As its name implies, the motion picture “Die Hard” isn’t going to go away any time soon.

You’ve probably seen the film, but to understand the phenomenon, go to YouTube and watch this year’s Night Visions Film Festival in Helsinki (“as in Helsinki, Sweden”).

You’ll hear an entire audience of thick-tongued Finns recite one of the most memorable lines in film history.

"Yippee-ki-yay, [You-Know-What]!”

I can’t write that missing word in a family publication.

Nor could Smithsonian magazine when it announced in June 2007 that its namesake institute had procured the blood-soaked T-shirt that Bruce Willis wore in the 1988 action film.

The museum had just put the Bruce Willis tank-top on display with Abe Lincoln’s top hat and Judy Garland’s ruby slippers, but still wouldn’t publish the film’s most famous line.

Instead, it ended its magazine article with the partial quote and a hanging hyphen, inviting readers to fill in the rest, confident, of course, that they could.

So, we can’t quote the movie’s most memorable line in polite society, but everybody knows it. Even in far-flung Finland.

That’s staying power. We not only know the line, we cue up “Die Hard” every year at Christmas to hear it again.

Yes, I said Christmas.

We’re not going to debate that anymore. “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie.

There are no agreed-upon standards of what makes a Christmas movie. If there were, “Die Hard” would check most boxes.

It’s set in the season on Christmas Eve. It’s filled with holiday music and decorations.

And it’s a coming home movie — a man trying to reclaim his estranged wife and family.

Just like George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life”), the main character John McLane wants to return to hearth and home.

Only he’ll have to shoot his way through a dozen trained killers to get there.

And sorry, but I’m unmoved by what Bruce Willis said about “Die Hard.”

At a Comedy Central Roast in 2018, the film’s leading man put it this way: “‘Die Hard’ is not a Christmas movie! It’s a g-- d--- Bruce Willis movie!"

With all the raw language and carnage that deluges the film and its memory, it’s no wonder that Christmas purists once formed ranks to bar it from the pantheon of holiday classics.

You weren’t going to befoul Rudolph and Frosty with this bloodbath — this gun lust.

Well, the purists lost. The heathens won.

We will watch “Die Hard” in December. We will watch a corpse fall multiple stories toward the squad car of Sgt. Al Powell just as he begins to sing, “Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!”

“Die Hard” director John McTiernan routinely tells audiences that he and his crew “hadn’t intended it to be a Christmas movie.”

But they didn’t settle the matter, he said. You did. The audience did, he told the American Film Institute: “The joy that came from it is what turned it into a Christmas movie.”........

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