Die Hard with a Vengeance
| Die Hard with a Vengeance | |
|---|---|
 Die Hard with a Vengeance theatrical poster | |
| Directed by | John McTiernan |
| Written by | Roderick Thorp Jonathan Hensleigh |
| Produced by | John McTiernan Michael Tadross |
| Starring | Bruce Willis Samuel L. Jackson Jeremy Irons Graham Greene |
| Cinematography | Peter Menzies Jr. |
| Edited by | John Wright |
| Music by | Michael Kamen |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox MGM (Non-US) released = May 191995 USA |
Running time | 131 min (uncut). 115 min. (censored) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $90,000,000 US |
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, Peter Krieg. It was directed by John McTiernan and written by Jonathan Hensleigh. It was followed by Live Free or Die Hard in 2007.
Plot summary
The antagonist in this movie is Peter Krieg (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. It first appears as though Krieg is out to avenge his brother's death but it is later revealed that other motives are at work.
He begins by blowing up a bomb in a busy street and telling the police, calling himself "Simon", that McClane must walk through Harlem displaying a sandwich board reading "I hate niggers". When some offended African-Americans threaten him they are held back 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 phony 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 radio 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 appears later.
"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, Simon has other plans for the bulk of his explosives, and the bomb the police find in the school is an elaborate dummy filled with syrup.
So far the police have been led to believe that all this is an overblown act of revenge. But in fact it is really just a diversion from Simon'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 Simon 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. Simon 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 finally 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 Simon, and leaves his wife hanging on the line. This leads the action to a warehouse in Canada where Simon and his gang have indeed taken the gold. There they witness Simon's gang being caught by the Canadian police before being attacked by Simon in a helicopter. The final battle ensues and McClane forces the helicopter to land. He then fires a shot that sends Simon to join his late brother.
Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Bruce Willis | Lt. John McClane |
| Jeremy Irons | Simon Gruber |
| Samuel L. Jackson | Zeus Carver |
| Larry Bryggman | Insp. Walter Cobb |
| Graham Greene | Off. Joe Lambert |
| Colleen Camp | Off. Connie Kowalski |
| Sharon Washington | Off. Jane |
| Anthony Peck | Off. Ricky Walsh |
| Michael Alexander Jackson | Dexter |
| Aldis Hodge | Raymond |
| Nicholas Wyman | Mathias Targo |
| Sam Phillips | Katya |
| Aasif Mandvi | Arab cabbie |
| Elvis Duran | Radio DJ |
| John McTiernan, Sr, father of John McTiernan | Fisherman |
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.
Alternative ending
In the original ending, found on the special edition DVD, it is presumed that the robbery succeeds, with McClane tracking Simon months later in a foreign country (maybe in Hungary, because Simon speaks in Hungarian to the staff). 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 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 blows Simon 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-defense. 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.
Box office success
Released on May 19, 1995, the movie was a box office success. It debuted at #1, grossing $22,162,245 on its opening weekend, and end up grossing $100,012,499 in the U.S. market alone. But it proved to be a bigger hit on foreign markets, outgrossing the biggest U.S. summer movie that year, Batman Forever, by grossing $261,200,000, to a $361,212,499 total, Worldwide the movie became the 2nd biggest hit movie for 1995, it was beat by Toy Story by $746.237.
Trivia
 | This article contains a list of miscellaneous information. (May 2007) |
- 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'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.
- In the director commentary, director McTiernan states that future Vice President Dick Cheney makes an uncredited cameo in the film.
- 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.
- The game of Simon Says, where McClane and Zeus travel through the city to get to payphones before Simon blows something else up, is similar to a plot point in the movie, Dirty Harry, where Detective Callahan travels around San Francisco at the behest of Scorpio. He too has to reach payphones in a certain amount of time, or else a girl Scorpio kidnapped would be killed.
- Towards the end of the movie, when Simon and his group were preparing to leave the U.S. with the gold, someone states that the trucks will be ready in "...zwanzig Minuten", twenty minutes, in German. However, the English subtitles display "ten minutes". The correct wording to match the subtitles would have been "zehn Minuten". Also in the scene at Yankee Stadium, where the sniper is asking the man with the walkie talkie whether to shoot or not, the subtitles say "We´ll follow him", whereas in German the character says "Nein - wir brauchen den anderen auch noch!", the correct wording being "No - we also need the other one!"
- There are two solutions to the water jug riddle in the park at the elephant fountain. To place exactly 4 gallons of water on the scale when you only have two jugs which hold 3 and 5 gallons respectively, the first method is:
- Fill the five gallon jug and decant the water into the three gallon jug. This leaves 2 gallons in the big jug.
- Empty the three gallon jug and pour in the 2 gallons from the five gallon jug, leaving space for 1 gallon in the small jug.
- Refill the five gallon jug and pour water from it into the three gallon jug until the small jug is full. That leaves exactly 4 gallons in the big jug.
The second method is:
- Fill the three gallon jug and pour the water into the five gallon jug.
- Refill the three gallon jug and pour it into the five gallon jug until the big jug is full, leaving 1 gallon in the small jug.
- Empty the big jug, and transfer the 1 gallon from the small jug to the big jug.
- Refill the small jug and pour all 3 gallons into the five gallon jug, resulting in 4 gallons in the big jug.
(It is worth noting that while this would work in theory, it is very unlikely that McClane and Zeus could have gotten the problem right in practice without even an ounce of error, especially with the way that they were splashing about.)
- Zeus Carver is the second black, former cab driver that has helped McClane in his struggles: Argyle, McClane's chauffeur in the first film, also used to be a cabbie before becoming a limo driver.
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