The 9 Best And Worst 'Die Hard' Knock-Offs

(This week marks the 30th anniversary of Die Hard, arguably the greatest action movie of all time. To celebrate, /Film is exploring the film from every angle with a series of articles. Today: examining the film's legacy through the numerous rip-offs and knock-offs it inspired in the '90s.)

If you've ever seen the Honest Trailer for Die Hard, then you may recall the lightning round of references at the end riffing on how it was "the original masterpiece that inspired countless knockoffs." Director John McTiernan's 1988 film redefined Bruce Willis as an action star and gave rise to a pervasive action-movie formula in which the proverbial one man *epic movie trailer voice* is trapped in a single setting with a bunch of bad guys.

Owing to this, the movie's title has become a metonym used to refer to other flicks with similar plots. "Die Hard on a plane, Die Hard on a train," etc. If you grew up during the heyday of '90s action movies like I did, then it's possible you may have been snapping open Blockbuster Video cases to watch some of these flicks at home in your living room before you ever even saw Die Hard or realized that it had influenced them.

As we celebrate its 30th anniversary here on /Film, let's take a look back at nine key instances from the '90s where Hollywood movies recapitulated the Die Hard formula and in some cases launched or reinvented the careers of other notable action movie stars and franchises. Viewed with an appreciation for genre history, these nine derivative actioners (coupled with some honorable mentions from the '90s and beyond) still hold rewatch value, while illuminating special aspects of Die Hard and showing how it was the gift that kept on giving.

Spoilers for all of these movies lie ahead.

In real life, Steven Seagal is now a Russian citizen who has been accused of sexual harassment in the last year by actresses like Julianna Margulies, Portia de Rossi, and Jenny McCarthy. He's been exiled largely to the direct-to-video market in the 21st century, but there was a time when Seagal ruled the roost as an action star and the movie that brought him into the mainstream is Under Siege.

It's a movie that's rightly been labeled "Die Hard on a battleship." The funny thing is, while Seagal is ostensibly the star of the film, his character — a Navy SEAL turned ship's cook — only has 41 minutes of screen time. It's actually Tommy Lee Jones, clad in a bandana, black shades, and a rhinestone-studded leather jacket, who steals the show here as terrorist Bill Strannix. Jones would re-team with director Andrew Davis the next year for his Oscar-winning role in The Fugitive. He was on the upswing, and with Gary Busey lending him zany support (at one point, Busey even appears in drag), he delivered a villain cut from the same scene-chewing cloth as Hans Gruber.

Like Die Hard, the villain's plan and the seemingly outmatched hero's attempts to foil it drive the whole plot of Under Siege. Disguised as an entertainer, Strannix hides in plain sight at first, similar to how Gruber effortlessly dons the American accent of "Bill Clay" to try and trick McClane. He's also one step ahead of negotiators, able to call up secret missile launch codes to show he's in control.

Honorable mention: Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. The third Die Hard film was originally supposed to be set on a cruise ship but after the success of Under Siege, it had to be reimagined. With Jeremy Irons playing the new surrogate Gruber, Die Hard with a Vengeance took to the streets for a furious New York cab ride, whereas Under Siege 2 was content to remain confined to a single location: namely, a train. By 1995, this series had become more Die Hard than Die Hard.

Cliffhanger recycled Renny Harlin, the director of Die Hard 2, for a movie with a clever title that immediately invokes suspense while also being appropriate to the movie's "Die Hard on a mountain" milieu. The VHS cover for this film literally showed Sylvester Stallone hanging off a cliff. With five Rocky films and three Rambo films behind him, Cliffhanger came at a time when Stallone was starting to branch out and diversify his action portfolio.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 fans who have never seen this film are in for a retroactive Ravagers reunion, as Michael Rooker (Yondu) plays the best friend of Stallone's character, Gabe. Both men are rangers who get conscripted at gunpoint into helping a gang of thieves whose plane has gone down, scattering three suitcases full of $100 million on a mountain in the Colorado Rockies. Like McClane, Gabe is a regular guy who's not normally cut out for this sort of thing.

Cliffhanger is the movie I always referred back to in my head when I heard that John Lithgow had been cast as a serial killer in Dexter. In the mid-to-late '90s, Lithgow was known as a comedic actor for his work on 3rd Rock from the Sun, the NBC sitcom where Joseph Gordon-Levitt also got his start. Yet as the leader of the bad guys in Cliffhanger, his ruthless, dead-eyed character exudes superior intelligence, much like Alan Rickman's did. Motivated by greed rather ideology, he's actually a truer corollary for Gruber, who only feigned terrorism as a robbery distraction.

Honorable Mention: Daylight (1996). Stallone's last film before his outside-the-box performance in Cop Land is a good example of the Die Hard scenario involving mother nature. This one's "Die Hard in a tunnel."

In Sudden Death, Jean-Claude Van-Damme re-teamed with the director of Timecop for one of the more ridiculous riffs on the Die Hard recipe that the action cinema of the 1990s produced. This one's "Die Hard in a hockey arena." Yes, it does feature a kidnapper dressed as the mascot for the Pittsburgh Penguins, and yes, Van Damme's martial arts-savvy fire marshal (just roll with it) does fight the penguin mascot, who tries variously to feed his nose into a meat-slicer, slide his face onto a sizzling stove, and dunk his head in a bubbling deep fryer.

Death by dishwasher: what a way to go. Van Damme's character is no stranger to playing dress-up, either, as the plot conspires to put him in goalie gear and have him take to the ice in the middle of Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals (all while a mad bomber holds the Vice President hostage in the owner's box above the rink). As much as the requisite member of the authorities on a phone outside the arena might say, "We are gonna do this by numbers," Sudden Death goes to some absurd lengths to distinguish itself.

To its credit, the movie does flip the script on foreign accents by giving the protagonist a French Canadian lilt and casting Powers Booth, a Texan, as the terrorist mastermind. This time the damsel in distress is the hero's daughter, and like Cliffhanger, there is a climactic showdown involving the hero, the villain, the damsel, and a helicopter. As much as these movies cribbed from Die Hard, they also cannibalized each other.

The AV Club called The Rock "the one good movie Michael Bay ever gave us." That might be a back-handed compliment, but it does seem to sum up the critical consensus about Bay's directorial work. The Rock (not to be confused with the new Dwayne Johnson Die Hard knockoff, Skyscraper) is one action movie that left an impression and that's got to count for something.

One of the things The Rock has going for it is the interplay between Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage's characters. John McClane may lack the physique of a bodybuilder but he does have detective-level police experience and that's more than can be said for Cage's lab rat, Dr. Stanley Goodspeed. Like Dr. David Grant in the previous entry on this list, Goodspeed is brought in as a consultant to a military unit (this time it's Navy SEALs, not Army Special Forces). He soon learns that he will have to accompany them to Alcatraz Island on what will eventually become a "Die Hard in a prison" mission.

The buddy-movie dynamic between him and Connery's character provides an interesting twist on the usual one-man Die Hard scenario. Having a corny schlub team up with the first big-screen James Bond allows for a different kind of wish fulfillment. It's as if Sgt. Al Powell (the character played by Family Matters actor Reginald VelJohnson in Die Hard) is tagging along with McClane and receiving life-coaching from him about what "winners" do with the prom queen. Ed Harris makes for a more principled, sympathetic Gruber surrogate but he's still after money ($100 million again).

Honorable mention: Con Air (1997). Yet another "Die Hard on a plane" movie, albeit one stacked with a who's who list of '90s character actors.

Popular tastes are ever-changing and in terms of box office supremacy, the great deluge of Die Hard knockoffs in the 1990s has largely given way to what's been called a "tsunami of superhero movies" in the 21st century. Still, there are a few high-profile examples of action films that have continued to carry the ball downfield from Die Hard into the new millennium. These three merit a mention before we wrap up.

Snakes on a Plane (2006). To paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson's character in Snakes on a Plane: "You know all those [Die Hard] scenarios we ran? Well, I'm smack in the middle of one we didn't think of." Maybe seeing Snake Plissken on a plane in Executive Decision planted the subliminal seed for this movie, which came along ten years later in an attempt to reverse-engineer a cult classic from an awesome-sounding title. Jackson does his thing but this is one of those ideas that might have made a better Grindhouse trailer than something stretched out to feature length.

Olympus Has Fallen (2013) and White House Down (2013). Like Deep Impact and Armageddon fifteen years earlier, Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down offered up competing tentpole releases with the same idea the same year. Now that "Die Hard on the President's plane" had already been done, the next logical move was for some able-bodied movie studio to crank out "Die Hard in the White House." So they did that ... twice. Of the two flicks, Olympus Has Fallen earns brownie points for being first out of the gate; having a star with more of an action-movie pedigree (Gerard Butler); getting Morgan Freeman to act as President again; and spawning a sequel (London Has Fallen). But be honest, would you really notice if you fell asleep on the plane during this movie and woke up in the middle of White House Down (or any other movie on this list)?

They're all Die Hard. Everything is everything and it all goes back to Die Hard. If there's anything reboots and shared universes have taught us, it's that Hollywood has a tendency to exploit a successful business model until it's been done to death.