Die Hard

John McTiernan's 1988 masterpiece starring Bruce Willis grossed $140M on a $28M budget, inventing the trapped-in-a-building action subgenre. Bruce Willis as NYPD cop John McClane set the template for every reluctant action hero that followed. Compared to The Raid's intimate hand-to-hand combat, Die Hard's larger-scale action and witty one-liners outperform #2 by making the everyman hero iconic, with a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score that outpaces the average action film's 70%.