Celebrate 25 years of Bruce Willis playing John McClane with this Legacy Collection Die Hard 5-Disc Collection featuring the five Die Hard films and an all-new bonus disc, “Decoding Die Hard.”

It's the ultimate tribute to the tough-as-nails cop with a wry sense of humor and a knack for explosive action. Wrong place. Wrong time. Right man. Yippee ki yay!

Disc 1: Die Hard
Disc 2: Die Hard 2: Die Harder
Disc 3: Die Hard with a Vengeance
Disc 4: Live Free or Die Hard
Disc 5: A Good Day to Die Hard

The gold, of course, is the original Die Hard, a flat-out five star classic pretty much without equal. Introducing Bruce Willis’ John McClane as an ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation, it’s littered with great lines, great characters, and genre-defining moments. Plus, in Alan Rickman, it has one of the finest cinematic villains of the past few decades.

Die Hard 2: Die Harder inevitably dilutes matters, this time switching the action to Washington’s Dulles International Airport. But with Willis and a good number of characters returning from the original, it’s a fun–if at times brutal–ride, that scores highly in the entertainment stakes.

Die Hard: With A Vengeance, the third film in the series, pretty much strips away the bulk of the supporting cast, and replaces them with the not-significant figure of Samuel L Jackson. It changes the dynamic of the film into a buddy-buddy movie, albeit a good one. And again, it’s a ride that’s hard not to enjoy, with Jeremy Irons giving good measure as McClane’s chi­ef foe.

Die Hard 4.0 is a real surprise. Given the fact that it arrived over a decade after the third film, it finds Willis and relative newcomer Justin Long shouldering an entertaining, old fashioned action film, that papers over its occasional cracks by asking its lead actor to ramp things up a gear when necessary. And watching John McClane do what he does–even when any hint of reality is thrown out of the window near the end–is endlessly entertaining.

Iconoclastic, take-no-prisoners cop John McClane, for the first time, finds himself on foreign soil after travelling to Moscow to help his wayward son Jack – unaware that Jack is really a highly-trained CIA operative out to stop a nuclear weapons heist. With the Russian underworld in pursuit, and battling a countdown to war, the two McClanes discover that their opposing methods make them unstoppable heroes.

So while none of the sequels have matched the peerless original, the Die Hard Quadrilogy nonetheless delivers one classic, and three very enjoyable action movies. And you can’t argue with that kind of hit rate. Always, always bet on McClane… –Simon Brew

Die Hard 25th Anniversary Collection Review

“With the release of A Good Day to Die Hard only two weeks away, 20th Century Fox has decided to take a look back at the previous chapters of one of the most influential action series of all time. The original Die Hard, which introduced audiences to infinitely resilient NYC cop John McClane (Bruce Willis), did in fact change everything when it was released in 1988, shifting the idea of action movies away from gritty, cheap Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicles and more in the direction of stylish, big-budget productions with a likable, emotionally vulnerable hero with a snappy comeback for everything. The influence of Die Hard on Hollywood action pictures was so enormous that it became a movie executive shorthand: every action movie was described as "Die Hard on a…”

It's impossible to point to a single thing that makes the original Die Hard so successful. The film is a perfect storm of savvy decisions that seem logical and innocuous but pay off in incredible dividends when watching the finished film. McTiernan saw, in his performance as David Addison on “Moonlighting,” how that wry charisma would work perfectly for McClane. Co-writer Jeb Stuart's “near-death” experience with a box on the freeway following a fight with his wife moved him to de-age the lead character from Roderick Thorp's book Nothing Lasts Forever and give McClane similar unresolved marital tension as motivation. Joel Silver had the idea of bringing in a stage actor named Alan Rickman to play a suave, charismatic villain, who McTiernan then downgraded from actual terrorist to bank robber. Finally, Willis' own love of Roy Rogers inspired the film's other co-writer to come up with McClane's signature catchphrase, and his exhaustion from his schedule forced de Souza to beef up the roles of the other characters, giving characters like Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), Ellis (Hart Bochner), Argyle (De'voreaux White), and Richard Thornburg (William Atherton) fleshed-out, interesting, and funny parts to play amid the action.

It may be lost on modern audiences how different Die Hard really was. Although modern action heroes like Jason Bourne and James Bond are routinely given human weaknesses and emotional facets, it was a shock to see McClane crying as he chokes out a message for Powell to relay to his wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia). One look at the stark simplicity of a film like Commando, made by 20th Century Fox a few years earlier, and the incredible style of Die Hard jumps off the screen: the beautiful design of the floor with Holly's office, the way McTiernan and DP Jan De Bont make a stairwell or an elevator shaft unique and visually interesting, and the scope seen from the Nakatomi rooftop (in reality, the newly-built Fox Plaza). Artful touches like composer Michael Kamen's use of “Ode to Joy” (a McTiernan suggestion) to build his fantastic score around help round out the picture, and McTiernan's di­rection is top-notch, clearly establishing crucial action geography in nearly every shot (some current directors really ought to sit down and study the movie). There are certainly parts that feel a litle cheesy (such as the complete ineptitude of Paul Gleason's police chief Dwayne T. Robinson, which famously bothered Roger Ebert), but it's hard to make a big deal out of them now; the status of Die Hard as one of, if not the best action movie of all time is more than valid.

Of course, if that's true, there's really no way that the film's sequels can live up to that bar, and they don't. Still, all three offer varying degrees of success at defining the character of McClane, and continuing his streak of unbelievably bad luck. The first, Die Hard 2: Die Harder is probably the weakest of the series, relying heavily on the same characters and scenarios of the original… Die Hard With a Vengeance…Filmed shortly after Pulp Fiction took the world by storm, the picture re-teams Willis with Samuel L. Jackson, who plays a racially tense store owner named Zeus Carver, drawn into the cat-and-mouse game with McClane and bad guy Simon (Jeremy Irons) when he saves McClane during the first challenge. A great deal of the success of Die Hard With a Vengeance has to be credited to the casting of Jeremy Irons, who bites into his villainous part with relish. Rickman may have had more menace, but Irons arguably has more fun, playing with accents, toying with McClane, and executing his plan with a self-satisfied glee. It's hard not to applaud as an army of tiny bulldozers roll into the Federal Reserve and start scooping up piles of gold bars; if it weren't the conflict in a Die Hard movie it could be a heist film of its own. The addition of Jackson is also inspired, and the relationship that builds between Carver and McClane feels earned in a way that other “mismatched hero” stories often don't.

..I'm a pretty big fan of Live Free or Die Hard. Again, the original Die Hard is one of the best action movies of all time, so the idea that the third sequel, made almost 20 years later, should be held to the exact same standard, especially given the two sequels in between, is absurd. Although there's no way that I, as a fan of the series, would ever have asked for a PG-13 Die Hard, it's also hard to argue that blood and violence are more important to McClane's character than, well, his actual character. He's a man who goes on instinct instead of strategy, who dislikes authority, has trouble getting along with his family, and who would be happy to leave the responsibility of saving the world to others if that responsibility didn't keep showing up on his doorstep. Screenwriter Mark Bomback, Wiseman, and Willis himself work very hard to make sure those aspects of McClane are present in Live Free, and even if it would be much, much better to hear McClane's big line uninterrupted, the flavor of the series is still present.*

The four films in the Die Hard series are so disparate and different that it's hard to summarize them as a whole, but the character of McClane has proved as resilient a pop culture icon as he is a police officer. There are plenty of movie heroes in the world, but few of them have carved out as wide or as lasting a space in action movie history as John McClane, and still the Die Hard franchise marches on, serving as the perfect “fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the pain in the ass” to all the other, stiffer action franchises. Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker, indeed.