All spoilers are unmarked!
- Hans Gruber on the outside seems like a nice evil man, but in the inside lays an eviler man whose ultimate plan was to blow the roof where the hostages were during the FBI's tradeoff and walk away in the confusion.
- Takagi's murder, where Hans blows his brains out when he fails to divulge the vault code. To make things worse, John sees the entire thing and was in no position to save his life.John: "Why the fuck didn't you stop them, John? Because then you'd be dead, too, asshole!"
- John leaving Tony's body for the terrorists to find with a cryptic warning written across his shirt. Fritz's mortified expression as the elevator opens says it all.
- Watch closely and you'll sometimes see bits of flesh come off the terrorists as McClane takes them out one by one.
- John forced to escape through the vents, nearly falling to his death inside the main shaft. It was purely dumb luck that he was able to stop his fall before plunging to the bottom.
- In a similar vein, you have him jumping from the roof in order to avoid getting blown up by the helicopter: With only a firehose tied around his waist, and openly begging God to not let him die, John makes the jump... and the explosion dislodges the firehose's spool. It's only because of the rooftop's ledge that John didn't die then and there, but he only had a minute to break through the window before it came loose. And even after it falls, he has to desperately untie himself before it drags him back out.
- Ellis' murder. We see it coming it but the fact it shows that Hans is willing to kill someone "close" to John McClane just to prove a point.
- Also the moment directly afterwards where Hans lets John hear the screaming hostages and threatens to keep killing them one by one until John gives Hans what he wants. Notable because having seemed calm and collected for most of the film, the genuine fury in Hans' voice at that point is quite unnerving.Hans: [he puts the walkie talkie up to the screaming crowd, then yells into the walkie talkie] You hear that?! TALK TO ME! Where are my detonators? Where are they, or shall I shoot another one?! Sooner or later, I might get to someone you do care about!
John: Go fuck yourself, Hans.
- Also the moment directly afterwards where Hans lets John hear the screaming hostages and threatens to keep killing them one by one until John gives Hans what he wants. Notable because having seemed calm and collected for most of the film, the genuine fury in Hans' voice at that point is quite unnerving.
- John escaping the shootout and then dragging himself into a restroom as his foot leaves a huge trail of blood in its wake; not helped by the image of John removing the glass from the soles of his feet. Unsurprisingly, test audiences were reportedly horrified by this bit.
- The glass-removal-from-foot scene could have been even worse, though. There was apparently supposed to be a *SQUELCH* sound effect as the glass was pulled out. Luckily, it was considered so disgusting that the producers insisted it be removed.
- It gets even better later, when John leaps from the roof and slams against the glass, his bleeding foot leaving fresh bloodied stains all over before he blasts his way back inside the exploding tower.
- Not to mention his Indy Ploy of leaping off Nakatomi's roof with a fire hose tied to his waist to escape the rooftop explosion, in the hopes of swinging back in through a plate-glass window. It's a textbook Awesome Moment for sure, but does he have some cool-as-a-cucumber quip ready before he tries this insanely dangerous stunt? No, he's scared utterly shitless for his very life ("God, please don't let me die!").
- The eerie looped horn music
when Hans Gruber plummets to his death. - Karl is this through his entire pursuit of McClane, Death Glare and everything. Especially chilling is his final attempt to kill John, where he takes four bullets from Powell before he finally goes down - one of which hits him dead center in the forehead and ISN'T THE KILLING SHOT.
- The tension as Al unwittingly comes very close to being shot by the "friendly" gunman who's occupying the reception desk, that audiences are just starting to recover (or rising still further as John's last chance of alerting the authorities is about to fail unless he can get the cop's attention NOW!) from when he returns to his patrol car singing Christmas carols. Only to have a corpse crash down onto his vehicle, followed by a furious hail of high-powered bullets that he only eludes by blind-driving backwards off the edge of a parking deck.
