When Die Hard dropped in 1987, it took a few years for the industry to figure out the formula, making Die Hard ripoffs an exclusively 90s affair. The buzzphrase "Die Hard on a ____" replaced "One's a ____, one's a ____" as John McClanery dethroned buddy-coppery as the format of choice for action connoisseurs. Then, as the 90s gave way to the X-treme shaky-cam shenanigans of the 2000s, the genre disappeared, never to be revisited. For Die Hard ripoffs have a simple, yet tricky formula: a group of thugs take over an enclosed location with one brave, resourceful protagonist trapped inside it, who must then take them out one at a time as both sides adjust to their changing fortunes in a cat-and-mouse game that ends with explosions and some manner of catharsis for the vindicated hero. Die Hards 3 and onward ditched this conceit altogether and had Bruce Willis running around whole cities, maybe for the same reason the genre as a whole dried up: producers could no longer think of things to have Die Hard on. It's odd that 90s nostalgia seldom highlights this cycle of flicks, so here is the definitive ranking of this little-fêted genre.
THE GOOD
Speed
Die Hard on a: bus. And in an elevator. And on a train.
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| "Woah" - Ted Theodore Logan |
Perhaps the best of the cycle is also the least Die Hardy, since it omits the team of bickering terrorists for one man: Dennis Hopper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), as himself.
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| Respectable Bipartisans when u don't want to bomb Iran (2024, colourised). |
On the other hand, the location is even more confined than Die Hard's office tower, since most of the movie takes place on a bus driven by this guy's forehead:
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| I'm not even h8ing; that's a powerful physiognomy. I bet this guy's slayed many cave bears. |
Hopper has planted a bomb on the bus that activates as it hits 50mph and will explode the moment it drops below, forcing the driver to maintain a consistently high Speed (1994) in LA traffic, making this the most implausible premise for a movie since John Wayne played Genghis Khan that one time. Sadly, Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves show up to ruin Hopper's fun, but he will live forever in our hearts as one of the movies' most inventive pranksters.
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| No ""hero"" ever cracks a smile like this. |
Speed's runaway success ensured a sequel which immediately pumped the brakes on the series by being unwatchably awful, but it's more like a 70s disaster flick than a Die Hard ripoff anyway, so no need to waste time on it. Not when we have gems like:
Executive Decision
Die Hard on a: plane.
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| An early expository flashback scene features this Orthodox priest emptying mags at someone for some reason. It's never explained, and might as well be stock footage. I love this. |
Though doubtless hindered at the box office with the most huh? what? title in the cycle, Decision distinguishes itself as the sole ripoff to prioritise suspense over action. Kurt Russell's (Tango & Cash) tuxedo'd think tank wonk must team up with Steven Seagal's hard-bitten colonel and his team of military brodogs to infiltrate a hijacked plane. But will Russell and Seagal's contentious past endanger the mission?
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| It's essential to have lots of nice orange clouds in your plane movies. |
Aided by excellent performances from Russell, Oliver Platt, Joe Morton and a pre-Oscar Halle Berry (Die Another Day) as the brave stewardess caught up in the scenario, Decision wrings suspense from devices as hokey as the old wire-cutting bomb disarming and forced landing routines, tightening the spring until it pops off at the final act.
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| The villain looks exactly like if you put Michael Ironside through one of those race-swap filters to make him an Arab terrorist. |
Ironically, Decision also stands out from the crowd for having the villains just be actual terrorists, whereas most of the ripoffs follow the original Die Hard's lead in having the same "twist" where the villains are only pretending to be terrorists to cover a heist by disguising it as something far worse that will definitely draw far more attention to themselves. This twist is stupid but so ubiquitous that I spent most of my first viewing waiting for it to drop. Yes, even in the 90s, sUbVeRtInG the cliché was the real cliché, while playing anything straight was the exception.
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| The terrorists wrote everything on their diagram in Arabic except, helpfully, WASHINGTON D.C. |
As Steve Sailer likes to remind us, George W. Bush actually campaigned on dropping profiling from airport security procedures, and a gate guard on 9/11 later admitted to Oprah that he clocked one of the terrorists but let him go on his merry way because he didn't want to be a mean raycist. If only more people had seen Executive Decision, such preening libtardry wouldn't have expedited 9/11 and the ensuing round of wars that killed a million people. Oopsie poopsie!
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| And all stewardesses would look like this. |
Sudden Death
Die Hard in an: ice hockey stadium.
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| Least violent hockey game. |
If I told you there was a movie in which Jean Claude Van Damme fights a 6'1" woman in a penguin costume, then plays hockey to save his kids, you would assume I was describing an especially surreal dream I had. Yet it exists:
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| Yes. |
Van Damme plays an ex-fireman relegated to fire marshal duty at the big game between Pittsburgh and Chigaco, where the VP of the United States is captured and the building rigged with explosives by the evil Joshua Foss, played by Powers Booth, whose name is "Powers". I don't know how many pairs of Ray-Bans you're required to own to name your kid "Powers", but it paid off, as his sardonic villain is a very fun and menacing antagonist for Van Damme, who for some reason plays his role with the deathly seriousness of a funeral director.
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| Sure, when Powers says this to little girls he's a cool villain, but when I do it I'm "ruining Halloween". |
Sudden Death hews close to the formula but keeps things fresh with oddball highlights like the sequence in which Van Damme hides from goons by donning the goalie's outfit only to find himself press-ganged into service on the ice.
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| The look of instant regret. |
No one went to see this and it's been completely forgotten, so we never got a sequel in which Van Damme has to save a football match, basketball game, polo match, monster truck rally, Wrestlemania, the Olympics, etc. - inexcusable since the '95 public showed up for Batman Forever and Waterworld. Maybe we do get the Hollywood we deserve.
Cliffhanger
Die Hard on a: mountain.
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| This is like the fourth best Die Hard ripoff of the 90s and it's better than everything released since 2019, and it's not even close. |
Sylvester Stallone was another well-established action star to try his hand at John McClane shenanigans, and Cliffhanger paid off, being a sleeper hit so popular it caught a parody in Ace Ventura 2. The mountain setting affords Cliffhanger spectacle and inventive action setpieces enviable even within the context of this high-production-value subgenre. Unlike Stallone's best 90s movie, Demolition Man, however, it's played pretty seriously and could use a few more laughs.
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| I found the scene where Sly impales a guy on a stalactite funny, but I'm me. |
Shrek's Lord Farquaad is the villain irritably trying to collect his money from a botched plane heist, with Stallone's mountaineering expert reluctantly roped in to save the innocents caught up in their blundering. Farquaad has the snitty sarcasm of Die Hard's Hans Gruber, but lacks the flair that makes Hans such an entertaining villain. Nonetheless you have to respect a film that looks this good and ends in a fistfight on a helicopter precariously jammed into the side of a mountain.
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| this is #cool |
THE MEH
Under Siege
Die Hard on a: battleship.
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| "I have two sides... the nicest guy you'll ever meet, and a twisted fucking cycle path" - Steven Seagal |
Mostly remembered for the scene where Baywatch hottie Erika Eleniak emerges from a cake, Under Siege follows an average day in the life of Steven Seagal as Navy cook Casey Rybeck, who finds himself locked in a freezer at the behest of the most flamboyantly insane cast of antagonists in the Die Hard ripoff cycle.
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| This was Admiral Rachel Levine in 1992. Feel old yet? |
Not one to take shit from cross-dressing Gary Busey or hippy burnout Tommy Lee Jones, Seagal escapes the freezer to team up with Eleniak, who improbably imbues her bratty sidekick with some fresh-faced charm.
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| Her anchor-shaped earrings are ridiculously adorable. |
Perhaps because there's not actually all that much you can do on a battleship logistically, the action is curiously underwhelming, but Seagal gets to show off in an anticlimactic knife fight with Jones, who looks about half his height and twice his age. This wouldn't be the first movie to pit a wooden hero against a villain of pure ham, but it would be one of them.
Air Force 1
Die Hard on a: plane.
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| Toy Story 1 lookin ass plane |
Another plane outing, Air Force 1 has the novel twist that it's the President of the United States doing the Bruce Willis tribute act (Harrison Ford). While this sounds like a good setup for a parody, it's inexplicably played straight to thunderously average results. I've seen it three times and can't remember anything about it. This would make it the perfect movie to watch on a long-haul flight, except...y'know...
THE UGHHH
Passenger 57
Die Hard on a: plane.
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| don't you h8 it when that happens? |
How might yet another plane flick distinguish itself, you ponder. What if I answered, "why, by means of cross-pollination with 70s blaxploitation beats that were laughably outdated even by 1992"? Wesley Snipes is the airline security expert extremely conveniently placed aboard a flight that gets hijacked by a Bri'ish villain, forcing him to save the day despite the bungling of buffoonish whitebois determined to slow his roll. The plane lands in a stereotypical hick town just so Snipes can be wrongfully arrested by strawman good ol' boys who call him BAWYH, because Hollywood's understanding of race relations is identical to a Tariq Nasheed wet dream.
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| "Nooo officer pleeease don't buck break me with your enormous BWC haha that would be awful" - Wesley Snipes |
Homoerotic ethnonarcissistic pandering aside, Passenger 57 is OKish, but with plane flicks already running up a surplus on the list, it's for completists only. The villain is fun though.
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| This line kills at speed dating. |
Under Siege 2: Dark Territory
Die Hard on a: train.
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| "Never ask a woman if the little man in the canoe is somewhere at the bottom of that enormous canyon" - Steven Seagal |
The sequel to Under Siege started life as a standalone script before being retooled into another Casey Rybeck adventure, to the indifference of all. Seagal's acting grows another set of rings as he imperturbably massacres the crew of mercenaries hijacking a train to wreak havoc with James Bondian orbital weapons. He's joined by his annoying niece and an annoyinger token black comic relief stereotype. Big Ed from Twin Peaks plays a heavy who is hyped up as a nasty piece of work throughout the movie but still gets steamrolled like a bitch in the end fight, because Seagal is as monotonously invincible as a 5'2" woman in any movie released after 2008. The other villain is Eric Bogosian, and in the movie's hands-down high point, he is killed when Seagal slams the sliding door of the helicopter he clings onto, severing all his fingers, causing him to fall to his death in a classic 90s giant orange fireball explosion. However, the fifth-hand DVD I bought for £1 for the purpose of this writeup had that graphic treat cut, meaning I paid £1 too much.
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| CGI "flames" haven't gotten any better. |
Die Hard 2
Die Hard in an: airport.
Can a sequel be a ripoff? Yes. McClane even bitches "how can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?" and it's obvious the writers were already running short of ideas, since they dredge up old characters and beats from the original to pad the runtime. Al has only a brief cameo but in an eye-rolling contrivance the reporter guy is brought back just to give Holly someone to beat up on again. The villains' plan is boring and their motivation is that they're too anti-c*mmunist(!)
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| You owe this man an apology. |
The highlight is probably the fight on the wings of a plane but Octopussy did it better 250 years ago, so everything about this one is skippable.
Con Air
Die Hard on a: plane.
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| No, mullets are not good "ironically". |
Con Air feels more like a Reddit bingo card than a real movie: it stars forced meme Nicolas Cage, has John Cusack's smarmy libtard (John Cusack) run rings around Colm Meaney's tough-guy strawman, and has Cage beat up a raypist while screaming "dOn'T tReAt WaHmEn ThAt WaY" (no, I'm not joking). The action is consistently well-executed, so if you can rescue your eyeballs from the back of your head, you might enjoy it.
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| Cusoyjak is supposed to be the voice of reason but the movie ends with the worst convict (Steve Buscemi) still at large, so Meaney's strawman was 100% vindicated in wanting to shoot the plane down, making this about the 200,000th movie that makes the opposite point than the one it's trying to. |
What was YUOR favourite Die Hard ripoff of the 90s??? Did I miss some??? Schnerp de derp!!!
