This summer, MovieJawn is counting down our 25 favorite action movies of all time! We will be posting a new entry each day! See the whole list so far here.

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

Though most modern discourse on Die Hard is centered on whether or not it is a Christmas movie, this conversation overlooks the fact that it is one of the greatest action movies of all time. In addition to being one of the greatest Summer blockbusters ever and one of those movies I watch every December (because it's obviously a Christmas movie, fight me). It's one of those movies I never get sick of and will watch anytime, anyplace. Die Hard is a movie that knows exactly what it is, and because of that it is able to function as a movie that is truly free. 

When I say Die Hard knows what it is, I mean that it knows the plot is dumb as hell but it works so well because it lets us walk in John McClain's shoes (or bare feet during the broken glass sequence). What would you do if you were visiting your estranged wife at her office Christmas party and European terrorists invaded the building and held everyone hostage? It's the sort of secret wish fulfillment every man dreams of: a chance to kick ass, take names, be the hero, and win back the woman they love. Granted, you would almost certainly earn a painful execution at the hands of Hans Gruber and his thugs, but hey, most action movies are also fantasy movies anyway so we can dream. 

Die Hard leans so hard into its own ridiculousness that it becomes a sort of highwire act that could slip into satire at any moment. Perhaps it was the success of Paul Verhoven's Robocop a year before that gave McTiernan the confidence to play such a silly premise with total seriousness. Ok, the most quotable line from this movie is "Yippy Ki-Yay motherfucker," but honestly that one line captures this movie's tone in a nutshell. It's equal parts "hell yeah" and that meme where the guy's head is caved in. It's all id. 

The engine that makes this run though is Bruce Willis. We now know Bruce Willis as one of cinema's great tough guys, but in the late 80s he was a TV star and the amount of grit on display in Die Hard must have been a shock for viewers who only knew him as the handsome charmer from Moonlighting. Willis' charm and wit cut through the seriousness of the plot to give it the swashbuckling edge it needs to succeed. Playing a script like Die Hard dead serious is a recipe for disaster. You enter Steven Seagal territory, and you only want that if your intent is to make a movie that is "so bad it's good."

What makes Willis' performance so great though is the tremendous work of his foil, the late great Alan Rickman. Rickman plays the German terrorist Hans Gruber as serious as cancer. In the hands of a lesser actor, Gruber would play as a caricature. He's certainly written as one. But Rickman elevates this character straight out of a pulp fiction novel into one of the great movie villains of all time. Watching this now nearly a decade after Rickman's passing, it makes my heart hurt that Rickman never got a chance to play a leading man. We just saw what fellow British character actor Bill Nighy could do with a leading role in 2023's Living, and you just know Rickman would have crushed it. Instead we can only look back and marvel at one of the great character actors of all time in one of his best roles.

Die Hard gets its flowers every December when the "Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie?" argument ramps back up, but that only distracts from the fact that Die Hard shows up on every Greatest Action Movies of All Time list that you can google. And it's there because it doesn't pretend to be a smart movie masquerading as a dumb movie. It's an insanely fun movie aware of its own dumbness, and it doesn't matter that it's dumb because it's so much fun. Die Hard's legacy seems to grow every year, and it's a movie I think about anytime I go into a hotel room and do the "fist with your toes" bit or anytime one of the kids (read: my clumsy ass) drops a glass on the kitchen floor and I pretend to go full John McClain. Die Hard spawned a franchise like most summer blockbusters, and while those movies are just fine, they don't capture the magic of that first time around. And honestly, they couldn't if they tried. You can't catch lightning in a bottle twice.