Die Hard (1988)

Die Hard (1988)
 Dir. John McTiernan
 Writ. Jeb Stuart
 Stars: Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman
 Rated R
 131 mins.
 Action
 IMDB 8.3

This is one of my favorite action movies. You all know by now I love a good action movie. What isn’t to like about bombs and gunfights and badass fight scenes and bad guys getting their asses handed to them?!

When it comes to bad guys getting their asses handed to them, nobody need look further than John McClane.

Die Hard tells the story of the aforementioned badass. McClane (Bruce Willis) is a NYPD cop who has flown out to LA to visit his wife and kids for Christmas and he shows up at his wife’s office’s Christmas party at Nakatomi Plaza. While he’s there, the building gets taken over by German terrorists led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) and it’s up to him to save his wife and all the other hostages before the terrorists or the incompetent LAPD can mess everything up. With only the help of a cop he gets in contact across the radio to, Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), McClane single-handedly takes on the German terrorists whose motive isn’t quite what it seems.

This is a classic. There’s just something about the late 80s and the 90s action movies. They’re always full of a more basic and convincing plot. These days, it’s either an spy movie or a conspiracy movie it seems. There’s rarely just a ‘some bad guys have to be taken care of, here’s a badass who wants to do that’ plot. Die Hard is interesting enough to make you care about the plot, but mostly it’s ‘fight scenes, guns, and explosions’ driven.

And that’s EXCELLENT!

Alan Rickman makes a wonderful bad guy, Bruce Willis makes an awesome cop, and everybody knows the immortal words of John McClane: “Yippy kay yay, motherfucker!”

My Rating: 9/10