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Sat 9 August 2025 19:50, UK
Bruce Willis has been a part of some truly excellent films.
His most famous role is easily John McClane in the Die Hard franchise, the first of which is often cited as one of the greatest action movies of all time. He leads one of the trio of segments in Pulp Fiction, playing a boxer on the run who encounters the infamous ‘gimp’. Chuck in The Sixth Sense, 12 Monkeys, The Fifth Element, and Moonrise Kingdom, and you’re looking at one hell of a CV.
Unfortunately, things haven’t always gone smoothly for the smooth-headed icon. Towards the end of his career, he made some very strange decisions, possibly informed by the dementia he would be diagnosed with in 2023, leading to some truly awful movies that were in no way deserving of his legendary presence.
Even when he was in his prime, he wasn’t immune to the odd stinker. Does anyone remember The Bonfire of the Vanities? Or Hudson Hawk? Even the Die Hard series wouldn’t always deliver, as anyone who watched beyond film number three can confirm.
It turns out that Willis and Die Hard don’t even need to be involved in a film to have a detrimental effect. In an interview with Movieline, John McTiernan, the director of the first instalment of the series, was asked why he didn’t return to direct the sequel, Die Hard 2. In answering this question, he also revealed how the series ultimately spelt doom for another action franchise.
“I actually prepared two sequels. One didn’t happen because Fox was wrangling with Bruce over money,” McTiernan explained. “After we made Die Hard 3, the studio used most of the material we’d developed for the other sequel and turned it into Speed 2: Cruise Control. The ocean liner going on the beach and stuff? That’s what we’d written for Die Hard“.
Released three years after its game-changing original, Speed 2: Cruise Control has little to no appeal compared to the first. Set aboard a luxury cruise ship, Annie Porter (a returning Sandra Bullock) and her new boyfriend Alex Shaw (Jason Patric, who replaced a very sensible Keanu Reeves) must prevent the hijacked vessel from crashing into an oil tanker. It was a complete write-off, shunned by fans and critics alike. It very nearly ruined the careers of several people involved and is now something of an inside joke amongst the film-loving community.
As McTiernan stated, most of the ideas for Cruise Control were repurposed from a potential Die Hard script. The screenplay, which was initially called Troubleshooter, saw McClane fighting terrorists at sea. This feels like a natural progression of the ‘action hero in an isolated location’ trope that served the franchise well up to that point, but concerns were raised that it would be too similar to the Steven Seagal movie Under Siege.
The idea was scrapped, and it was decided that McClane would instead battle the brother of the original antagonist, Hans Gruber, as he attempted to blow up New York City with a series of bombs. This served as the eventual premise of Die Hard With a Vengeance.
Speed 2: Cruise Control is every bit as horrible as people say it is, but the story behind it is actually quite interesting. Does this mean you should go out of your way to watch it? Absolutely not.
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