Die Hard with a Vengeance

For the previous film in the series, see Die Hard 2.

For the next and most recent film in the series, see Live Free or Die Hard.

Die Hard: With a Vengeance
Die Hard: With a Vengeance theatrical poster
Directed by	John McTiernan
Written by	Jonathan Hensleigh
Produced by	John McTiernan Michael Tadross
Starring	Bruce Willis Jeremy Irons Samuel L. Jackson Larry Bryggman Graham Greene Colleen Camp
Cinematography	Peter Menzies Jr.
Edited by	John Wright
Music by	Michael Kamen
Distributed by	20th Century Fox (USA) Cinergi/Touchstone Pictures (International)
Release date	May 19, 1995
Running time	131 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$90,000,000
Box office	Domestic: $100,012,499 Worldwide: $361,212,499

Die Hard with a Vengeance is a 1995 action film and the second sequel in the Die Hard series. It was produced and directed by John McTiernan (who directed the first film) and stars Bruce Willis as NYPD detective John McClane. Vengeance also stars Samuel L. Jackson as Willis' reluctant partner Zeus Carver and Jeremy Irons as the main villain Simon Gruber. The film was written by Jonathan Hensleigh and was followed by Live Free or Die Hard in 2007.

Plot

After a bomb explodes in the early morning at the Bonwit Teller department store in New York City, a man calling himself "Simon" (Jeremy Irons) telephones the police claiming responsibility, and demands that they play a game of "Simon Says" to prevent any more explosions. Simon orders suspended NYPD Lt. John McClane walk through Harlem wearing a sandwich board displaying racist slurs. Before McClane can be beaten to death by a group of outraged residents, Harlem shopkeeper Zeus Carver (Samuel L. Jackson) steps in to rescue McClane, and together they return to the precinct. There, Simon calls the precinct and takes credit for an Astrolite-like bi-component explosive discovered in a major park. Further investigation reveals that several thousand pounds of it were stolen the night before - Simon has enough explosives to level a city block. Simon demands that Carver join McClane for the remainder of his "game", directing them to a payphone near a subway station. Simon reveals that a bomb is on a subway train that is just leaving the station, and tasks the two to reach the Wall Street subway station 90 blocks away in 30 minutes to prevent its detonation. McClane and Carver commandeer a taxi and cut through Central Park to avoid traffic; McClane instructs Carver to continue on surface roads while he gets on the subway car to search for the bomb. McClane finds the bomb and attempts to throw it off the subway. As the train enters the station, it trips over the detonator, causing the subway car to derail and tear through the station.

As the Wall Street area is cleared and McClane and Carver recover, they learn from the police and FBI that Simon is a former East German special forces officer who specialized in long range infiltration. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Simon is believed to have gone to work for the Iranian Government. They are also told Simon's full name is Simon Peter Gruber and he is the brother of Hans Gruber, whom McClane dropped off a building in Los Angeles during the events of the first film. Therefore, the FBI believes the bombings are linked to Simon's desire to avenge Hans' death. Simon calls again, telling the police that the remaining explosives have been hidden in one of the public schools in New York, and that police-band radio transmissions could set them off. McClane and Carver have less than five hours to complete Simon's game to prevent the bomb from detonating, and depart while the police organize a massive search of every school, leaving the Wall Street area unsecured. Without their radios, they must coordinate through the city phone switchboards.

Simon, along with employer Mathias Targo and numerous henchmen, use the opportunity created by the chaos between the destruction of the subway station and the sparseness of the police force to seize and secure the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to steal all the gold bullion in its vaults. McClane and Carver, initially hostile towards each other, become friends and work together to solve Simon's riddles; McClane deduces that the various distractions are part of Simon's plan. McClane instructs Carver to continue following Simon's game, and returns back to the city to discover the gold has already been stolen by Simon using a number of dump trucks. McClane attempts to follow them through an aqueduct, but Simon's men flood it. Realizing that their goals have been exposed, Simon calls a major radio station and tells the entire city that a school has a bomb in it - overloading the switchboards when every parent in the city calls 911, cutting off all police communications. Though McClane is able to join Carver and they discover that the dumptrucks have unloaded onto a tanker, they must act alone. McClane and Carver sneak aboard the tanker but discover that the containers aboard it hold only scrap metal, and are quickly captured by Simon, who reveals that there is no bomb in any school, instead that the bulk of the explosive is aboard the tanker. Although the original plan was to blow up the gold in New York harbor and destabilize the world's economy, Simon has murdered Targo and smuggled the gold off the ship to keep it for himself and his men. McClane and Carver are chained to the explosives as Simon escapes; McClane and Carver are able to escape just seconds before the bomb destroys the tanker.

McClane and Carver are treated for injuries and debriefed, while Carver insists that McClane should call Holly, his estranged wife. Just as he makes the call, however, McClane realizes that an aspirin bottle given to him by Simon comes from a border town in Quebec. Meanwhile, Simon boasts to his men, declaring that, because of the stupidity of the NYPD, they have gone from an army without a country to one which must decide which country to buy. However, McClane and Zeus arrive with a massive force of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and taunt Simon from the safety of a police helicopter. Seething with hatred, Simon tells his men, "I have something personal to finish." Entering an attack helicopter piloted by his mistress, he attempts to kill McClane and Zeus with a machine gun. Forced into making a crash landing, McClane and Carver are seemingly at Simon's mercy. Meanwhile, the other copter hovers beneath some nearby power lines, as Simon looks his mortal enemy right in the eyes. However, McClane shoots out the power line with his last two bullets, which causes the copter to explode in a massive fireball. McClane snarls,"Yippy-ki-yay, motherfucker," and leaves for a payphone to call Holly.

Cast

Actor	Role
Bruce Willis	Lt. John McClane
Jeremy Irons	Simon Gruber (aka Peter Krieg)
Samuel L. Jackson	Zeus Carver
Larry Bryggman	Inspector Walter Cobb
Graham Greene	Detective Joe Lambert
Colleen Camp	Detective Connie Kowalski
Sharon Washington	Officer Jane
Anthony Peck	Detective Ricky Walsh
Michael Alexander Jackson	Dexter
Aldis Hodge	Raymond
Nicholas Wyman	Mathias Targo
Sam Phillips	Katya
Aasif Mandvi	Arab cabbie
Elvis Duran	Radio DJ
Tony Halme	Roman
John McTiernan, Sr.	Fisherman
Mischa Hausserman	Mischa

Script and setting

The film 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 45 minutes, until immediately after the Wall Street bombing, 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 and also the video game Die Hard: Vendetta.

Alternate endings

An alternative ending to the one shown in the final film was made and can be found on the special edition DVD. In this version it is presumed that the robbery succeeds, and that McClane was used as the scapegoat for everything that went wrong. He is fired from the NYPD after more than 20 years on the force and the FBI has even taken away his pension. Nevertheless he still manages to track Simon using the batch number on the bottle of aspirins, and confronts him in a cafe in Hungary.

In this version, Simon has double-crossed most of his accomplices, gotten the loot to a safe hiding place (Nova Scotia), and has 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 he is still tracked down to his foreign hideaway. This is very similar to Alec Guinness's situation in the British heist movie The Lavender Hill Mob made some 45 years earlier in which the stolen gold is turned into Eiffel Tower paperweights.

McClane is keen to take his problems out on Simon 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 Simon some riddles similar to the ones he played in New York. When Simon gets a riddle wrong, McClane forces him at gunpoint to fire the launcher, which fires the rocket through Simon, killing him. Of course, McClane had been wearing a Flak jacket (which was the answer to the final riddle "what could he have brought to the meeting to save his life?"), so even if Simon had pointed the launcher the right way, it's likely that the relatively low-velocity rocket wouldn't have caused McClane enough injury to prevent him from shooting Simon.

In the DVD audio commentary, screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh claims that this version was dropped because the studio thought it showed a more cruel and menacing side to McClane, a man who killed for revenge rather than in self-defense. Hensleigh's intention was to show that the events in New York and the subsequent repercussions had tilted him psychologically. This alternative ending, set some time after the main events of the movie, would have marked a serious break from the Die Hard formula, in which the plot unfolds over a period of roughly 12 hours.

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.

Box office

Die Hard With a Vengeance had a budget of an estimated $90,000,000. It had a wide release opening in 2,525 theaters, making $22,162,245 its opening weekend in the U.S. Die Hard With a Vengeance made $100,012,499 in the USA, and another $261,200,000 worldwide for a gross revenue of $361,212,499.

Trivia

• The scene where McClane goes to Harlem with the sandwich board was filmed on location. The writing on the board said "I HATE EVERYBODY" on some of the versions displayed on television, but the original version which said "I HATE NIGGERS" was seen in the theatrical and home video releases.
• Tieing McClane's identity as an Irish-American in the film, the soundtrack features an instrumental version of the Irish war-time song Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye. It features in segments throughout the television version and on the closing credits.
• During a conversation between Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis, McClane states that he has 'nothing better to do than smoke cigarettes and watch Captain Kangaroo'. This is in reference to the song that was playing on the radio (The Statler Brothers - Flowers on the Wall, written by Lew DeWitt) in Pulp Fiction when Bruce Willis ran over Ving Rhames. Jackson and Willis both starred in Pulp Fiction.
• Bonnie Bedelia, who played McClane's wife Holly in the first two films, chose not to return for the third film. But, she is mentioned near the end of the film, when John needed to make a call to her.
• Although McClane is a member of the New York Police Department, this would be the only Die Hard movie actually set in New York City.
• This is actually the second time a terrorist targets McClane to avenge the death of a brother. Throughout Die Hard, Karl had his attention set on killing McClane after McClane killed his brother Tony early on in the film.
• This is the last film in the Die Hard series to be rated R by the MPAA.

External links

• Die Hard: With a Vengeance at IMDb
• Die Hard: With a Vengeance at Rotten Tomatoes