Average at best

Rating: 5/10 (28 January 2015)

New York City cop John McClane has flown to Los Angeles to reconcile with his estranged wife, Holly. He arrives on Christmas Eve and heads to Holly's office, where her company's Christmas party is in full swing. Holly does not work for some ordinary company. She works for the Nakatomi Corporation, whose headquarters are located high up in the Nakatomi Plaza skyscraper which is still under construction. In this office there is a vault. In this vault there are bearer bonds worth $640 million. Enter Hans Gruber. He and his heavily-armed goons storm the building, take everybody hostage and set in motion their plan to open that vault and get that money. Only one thing stands in their way: John McClane.
McClane is conveniently the only person in the building who manages to escape being taken hostage. He then conveniently manages to stay alive as a whole swarm of well-trained, heavily-armed terrorists continually fires at him with machine guns and attempts to blow him to smithereens with powerful explosives. He makes quite the nuisance of himself, Hans is not pleased. Anyhow, there's a lot of shooting and a lot of things blowing up...and then there's a lot more shooting and a lot more things blowing up...and then...well, you get the picture. It's basically two hours of this on an endless loop. It's an action movie that indeed has lots of action but that action gets repetitive rather quickly. This movie is often described as innovative and revolutionary. That's overselling it by quite some distance. It's an average shoot-'em-up action movie. No more, no less.
The best thing the movie has going for it is the talents of its two leads. Bruce Willis plays the hero, Alan Rickman plays the villain and if anything in this movie rises above the level of cliché it is their performances. Willis infuses McClane with some personality, delivering wisecracks which bring a smile to your face. Rickman makes Hans into a rather unique villain, a detestable guy to be sure but one with some serious intelligence and cunning. Unfortunately these two main characters spend very little time actually squaring off with one another, McLane spending the bulk of the movie dealing with a bunch of anonymous bad guys you really don't care about. Supporting characters offer very little support. Aside from McClane and Hans there's not much there. Reginald VelJohnson has a few good moments playing an LAPD officer who comes onto the scene. Unfortunately he is soon overshadowed by a deputy police chief character whose stupidity is just mind-boggling. Any momentum the movie threatens to gather comes to a screeching halt anytime this guy opens his mouth. Then some FBI guys show up and remarkably they're even worse. There's a lot of stupidity outside Nakatomi Plaza. And there aren't enough interesting things happening inside the building. Die Hard is a movie which is considered to be a standout in the action movie genre, a classic. The truth is it's a rather ordinary movie.