We’re back with another 3-act structure analysis. Last time I did one of these, it was a deep dive into Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. But three-act structure doesn’t just apply to books written hundreds of years ago. To underscore that point, I thought I’d switch things up and do a three-act analysis of Die Hard, one of my favorite movies of all time.
Spoiler Alert! Okay, I always have to do one of these spoiler alert warnings, because the last thing I want is to ruin a book or movie for someone else. So consider this your spoiler warning. If you haven’t watched Die Hard (for shame!) go stream it now.
Okay, let’s dive into our analysis. But first, here’s a quick diagram showing the key components of the three-act structure. For an in-depth look at the three-act structure and how it works, check out this article on our website.
ACT 1: On Christmas Eve, NYPD officer John McClane arrives in LA to see his estranged wife, Holly. They’re still married, but his wife has moved to the West Coast for a fancy job and has taken the kids with her. McClane gets picked up in a limo by a driver called Argyle who takes him to Nakatomi Plaza. When they get to Nakatomi Plaza, Argyle offers to stay and wait for McClane, in case the reunion with his wife doesn’t go well and he needs a ride elsewhere. Let’s run through the five promises.
CHARACTER: John McClane is your typical tough guy action hero character. He’s a great cop and the kind of person you want to have on your side in a crisis, but when it comes to matters of the heart, he’s a bit clueless.
VOICE: Since it’s a film, we don’t really have a voice per se, but we do have a mood. It starts out very Christmas-y with holiday music, decorations, and people having fun at the Christmas party… but we get the uneasy feeling that something evil is brewing. Even the music in some spots turns a bit dark. We also see snippets of the bad guys starting to put their plan into action.
WORLD: With the exception of a couple of short scenes, the bulk of the movie takes place in Nakatomi Plaza, a large, fancy office building in Century City. At the start of the movie, the employees of the Nakatomi Corporation are having their Christmas party.
PROBLEM: McClane’s wife has moved across the country, but he’s a New York cop through and through. How can they possibly make this relationship work? When McClane arrives at Nakatomi Plaza, he discovers his wife has been using her maiden name (Holly Gennaro), further cementing that their relationship is on the rocks.
EVENT: Upon arriving at Nakatomi Plaza, McClane goes up to his wife’s office. He meets his wife and one of her coworkers, Harry Ellis, who brags about the Rolex Holly got from the company as a holiday present. McClane washes up, takes off his shoes and squishes the carpet beneath his feet, making “fists with [his] toes.” (This is something a fellow passenger on his plane recommended to feel better after a long flight.)
PIVOT POINT 1: Thieves—who behave like terrorists—enter the building and take all the Nakatomi employees hostage, including McClane’s wife. McClane is still in the bathroom and when he hears the commotion, he manages to stay hidden and escape to another floor. At first he’s unsure of what to do—after all, he’s a lone, unarmed cop while the bad guys all have machine guns pointed at the hostages—but then he has an idea. If he pulls the fire alarm, he’ll also summon the cavalry because the fire department will have to respond. He pulls the alarm, thereby alerting the bad guys to his presence.
ACT 2: The bad guys manage to convince the emergency responders that there is nothing wrong and they turn back. Now criminal mastermind Hans Gruber and his goons know that someone is there in the building with them and the cat-and-mouse game begins. Throughout Act 2 McClane manages to hold his own against the bad guys. He sneaks into various places, trying to collect as much intel as he can about them.
One of the things that keeps the story moving throughout Act 2 is the supporting cast, which becomes increasingly more important as the story evolves. Let’s take a closer look at the supporting characters who come into play in Act 2.
HANS GRUBER & HIS CREW: The most significant supporting character in the story is our villain, Hans Gruber. We don’t know much about Hans except that he’s a criminal mastermind and his focus is 100% on getting the job done. He doesn’t have any grand political purpose—all he wants is to steal the bearer bonds that are in the vault at Nakatomi Plaza, and he will do whatever it takes to make that happen.
Throughout Act 2, he continually sends one or more of his goons after McClane, but McClane thwarts them and starts to pick them off one by one. In addition to decimating the ranks of the bad guys, he also managed to take a radio (so he can now communicate with the outside world) as well as a machine gun and other supplies.
At one point (late in Act 2), Hans separates from his men and goes to the roof to check on some explosives. While he’s there, he comes across McClane and pretends he’s a hostage who also managed to escape. He and McClane talk for a bit and McClane gives him a gun, at which point he turns on McClane and tries to shoot him. But McClane has tricked him and the gun isn’t loaded. Hans manages to escape when his men arrive and go after McClane. They shoot through glass partitions leaving shattered fragments everywhere, forcing McClane to walk over them in his bare feet to get away.
HOLLY GENNARO: While she is captured by Hans Gruber and his men, Holly Gennaro (McClane’s wife) is not particularly active, but she does take on an important role. After Hans kills the office head, Mr. Takagi, she becomes a leader of sorts among the hostages, negotiating with Hans for certain necessities. She also keeps her identity as John McClane’s wife a secret because if Hans is aware of their relationship, he could use her to get to McClane.
AL POWELL: Perhaps the most important new character in Act 2 is Al, a sergeant who gets called in to Nakatomi Plaza to check things out. At first, when he gets there it seems like everything is fine, but then McClane gets his attention by dropping the corpse of a bad guy onto his car. McClane and Al form an alliance as they talk over the radio. Al becomes a liaison between McClane and the outside world. We later learn that Al refuses to pull his gun on anyone because he once shot someone by mistake.
ARGYLE: We don’t see much of Argyle throughout the beginning of Act 2, but periodically we get snippets of him in his limo, listening to music and talking to his girlfriend on the phone. At first, he is completely oblivious to what is happening in the building above the garage. It is only when he sees a news report about Nakatomi Plaza on the limo TV that he realizes what is going on. Unfortunately, he can’t get out of the garage because all the gates are closed, so he quietly waits in the limo.
MIDPOINT: The police finally realize there’s something serious going on. The deputy chief arrives with the SWAT team and they prepare to attack the building. Both Al and McClane know that an attack would be a disaster because the criminals are too well-armed. The deputy chief refuses to listen and the SWAT team attacks anyway. They get completely destroyed by the criminals and in the middle of the fight, McClane asks Hans to let the SWAT team pull back but Hans orders his men to fire again.
McClane is furious. He takes some explosives he got off one of the criminals and builds a makeshift bomb, throwing it down an elevator shaft. It creates a massive explosion and kills two of the criminals. For a moment it seems like McClane has had a small victory, but when he calls on the radio, the Deputy Chief gets angry at him.
This midpoint is an example of a temporary triumph. The character has a moment of victory where it seems like they’ve gotten what they want, but that triumph is short-lived. In this case, because it’s an action movie, we don’t have much of a moment of self-reflection. The emphasis is on the temporary triumph and we get right back to the action afterwards.
PIVOT POINT 2: This plot point occurs over the course of a series of tightly woven scenes. McClane is wounded and his feet are bleeding from the broken glass. He and Al talk over the radio and Al confesses to him why he had a desk job. This sequence of scenes is a moment of vulnerability for both Al and McClane. At this point, McClane is at his lowest and it looks like the thieves have won. In his darkest moment, McClane asks Al to give his wife a message:
“She was the best thing that ever happened to a bum like me. She’s heard me say I love you a thousand times, but she never got to hear this…Honey…I’m sorry.”
This is just about as classic a Dark Night of the Soul monologue if there ever was one. After giving Al this message, in true action hero fashion, McClane rallies his strength and continues to go after Hans and his crew.
Interestingly enough, McClane and Al have opposite trajectories for their stories and they are almost mirror images of each other as characters. Al is a super-supportive husband, stopping at the convenience store on his way home to pick up snacks for his pregnant wife. At the same time, because of his accident on the job, he’s afraid to draw his gun on anyone and needs to regain his confidence as a cop. McClane, on the other hand, has the cop thing down and is taking on a building full of criminals all by himself. His problem is that he needs to be more supportive of his wife. It’s no surprise that both Al and McClane verbalize their weaknesses during this sequence of scenes at the second pivot point, or Dark Night of the Soul.
ACT 3: As the crisis for Act 3 builds, we get more and more quick cuts from one scene to another. This gives us the sense that multiple things are happening at the same time. Here’s a summary:
A few of Hans’ men take the hostages up to the roof but the roof has been rigged with explosives. McClane, thinking his wife is among the hostages, heads to the roof as well. Meanwhile, Hans now has Holly and he takes her away from the roof to the (now open) vault. At the same time, a couple of Hans’ goons have been loading the bearer bonds from the vault into a truck.
Karl, whose brother was killed earlier in the film (and now has a particular vendetta against McClane), goes after him in the stairwell to the roof and tries to kill him. He and McClane fight and it seems like Karl is dead. McClane goes to the roof in search of his wife.
McClane gets the hostages off the roof, but he’s cornered by an FBI helicopter and he knows the roof is about to blow. Just in the nick of time, he jumps off the roof tied to a fire hose and manages to break in through one of the windows on a floor below.
Just before the climax, one of the criminals takes a truck (now loaded with bearer bonds from the vault) and gets ready to get away. Argyle, who has been hanging out in the garage all this time, crashes the limo into the truck and foils the escape.
CLIMAX: McClane comes after Hans to get his wife. He surrenders and it looks like everything is over when he pulls a concealed gun he has duct taped to his back and shoots Hans. The wounded Hans falls out a window, hanging onto Holly’s watch. He pulls a gun, trying to take Holly and McClane down with him, but McClane unlatches the watch clasp just in time and Hans falls to his death.
ENDING TYPE: This is a happy ending because McClane gets what he wants (to stop the thieves and save the hostages) and he still wants that at the end of the film.
DENOUEMENT: As McClane and his wife walk out of Nakatomi Plaza, Karl (who didn’t die previously) ambushes them and tries to kill them. Al shoots Karl and saves McClane and Holly, thus tying up the loose end of his story. Then Argyle comes tearing out of the garage and takes McClane and Holly off in the limo.
RULE OF 3: There is a Rule of 3 that spans the entire movie, starting at the beginning of Act 2 and going through to the very end. There are three instances where an individual hostage is in peril and McClane wants (or tries) to save them. The first is Mr. Takagi, who gets taken by Hans right at the start of Act 2 so that the criminals can get the code to the vault. When he doesn’t reveal the code, Hans kills him. At that point in the story, McClane has not yet pulled the fire alarm and revealed his presence to Hans and his crew. He’s furious at himself for not trying to stop Takagi’s murder but he also knows there’s nothing he could have done.
The second instance is with Harry Ellis, one of Holly’s co-workers, who tries to negotiate with Hans by saying he and McClane are old friends. In the process, Ellis gives up information to the criminals about McClane, including his name and the fact that he’s a police officer. Knowing that this is not going to end well for Ellis, McClane insists he doesn’t know him but Hans doesn’t believe it. Ellis tries to smooth-talk his way through the situation and ends up getting killed.
The third and final instance is when Holly gets taken by Hans at the end of the film. At that point, Hans has put together that Holly is McClane’s wife and he kidnaps her as added insurance so he and his crew can get away. Unlike the two previous instances where McClane was unable to save the hostage, in this case, he successfully saves his wife.
CONCLUSION: It’s indisputable that Die Hard is one of the tightest, most perfectly plotted films out there. The three acts are well-paced and the two pivot points include both external events and internal choices from the protagonist. The only thing it might be missing is that moment of introspection at the midpoint, which plays out purely as a Temporary Triumph without much self-reflection. That said, because this is a high-action film it makes sense that McClane does not have time to pause and reflect because he has to go after the bad guys and save his wife.
This film also adheres closely to Chekov’s gun, a principle in which every element must be significant to the story. Notice that not a single detail gets introduced that doesn’t have payoff later in the film. For example, the Rolex watch that we see mentioned briefly at the beginning becomes a key detail in the climax of the film. Also, Argyle, who all but disappears for most of the film, only to reappear at a key moment when one of the bad guys is about to get away and he thwarts the escape. Finally, when McClane makes “fists with [his] toes,” it means he’s barefoot when the criminals attack. This means he spends most of the film running around barefoot and later when they shoot the glass, it injures his feet. As you can see, not a single detail is added to the film that does not have follow-through later.
Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!
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