Except for the first one, I don’t even especially like the “Die Hard” movies. The second one’s not so good. The third one is pretty good. The fourth one is slightly better, especially if you happen to catch it on a plane or FX. The fifth one — well, the fifth one just came out and let’s just say it’s less a coherent movie than it is a snuff film for cars and helicopters.

It’s difficult to evaluate the “Die Hard” series as a whole, however, because, by all logic, none of these sequels should exist. With “Rocky,” each installment makes narrative sense: he’s a fighter, so it follows that there should be more fights. But the very premise of the original “Die Hard” precludes continuation. That’s part of the genius of the film. It completely flips the standard action-movie narrative, in which some world-class expert (the gunslinger; the safecracker; the ex-Green Beret) is lured out of hiding to tackle one last mission, to slay one last unslayable foe. The premise of “Die Hard” is that a regular New York cop is stuck unexpectedly in a building full of bad guys. The idea that this same guy finds himself in the same situation again — that stretches credulity.

Of course, in Hollywood, credulity bows to — nay, is the manservant of — profitability, which is how we ended up with “Die Hard 2,” with its memorable tagline, “Die Harder.” In this film, McClane is trapped in an airport that has been taken over by rogue American soldiers, and he constantly wonders aloud how the same thing could happen to the same guy twice, which exactly echoes the reservations of the audience.

For the third, fourth and now fifth films, the producers wisely ditched the “Die Hard” trapped-in-a-blankety-blank constraint (had they not, we would most likely be watching “Die Hard in the Center of the Earth” at this point), which both freed the franchise but also sent it spiraling toward the black hole of generic action-adventure. It’s important to remember, as action heroes go, just how radical McClane seemed in 1988. He arrived in the shadow of Schwarzenegger’s Teutonic (and, in “The Terminator,” literally robotic) unstoppability and the hoo-rah fantasy of Rambo leaping up from a river to cut down entire armies with bow and arrows. The quintessential scene in the first “Die Hard” is one in which McClane is pinned down in an office cubicle, and Hans Gruber, noticing McClane’s unshod feet, instructs his sidekick to “schiess dem Fenster” — shoot the glass. Cut to McClane hobbling and trailing great globs of blood into a bathroom, then prying shards from his sliced-up soles. By contrast, the quintessential scene in the most recent James Bond film, “Skyfall,” occurs when Bond jumps onto the ripped-open backside of a moving train car, then pauses to adjust his cuff links.

It has long been said that much of McClane’s allure lies in the fact that he’s just an average dude — he’s just like us — though in reality that doesn’t quite explain it, either. Most of his appeal lies in the fact that he’s just like Bruce Willis. Whatever your opinion of Willis as an actor (and mine’s pretty high, actually), you have to root for a guy who struggled to make the leap to movies from TV, went bald and doesn’t hide it and has the weirdest-looking movie-star nose this side of Owen Wilson. There’s a DVD extra that comes with some of the recent “Die Hard” films, in which John McTiernan, the director of the first and third films, says: “The John McClane character was built out of Bruce. We said, ‘O.K., who is this guy?’ A lower-middle-class kid from New Jersey with a lot of spunk. We better try and build John McClane out of that.” And it’s true: whatever pleasures remain in the maxed-out “Die Hard” franchise are all a result of Willis’s residual charm. To borrow a presidential metric, McClane’s not the smartest, toughest or savviest action hero, but he is the one you would most like to have a beer with.