Die Hard Review

John McTiernan's real innovation was making the building the antagonist. Nakatomi Plaza is established as legible geography in the first act, thirty floors of unfinished construction, elevator shafts and air ducts, so every later move has a place you can locate on a mental map. That clarity is why the film still plays when its imitators do not. Bruce Willis rebuilt the action lead from the ground up as a man who is frightened, sweating, bleeding from the feet and talking constantly to keep himself calm, and the barefoot glass sequence works because the vulnerability was planted two reels earlier.

Alan Rickman, in his first film role, plays Hans Gruber as a bored aesthete only pretending to be a terrorist, and his flat appreciation of a good suit hands the villain more personality than the plot required. Jan de Bont lights the tower in orange sodium and hard shadow, and Reginald VelJohnson gives the radio voice on the other end a genuine interior life.

The weakest material is everyone outside the building: the two FBI agents both named Johnson are broad cartoons, and Deputy Chief Robinson exists only to be wrong on schedule. Inside, nothing is wasted. The detonator cord, the watch and the tape on the machine gun all come back.