The Best Die Hard Rip-Off Is One You've Never Seen

Cliffhanger's Fight Scenes Are Brutal & Explosive

Cliffhanger John Lithgow Qualen Fight Scene
TriStar Pictures

The first of these big set-pieces is Qualen's heist, which involves the aforementioned aerial transfer that got Cliffhanger its record-breaking moment. Michael France and Stallone's script does an excellent job of messing with expectations here, positioning a newly transferred FBI agent (Vyto Ruginis) as the likely traitor in collusion with the film's soon-to-be-revealed villains.

However, it transpires that Travers (Rex Linn) along with one of the pilots are the real turncoats. After seemingly murdering everyone on board we're treated to the great transfer scene itself, but this is then followed up by Ruginis' FBI guy recovering from his wounds, getting up, and then single-handedly ruining his killers' day by firing an Uzi and causing the plane to crash land. This leads to the stolen money getting scattered across the mountains, as well as to Gabe and his old friend Hal Tucker (Michael Rooker) being held at gunpoint to guide the crooks around - albeit fully aware that the moment they outlive their usefulness, they're likely to die.

Much like its protagonists precariously navigate the mountaintops, a core element of Cliffhanger's success is how well it balances its unsuspecting mean streak with more traditional eighties action camp. Fights are brutal and bloody, and innocent bystanders are deliberately bumped off by Qualen's crew.

At the same time, Lithgow's performance as Qualen lives up to every English villain stereotype in the book. When he's not needling his men for making mistakes, he's punctuating their evil with diabolically snappy one-liners. This can sometimes jar with how committed Rooker and Stallone are with their respective performances - as if Qualen and his men have taken a magic ticket to a different movie - but it's a balancing act Cliffhanger (mostly) manages to pull off.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.