The most unbelievable scene in the original Die Hard is the one where John McClane avoids an explosion by jumping off of the roof of Nakatomi Plaza, swinging down on a fire hose to a window below him. That's it. McClane even has to shoot the window open because it didn't break when he slammed into it. This is reasonably realistic: skyscraper windows are not supposed to shatter when objects make contact with them. On the spectrum of "crazy shit that happens to action movie characters," this is pretty far down the list.

And even though it's implausible that, in real life, McClane would survive, we in the audience get the sense that McClane knows this, too. We see the anguish on his face, because he knows that the chances of this working are low. For such a low-stakes (in action-movie terms, at least) endeavor, it's extremely riveting. We can still ask ourselves, What would I do in this situation? The answer, again, is "die." But we like John McClane because he didn't die, even though he was terrified of dying.

Now, in A Good Day to Die Hard, there's a scene about 45 minutes into the movie in which McClane (along with his son, played by Jai Courtney, whom I did enjoy in this role) finds himself, once again, in a high-rise building. A helicopter is firing bullets into the room that the McClanes are in, so McClane and his son run at top speed toward the windows, break through, and jump into infinity. The two then crash though scaffolding at a high rate of speed (scaffolding that it's hard to believe they were aware existed), eventually falling into a chute of some kind and then landing safely on the ground without harm. McClane didn't think twice about this decision; there was no anguish at the thought of dying. He didn't even bother looking for a fire hose to swing from.

The man who jumped out of that window had no fear of dying because he knew that there was no way that he could possibly be killed. Watching this was no different than watching a Super Dave Osborne sketch: I'm sure he's going to complain, but he'll be fine. And this is only one of many instances that McClane defies death in ways that make jumping off a building with a fire hose, or running across broken glass while barefoot, look easy. (Let me repeat that for effect: the original movie made running across glass ... suspenseful!)