Citizen Kane of action movies!

Rating: 10/10 (26 January 2004)

It can not be underestimated enough, or even said enough, but Die Hard is one of the best Hollywood action thrillers ever made. Not only is it a gripping slice of suspense with many great set pieces and wonderful performances (yes, wonderful performances) by the cast that includes Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia and Reginald Veljohnson, but it sets in stone many of the hallmarks that sixteen years later we all come to associate with big budget action movies. Action sequences involving machine guns and lots of destruction, check. A classy villain, check. The evil henchman with a hatred of the hero, check. A damsel in distress that has an emotional connection to the hero, in this case the wife, check. Lastly, a wise cracking hero that has a pun or a joke for every situation he gets out off, check. It's all here and would pave the way for two sequels (a third is in development) and action movies with the same motif. Only Die Hard does it so well. You can't accuse this film of being cliched, it created the cliches and they only became cliches when Arnie, Sly and Van Damme jumped on them.
Bruce Willis makes an endearing action hero. He isn't the action hero who can sustain anything and survive everything unscathed. The character of John McClane is not muscle bound killing machine. He is just a man wanting to get his marriage back on track and not, instead, be trying to survive being killed by German hostage takers. Willis succeeds in making McClane a likable character, his mild mannered delivery of his dialog and magnificent manner of delivering one liners is spot on and it's no surprise he became a huge movie star after this. Alas the film is stolen by Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber the villain who is clever, vicious (witness the killing of Takagi) and great, great fun. So entertaining is Rickman's performance that somewhere deep inside you kind of want him to win. The cold blooded nature of Hans when he kills Takagi (one of the most graphic murders I have seen in a mainstream film) and Ellis through to the sense of awe when he and his fellow crooks break the fault of the Nakatomi building makes Hans one of the best villains in a film and marks Rickman out as a great actor.
Director John McTiernan handles this all very well and has crafted a genuine classic action film which like The Matrix in later years, paved the way for a particular breed of action film. Spectacular, fun and gripping Die Hard is simply magnificent and sixteen years on is still a classic piece of the action genre.
Yippe-ky-yay!