Die Hard with a Vengeance

Die Hard with a Vengeance is the third film in the Die Hard series starring Bruce Willis as policeman John McClane, released in 1995. Vengeance introduces Samuel L. Jackson as new character Zeus Carver, Willis' reluctant partner. Jeremy Irons plays the main villain, Simon Gruber. It was directed by John McTiernan and written by Jonathan Hensleigh. It will be followed by Live Free or Die Hard (2007).

Plot summary

The antagonist in this movie is Simon Gruber (Jeremy Irons), brother of Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman, who, like Irons, was an English actor playing a German). Hans was a German criminal who was killed by NYPD cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) at the climax of Die Hard, the first film in the series. Simon, it appears at first, is out to avenge his brother's death but it is soon revealed that other motives are at work.

Simon begins by blowing up a bomb in a busy street and telling the police that McClane must walk through Harlem displaying a sandwich board reading "I hate niggers". When some offended African-Americans threaten him they are held away at gunpoint by shopkeeper and black activist Zeus Carver (Samuel L. Jackson). Carver gets McClane away, not out of concern for a white man but that the colleagues of a white cop might go gunning for every black man in the area if one of their own is killed. Simon now insists that this "Good Samaritan" become part of the game whether he likes it or not.

Simon has planted real and phoney bombs throughout the city, and forces McClane and Carver to participate in a game of "Simon says", which usually consists of giving them information about a bomb and giving them a chance to defuse it.

The games of Simon Says they play are:

First at a phone booth, where Simon tells them the As I Was Going to St Ives riddle which they answer correctly but too late. They needed to dial 555 then the answer within a time limit or a bomb would go off. Fortunately Simon didn't say "Simon Says" so there is no bomb.

McClane is told that they have half an hour to go to a phone box at a subway station near Wall Street from where they are on the upper west side. To do this, McClane drives through Central Park and makes a phone call for an ambulance which they follow through heavy traffic. McClane manages to climb into the subway train from an above grating and finds the bomb, quickly chucking it out the train window. Only Zeus makes it to the station to pick up the call. Simon says that McClane's absence is a breach of the rules and the bomb is detonated.

They have to use a 3 gallon jug and 5 gallon jug to put exactly 4 gallons of water onto a scale to deactivate a briefcase bomb. The now-defused briefcase bomb would later be used to drown John.

"What is 21 out of 42?" Zeus figures out that there have been 42 Presidents of the United States, but is unable to remember who the 21st was. Later, a truck driver tells McClane it is Chester A. Arthur and it identifies a school in which Simon claims to have placed a bomb - it is later found to be Chester A. Arthur Elementary School, However, Gruber has other plans for the bulk of his explosives, and the bomb the police find in the school is a dummy filled with syrup.

So far the police has been led to believe that all this is an overblown act of revenge. But in fact it is really just a diversion from Simon Gruber's real aim: robbing the high-security vault in the basement of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which holds the gold of several foreign nations, even more than Fort Knox. The need to search the thousands of schools in New York means that the police, emergency and Federal agencies are all occupied elsewhere. This enables Gruber and his army of East European mercenaries to break into the vault and make their escape with a dozen dump trucks filled to the brim with gold bars.

McClane and Carver eventually see through the plan and catch up with the gang as they embark their trucks on board a ship. They are captured and left on the ship with a huge bomb.(At this point they hold a heart-to-heart, with McClane admitting that he and his wife are yet again estranged, and Carver trying to convince him to try to at least call her.)

They manage to escape the ship just as the bomb explodes. Gruber has led them to believe that the gold was still aboard the ship and that the whole thing was a plot to upset the world economy. However McClane guesses that it is yet another diversion and that the gold is safely elsewhere. After suffering a horrible headache all day, McClane had finaly managed to obtain a bottle of aspirin from Simon himself. Based on Carver's prompting, McClane then calls his estranged wife. As the call is connecting, McClane goes to take one of the pills, and a label on the bottom of the bottle shows that they were purchased from a pharmacy in Quebec. McClane is forced to leave the phone to pursue Gruber, and leaves his wife hanging on the line as he does. This leads the action to a warehouse in Canada where Gruber and his gang have indeed taken the gold. There they witness Gruber's gang being caught by the Canadian police before being attacked by Gruber inside his helicopter. The final battle ensues and McClane forces the helicopter to land. He then fires a shot that sends Gruber to join his late brother.

Cast

Script & Setting

• This movie is based on a script written by Jonathan Hensleigh originally titled Simon Says, which was originally conceived as a Brandon Lee action film, then later considered for use as the fourth installment of the Lethal Weapon series. The first half of Die Hard with a Vengeance is almost identical to Simon Says; the robbery was added to bring the story in line with other Die Hard films. The original plan was to have the villains burgle the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an idea not used here, but which appears in John McTiernan's film The Thomas Crown Affair.

• Die Hard with a Vengeance was the first in the series not to take place during the Christmas holidays (though several references are made to Santa and Christmas) and the first where John McClane is an active police officer on his own patch. Also significant is that for the first time he has an on-screen partner, Zeus Carver almost throughout. In Die Hard Sgt. Powell was aiding McClane, but they didn't meet until the end. In Die Hard 2 the air-traffic controller was a partner for the first half, replaced by the janitor for the second. Die Hard with a Vengeance does follow the same pattern as the previous two films, as his partner appears after the 'terrorist' has appeared, is pulled into the plot due to the McClane's actions, helps and hinders action sequences, and he and the partner did not know each other to begin with. It's interesting to note that with the exception of the janitor in Die Hard 2, who served no real purpose other than give McClane directions and the un-coded radio, all the 'side-kicks' have been black until now — for the fourth installment of the series, Live Free or Die Hard, Justin Long is cast for that role.

Plot hole

One flaw in the film is easily observable to fans of the James Bond film Goldfinger, which describes, but does not execute, a similar heist with Fort Knox as the target - the logistics of the task are just too great to carry out in the period of time allowed in the film. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York Gold Depository contains roughly 5,000 tonnes of gold, and the value of $140 billion quoted by Simon in the film represents about 8,000 tonnes at $500 an ounce. Between the 14 dump trucks used, each would need to carry over 350 tonnes.

Alternative ending

In the original ending, found on the special edition DVD, it is presumed that the robbery succeeds, with McClane tracking Gruber months later in a foreign country. McClane has tracked him using the batch number on the bottle of aspirins to a local pharmacy. McClane was used as the scapegoat for everything that went wrong and has been fired from the NYPD. He is keen to take it out on Gruber whom he invites to play a game called "McClane Says". This involves a form of Russian Roulette with a small Chinese rocket launcher with the sights removed, meaning it cannot be determined which end is which. McClane then asks Gruber some riddles similar to the ones he played in New York. When Gruber gets a riddle wrong, McClane forces him at gunpoint to fire the launcher, which blows Gruber to bits.

In the DVD audio commentary, screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh claims that this version was dropped because it showed a more cruel and menacing side to McClane, a man who killed for revenge rather than in self-defence. Hensleigh's intention was to show that the events in New York and the subsequent repercussions had tilted him psychologically.

In this version the villain has dumped or double-crossed most of his accomplices and had the gold turned into statuettes of a famous landmark (in this case the Empire State Building) in order to smuggle it out of the country. But the cop still manages to track him down to his foreign hideaway. This is reminiscent of Alec Guiness' situation in the British heist movie The Lavender Hill Mob, made some 45 years earlier.

According to the DVD audio commentary, a second alternate ending had McClane and Carver floating back to shore on a makeshift raft after the explosion at sea. Carver says it's a shame the bad guys are going to get away; McClane tells him not to be so sure. The scene then shifts to the plane where the terrorists find the briefcase bomb they left in the park and which Carver gave back to them (in this version it was not used to blow up the dam). The movie would end on a darkly comic note as Simon asks if anyone has a 4 gallon jug. This draft of the script was rejected early on, and unlike the rocket-launcher sequence was never actually filmed.

Trivia

• On the DVD commentary, screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh says the idea for the film's plot came to him when he imagined what would happen if one of his childhood friends, who was injured after Hensleigh threw a rock at him, decided to seek revenge on him as an adult.
• The protagonist in Hensleigh's original Simon Says script was a New York cop named Alex Bradshaw, and the character that became Zeus Carver was a woman. The film studio wanted Hensleigh to change Zeus's race from black to either white or Asian.
• Hensleigh was told by an FBI agent that Simon Gruber's plan, while far-fetched, was technically possible to pull off.
• The film was shot under the working title Die Hard: New York.
• In order to avoid starting a riot while filming the scenes in Harlem, the sandwich board that McClane wears actually said, "I hate everyone". The word "niggers" was later superimposed over "everyone" in post-production, though the unaltered version is sometimes used on television broadcasts and on airplane showings.
• Future Vice President Dick Cheney makes a cameo.
• Much of the film was shot around Charleston, South Carolina, including the subway scenes (which were shot on a set) and the bridge scenes (which were shot on the Cooper River Bridge).
• In one scene John McClane answers "Smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo" in response to a question by Zeus. This is a chorus lyric from a song called "Flowers on the Wall" by The Statler Brothers. The song is sung by Bruce Willis in the film Pulp Fiction, in which both he and Samuel L. Jackson had prominent roles.
• This is the first movie of the series to not take place on Christmas Eve, although McClane does make a reference to Santa Claus.

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