Fuzzy Mushroom › Films of 1988 › Die Hard
Spore Score: 85/100 · The Pros: 82 · The Punters: 93 · 3 sources
Must-see. Spore Score 85/100. The Punters rate it 11 points higher than The Pros.
By Fuzzy Mushroom · Updated 11 November 2026 · The Pros 82 · The Punters 93 · Spore Score 85 · How we write our takes
Die Hard is one of the few action films that both camps rate as a classic. The Punters give it 93, The Pros 82, and the Spore Score is 85. The 11-point gap is modest: audiences adore it, critics admire it. Whether it is a Christmas film is the only argument left.
New York police officer John McClane (Bruce Willis) flies to Los Angeles on Christmas Eve to see his estranged wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) at her company's party in the Nakatomi Plaza skyscraper. A gang led by the cultured, ruthless Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) takes the building and its guests hostage. McClane, barefoot and alone, is the only one who got away.
The film works because McClane is vulnerable. He gets hurt, he is frightened, and he talks to himself and to a sympathetic LAPD sergeant, Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), over a radio. Rickman, in his first film role, makes Gruber one of the great screen villains: funny, elegant and always a step ahead. Director John McTiernan uses the half-finished tower brilliantly, from lift shafts and air ducts to the roof, and the plot clicks together like a watch.
The supporting characters are broad, especially the TV reporter and the deputy police chief, and the violence is heavy by the standards of a holiday favourite. The sequels have made the formula look more familiar than it was in 1988.
It is set on Christmas Eve at a Christmas party, it has Christmas music, and the villains are undone partly with sticky tape and wrapping paper. We say yes.
Die Hard is loosely based on Roderick Thorp's novel Nothing Lasts Forever. It made Willis, then best known for the TV comedy Moonlighting, a film star.
Must-see, with a Spore Score of 85. The template for a hundred imitators, and still better than all of them. Yippee-ki-yay.
Genres: Action, Thriller/Crime.
| Site | Side | Site score | Adjusted /100 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rotten Tomatoes | The Pros (critics) | 94% | 91 |
| Metacritic | The Pros (critics) | 72/100 | 79 |
| IMDb | The Punters (audiences) | 8.2/10 | 93 |
The Pros' sites said 79, adjusted to 82; The Punters' sites said 82, adjusted to 93. Every review site has habits: some score high, some low, some bunch everything in the middle. We measure each site's habit across thousands of films and iron it out, so a 7/10 from a generous site and a 7/10 from a harsh one aren't treated the same. Then critics and audiences each get one figure, and the Spore Score sits between them. How the Spore Score works.
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