Bruce Willis plays a New York cop visiting Los Angeles to see his estranged wife (Bonnie Bedelia), an ambitious executive working for a Japanese company; he arrives at her company’s Christmas Eve party in Century City just as a band of a dozen terrorists, headed by Alan Rickman, are taking over the building. A serviceable if rather overextended and overblown adventure thriller (1988), with Willis stripped for action like Rambo and doing his best as the only hope of the hostages held captive, this features a spectacular Cecil B. De Mille-like conclusion and makes good use of its skyscraper set (portions of which exhibit a Frank Lloyd Wright influence), but the script by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, adapted from Roderick Thorp’s novel Nothing Lasts Forever, is fairly routine, and most of the wit consists of showing the naivete of police and FBI officials outside and characters calling one another dickhead. John McTiernan, who directed, manages to keep this monolith moving. With Reginald Veljohnson, Paul Gleason, and Hart Bochner. (JR)