a new direction, adding a human touch and bit of reluctance to their invulnerability, while also showing them (as Spider Man would do so as well later on) as people who are much better at making others' personal lives work out than they are with their own.
Even if you haven't seen Die Hard, you've seen its legacy in many other films since. The formula was a brilliant one, and this was its birth.