11 Movie Sequels That Turned Badasses Into Total Wimps

9. John McClane - Die Hard 4 & 5

There was once a time when Bruce Willis' finest character creation was basically a rat in a trap surrounded by cats and pretty much on fire, down to his last bullet and already soaked in his own sweat and blood. And as he quipped his way through death-defying scenarios we all fell in love with an entirely new type of action hero.

But then Willis stopped turning movies down, and while he was putting in career defining work with M Night Shyamalan, he always unfortunately had the capacity to pull a Nic Cage and star in things so despicably bad that his legacy was utterly, irrevocably altered. And now, for every great performance, there are two or three where he looks uninterested, because the quality of the material is just not there, which is sadly the case for the last two Die Hard movies.

Gone was the tenacity of the original McClane, who was pushed through a more typically Michael Bay-like filter, a bad-ass but one stripped of almost everything that made Willis' performances in the first three movies so seminal. And by the fifth and worst entry in the season, McClane was relegated to a supporting character in his own universe, and there was nothing that suggested he was even the same character, nor that he couldn't have been played by any two-bit C-list action star.