What Makes a 'Die Hard' Movie a 'Die Hard' Movie?

We can’t help it; it’s become ingrained in all of us. We hear the first few bars of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy or hear some rambunctious cowboy-type spout “yippee ki yay,” and our thoughts immediately turn to Die Hard.
John McClane embarks on his fifth (mis)adventure this week in John Moore’s A Good Day to Die Hard. This time around, John is in Russia and ends up inadvertently teaming with his son Jack to stop a nuclear weapon from falling into the hands of some very unsavory characters. What is it about this series and this character that hasallowed him to remain alive and well in the imaginations of audiences 25 years after the first film? To understand the longevity of this franchise, it is important to not only to analyze the appeal of the first film, but also to understand how its defining characteristics have been stretched, altered, and redefined.
Ordinary Guy Extraordinary Situation
Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart were Alfred Hitchcock’s go-to leads for many years. Why? Because they embodied his prototypical hero; the ordinary man in the extraordinary situation.
Bruce Willis as John McClane is simply the action movie iteration of that same character. While he too is the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time, contemporary audiences connect with him because he is not as passive or out of his element as Hitch’s heroes. His law enforcement training casts him in a natural protector role that compels him to forge headlong into trouble. This has been a threadline through all four existing movies.
http://www.hollywood.com/news/movies/55000945/bruce-willis-die-hard-franchise-john-mcclane