Yippee-Ki-Yay, motherf***er.

Rating: 10/10 (23 March 2014)

The idea is a great one for an action movie: A cop is trapped inside a skyscraper with a team of desperate terrorists. He is all that stands between them and their hostages. Give the terrorist leader brains and a personality, make one of the hostages the estranged wife of the cop and you've got a movie.
Starring Bruce Willis, it's about a New York cop who has flown out to Los Angeles for Christmas, and we quickly learn that his marriage was put on hold after his wife (Bonnie Bedelia) left for the Coast to accept a great job offer. She is now a vice president of the multinational Nakatomi Corp., and shortly after Willis makes his surprise entrance at her office party, the terrorists strike.
They, too, are a multinational group, led by a German named Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) who is well-dressed and has a neatly trimmed beard and talks like an intellectual and thinks he is superior to the riffraff he has to associate with. He has a plan that has been devised with clockwork precision involving the theft of millions of dollars in negotiable bonds, and it is only after Willis starts causing trouble that he is forced to take the Nakatomi employees as hostages.
The terrorists are skilled and well-armed, and there are a lot of them. Willis' strategy involves keeping them off guard with lightning attacks from his hiding place on an upper floor of the building that is still under construction. This plan involves the deployment of a great many stunts and special effects, such as when Willis swings through a plate glass window on the end of a fire rope or when he drops plastics explosives down the elevator shaft.
Willis remains in constant radio contact with a police officer on the ground (Reginald Veljohnson) who tries to keep his morale up. This is where the movie gives us human interaction to who John McClane really is: he is a screw up, and he is afraid to do this mission; however, he's a cop, and he's doing what he was trained to do. This makes him different from other action stars like Schwarzenegger or Stallone because he is human. Those scenes with his bloody feet cut from glass is painful to watch.
It's a great action movie that has enough stunts and action to keep you invested, and enough interaction between the main characters to make the movie have humanistic elements to it. It's considered one of the best action movies ever, and for a reason.