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 Rambo movies and some of the cruder, decidedly low-budgeted, martial-arts movies starring Chuck Norris, there wasn't a precedent for Bruce Willis's 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 unlike Sean Connery and his alter ego James Bond. Willis and McTiernan can take credit for bringing back the kind of distinctly American, masculine swagger John Wayne used to bring to his roles, albeit with a dirtier lexicon of catch-phrases than Wayne ever would've used on camera. The director and his crew of special effects experts could also take credit for a series of explosions that rivaled the combined fire-power and energy expended in Wayne's The Hellfighters, Back To Bataan, The Sands of Iwo Jima, Chisum, and The Longest Day combined. It's a testament to Willis' star power that his work in this vein is still taken seriously at the box-office, as evidenced by Die Hard: With a Vengeance, and not yet an object of excessive burlesque or parody -- something that cannot be said of Stallone's 1990s action pictures. Bruce Eder