The Best Die Hard Rip-Off Is One You've Never Seen
Sylvester Stallone's Cliffhanger offered a great twist on the Die Hard formula.
John McTiernan's Die Hard pretty much redefined the modern action blockbuster when it released in 1988. Sleek, suspenseful, and thoroughly human, the film launched Bruce Willis' action career and subverted the expectation of what the stars of that genre should look like.
Willis, who at that point had thinning hair and a lean physique, made for an interesting contrast to the then action kings: Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, both honed athletes whose films saw them cleaving heads with swords and taking Vietnam at the barrel of an M60. Together with the Shane Black-scripted Lethal Weapon, directed by Richard Donner, Die Hard ushered in a new kind of genre blockbuster, where heroes were vulnerable again, and getting your ass kicked was, in some ways, just as cool as being the ass-kicker.
Aspects of the Die Hard formula weren't alien to Sly and Arnie, of course. Even in the Survivor-scored antics of Rocky IV, where Stallone's Italian Stallion went up against Dolph Lundgren's machine-engineered supervillain Ivan Drago, Rocky got beaten up and bruised. He was by this point a shadow of his vulnerable, working class roots - a reflection of eighties excess and MTV aesthetics just like the Tony Scott-directed Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop 2 - but Rocky still got beaten up. He still hurt, even if he showed less battle damage than he used to.
The same was true of Schwarzenegger who, in the nineties, arguably illustrated a better grasp of his action persona than his one-time rival. Predator, which released a year before Die Hard in 1987 and was also directed by McTiernan, was arguably just as subversive, assembling a group of immaculate badasses only to have them be torn apart by an alien slasher villain.
Arnie's (unfairly) unheralded period in the early nineties reiterated his grasp on his screen and Hollywood personality, exemplified in the criminally underrated Last Action Hero (McTiernan again). This career adjustment for Schwarzenegger was defined by comedy and more light-hearted efforts, and it would take years and a governorship later until he starred in a film made in the Die Hard mold - 2013's The Last Stand, where he portrays a sheriff who battles outlaws in a small town.
Stallone - who suffered a greater fallow period than his rival in the nineties - wouldn't wait as long to take a stab at the Die Hard formula. However, when he did, he arguably did it best, firmly placing his own spin on the Die Hard scenario by leaning into - rather than shying away from - his athletic physique and screen persona. I am, of course, talking about Cliffhanger, which has recently just turned 30.