Bruce Willis delivered some sad news in March 2022, announcing his retirement from the acting game due to the impact of his aphasia, a serious cognitive disorder. The diagnosis sparked countless tributes from his peers in Hollywood, and an outpouring of sympathy from millions of fans—suddenly, John McClane’s face was kinda everywhere again.
Probably the greatest hero Willis ever played, the everyman terrorist-terroriser appears in five films forming the Die Hard franchise, although the series rarely reached the thrilling heights of that first bombastic action classic. If you’re in the mood to revisit Bruce Willis’s greatest hits, every single Die Hard movie is available to watch on Disney+ for Aotearoa subscribers.
Directed by John McTiernan in 1988, the original Die Hard showed that Willis, formerly known best as a somewhat balding TV smartarse, had serious muscle as a loveable action star. Newly appreciated these days as an entry to the Christmas canon, it’s still one of the greatest action films of all time.
Disney+ subscribers can start with this explosive blockbuster before checking out the film’s four sequels. Another option is to rent or buy each film via on demand services Google Play, the Prime Video store, or Apple TV, if it’s Christmas Eve and you urgently need a bloodied thriller to entertain the fam.
What’s interesting about the franchise’s sequels is that many of them were originally conceived as stand-alone, unrelated movies: the plot for 1990’s Die Hard 2 was taken from a 1958 novel, and the great Die Hard: With A Vengeance was first planned as a Lethal Weapon sequel, which explains why they added Samuel L. Jackson for that buddy-cop element.
The two more modern sequels aren’t remembered with any special fondness. Live Free or Die Hard has big, paranoid action with a techno-terrorist plot, and the limp A Good Day To Die Hard casts Jai Courtney as McClane’s estranged son, taking the action so far from the reluctant heroics of Nakatomi Plaza it’s unbelievable. Still, whether Willis is phoning it in for another sequel or enjoying his years of retirement, we’ll always have that original, solid-gold action classic. Yippee-ki-yay.
