Die Hard

No. Everything the genre did for the next twenty years came out of this film, and the imitations were so numerous that pitching a thriller as "Die Hard on a boat" or "Die Hard on a train" became an actual industry shorthand.

What it changed was the hero. The action star of the mid-eighties was a physique with a rifle. McClane is a tired New York cop with marriage trouble who spends the film barefoot, bleeding, and frightened, talking to himself in air ducts because there is nobody else to talk to. He wins by improvising badly and getting lucky, and he is in genuine pain throughout. Willis was a television comedy actor when he was cast, which is the reason the part works and the reason the studio marketing barely showed his face.

The other half is Alan Rickman, in his first film, playing Hans Gruber as a bored, well-read thief who is contemptuous of everyone including his own men. The script gives the villain better lines than the hero, lets him pretend to be a hostage, and never asks the audience to find him frightening rather than clever.

A useful piece of trivia explains the odd shape of the plot: it adapts Roderick Thorp's 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, which was a sequel to a book already filmed with Frank Sinatra, so contractually the role had to be offered to Sinatra first. He was in his seventies and declined. And yes, it is a Christmas film. The argument has been running for thirty-seven years and the film is explicitly set on Christmas Eve, so the burden of proof is not on the people saying yes.