By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
The holiday season often devolves into a major argument, and we’re not talking about the one your weird uncle starts after having too much egg nog. No, this is the debate to end all debates: whether a certain action classic is a Christmas movie or not. At this point, though, the haters need to just admit that Die Hard is a holiday classic, and if you doubt that indisputable fact, streaming it for free on Tubi will most certainly change your mind.
Die Hard is a genuine cinematic masterpiece, and it earned its reputation as such long before the advent of streaming. The plot is beautifully streamlined: a New York detective heads to Los Angeles to rekindle the spark with his estranged wife, and that brings him to Nakatomi Tower, where she is enjoying a Christmas party with her coworkers. However, when mysterious bad guys take over the tower, the erstwhile detective discovers there’s no time for love as he becomes a one-man army taking on a legion of twitchy terrorists.
When you watch Die Hard on streaming, you’ll get to see some very familiar faces, including the late, great Alan Rickman as terrorist leader Hans Gruber. And for movie lovers of a certain age, it’s always great fun to see Reginald VelJohnson, the Family Matters patriarch who just can’t get away from playing iconic onscreen cops. But nobody shines more in this movie than Bruce Willis: casting him was a studio risk that paid off, transforming a television actor best known for the hit series Moonlighting into one of the most famous movie stars in the entire world.
If you’re hesitating to put Die Hard on for tonight’s streaming festivities, you’re probably asking what makes this movie so great. The short answer is that it partners killer action scenes with very smart storytelling, and it’s rewarding to see that our chief hero and villain are equally capable of surprising each other (not to mention the audience). The movie is full of quotable dialogue, but it never becomes a parody of itself, and that feels refreshing in a post-Avengers (or maybe we should say post “well, that just happened!”) world.
We’re not the only ones who love Die Hard, either: if you’re still on the fence about streaming it on Tubi, you should know that the movie has a wildly impressive 94 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes. Additionally, this Bruce Willis classic has a 94 percent audience score as well, proving that it was an outsized hit with just about everyone. That popularity helped a movie made for $25–35 million to earn about $140 million at the box office, kicking off an entire franchise of sequels.
If we’re being blunt, those sequels offered increasingly diminished returns, and your enjoyment of later entries will mostly come down to how much you enjoy seeing Willis doing his charismatic action guy routine. But the first Die Hard is a celebrated classic for a reason, and streaming it for free on Tubi will always be a better alternative than slurping up the latest made-for-streaming slop from Netflix. As an added bonus, this film’s holiday setting gives you the perfect excuse to put it on while you’re wrapping presents or just leaving milk and cookies out for Santa.
Will you find Die Hard lives up to the hype after streaming it, or will you find its topsy-turvy action plot a little outdated? You won’t know until you check it out on Tubi. Streaming it on this platform is completely free, and that’s the kind of price that will always make us channel our inner Willis while yelling, “Yippee ki‐yay.”
