We asked you to tell us your favourite Bruce Willis movie quotes… and you came up so many pithy quips, zippy comebacks and scintillating one-liners that we just had to compile the choicest ones into a chart.
So here is the Ten Best of Willis’s Wisecracks of Wisdom with asterisks appropriately applied to reserve this blog’s PG rating.
1) “Yippie-Kai-Yay, Motherf*****r!”
First coined in Die Hard, this has become dirty vest-clad cop John McClane’s catchphrase and hit the top spot by a considerable margin. We’re not actually sure what it means, but it appears to have a nice ring to it when shouted at top volume while using heavy artillery!
2). “Nine million terrorists in the world and I gotta kill one with feet smaller than my sister.”
Another pearl from the original Die Hard and proof positive that Bruce’s John McClane has big feet (or his sister has very small ones!) – like we didn’t already know that considering how many times he puts his foot in his mouth.
3). “Who’s driving this car, Stevie Wonder?”
And the original Die Hard takes the top three spots with another of John McClane’s un-PC pearls… Move over Casablanca, Die Hard is the Movie of Many Quotable Lines.
4). “I don’t f****ing believe this. Another basement. Another elevator. How can the same s**t happen to the same guy twice?”
John McClane again, this time in Die Hard 2, at the moment when he finally twigged he was appearing in a sequel… Wonder if he was still asking himself that question by Die Hard 4.0?
5). “Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.”
A moment of profundity in a sea of profanity, the first of only three non-Die Hard quotes comes in at Number Five — from Bruce’s character Butch Coolidge in Quentin Tarantino‘s ultimate cult quote-a-thon, Pulp Fiction. Remind me, though, who the heck was Zed?
6). Matt Farrell: “You just killed a helicopter with a car?”
John McClane: “I was out of bullets.”
Insouciance becomes McClane in this exchange with Justin Long‘s gobsmacked sidekick after a seriously insane stunt in Die Hard 4.0 – one of many as it happens.
7). “I ain’t gonna kill him, I’m just gonna take a foot off of him. A man can work with one foot.”
Brucie’s Harry Stamper proves that he’s all heart as the blue-collar ballbreaker (and we mean that quite literally) who’s gonna save the world from Armageddon.
8). “Hey, well, as far as I’m concerned, progress peaked with frozen pizza.”
John McClane in Die Hard 2 gives his thought-provoking take on what Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was really all leading up to. (Fast food with longevity, folks, just in case you were wondering).
9). “Welcome to the party, pal.”
John McClane in Die Hard gives Reginald VelJohnson‘s beat cop the good news that he’s just gate-crashed a high-rise shoot-out with Alan Rickman’s band of heavily-armed professional terrorists. Bummer.
10). “Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for conversation, but maybe you could just shut up for a moment.”
Bruce’s Korben Dallas shows Milla Jovovich‘s Supreme Being his sensitive side in The Fifth Element… A fitting final line to round up our Top Ten. Now maybe if you could just shut up too, Mr Willis!
So there you have it… Who knew Brucie Boy was such a font of memorable one-liners!
The Die Hard quadrilogy is available on Blu-ray from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.