10 Greatest "Die Hard On A...." Movies

There are extremely few movies that can claim to have had the same impact on the action movie genre as John McTiernan's 1988 classic, Die Hard. It laid out a fresh action movie blueprint and sure enough following its incredible success, a whole raft of pretenders trailed in John McClane's blood-soaked wake.

The reason for the ongoing popularity of the "Die Hard" premise is both its effectiveness and its incredible simplicity. Take a team of bad guys, ideally with a charismatic leader, and have them take over a set location. Throw in a lone hero trying to save the day, usually he's there purely by chance, and watch as he proceeds to take out the baddies and rescue the hostages.

Add in some pyrotechnics, a couple of wisecracks and a crawl through some sort of ventilation system and you're golden. Some movies are purely copycat Die Hard clones, while others merely borrow certain key aspects, but to some degree, action movies have been following the Die Hard formula ever since its release, with wildly varying box office success.

Here are ten of the finest examples of movies that owe Die Hard a huge debt of gratitude.

The "Die Hard on a Plane" schtick has been done on several occasions. Con Air varies enough from the formula to discount it from this list, while a certain film set aboard a very specific Presidential plane may well appears later on. It therefore came down to a straight shoot out between Executive Decision and this 1992 Wesley Snipes vehicle.

Thanks to Snipes' entertaining bravado and Bruce Payne's solid work as Charles Rane, aka "The Rane of Terror", Passenger 57 just about edges it. Rane is an international terrorist being escorted to LA aboard a passenger jet in order to stand trial. In retrospect, that was a needlessly risky move from the authorities, but so be it.

After men in Rane's employ kill his handlers and take control of the plane, it's up to former cop John Cutter (Snipes) to weed out the bad guys and retake the aircraft. Brief at just 84 minutes long, Passenger 57 restricts the action to an extremely confined space and while the script is fairly iffy for the most part, Payne's unsettling performance as a psychopathic terrorist (the worst kind there is) just about makes up for it.