Die Hard

It's Christmas time in L.A., and there's an employee party in progress on the 30th floor of the Nakatomi Corporation building. The revelry comes to a violent end when the partygoers are taken hostage by a group of terrorists headed by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), who plan to steal the 600 million ...more

John McTiernan's Die Hard introduced a type of character that hadn't been seen much in big-budget action films of the 1980s: the working-class hero. Apart from Sylvester Stallone's first Rambo movie and some of the cruder, decidedly low-budget martial arts movies starring Chuck Norris, there wasn't a precedent for Bruce Willis' gruff John McClane. In contrast to its predecessors, Die Hard was such a high-profile production that Willis was suddenly elevated to the status of cultural icon, not ...more