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 Jeremy Irons Samuel L. Jackson Larry Bryggman Graham Greene
Cinematography	Peter Menzies Jr.
Edited by	John Wright
Music by	Michael Kamen
Distributed by	20th Century Fox Cinergi
Release dates	May 19, 1995
Running time	131 minutes
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

File:BruceWillisSLJphone.jpg

Zeus and John listening to Simon on the pay phone

After a bomb explodes in the early morning at the Bonwit Teller department store in New York City, a man named "Simon" (Jeremy Irons) telephones the police claiming responsibility, and demands that they play a game of "Simon Says" to prevent any more explosions. Simon demands that NYPD Lt. John McClane walk through Harlem wearing a sandwich board reading, "I hate niggers." Before McClane can be beaten to death by outraged blacks, Harlem shopkeeper Zeus Carver (Samuel L. Jackson) steps in to rescue McClane, and together they return to the precinct. There, they learn that detectives have discovered a large quantity of a bi-component explosive that were stolen the night before and are the components of Simon's bombs. Simon calls to the precinct and forces both McClane and Carver to play his game, directing them to a payphone near a subway station. After tricking the two with the "As I was going to St Ives" riddle, 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, several blocks away, in 30 minutes in order to prevent its detonation. McClane and Carver hijack 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. Though McClane finds the bomb and attempts to throw it off the subway, Simon still detonates the bomb, 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 Simon Peter Gruber, a former East German special forces officer who specialised in long range infiltration. Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Simon is believe to have gone to work for the Iranian Government. Not only this, but he is also the brother of Hans Gruber, whom McClane dropped off a building in Los Angeles. Therefore, the FBI believes the bombings are linked to Simon's desire to avenge Hans' death. Simon calls McClane and Carver and instructs them to solve more riddles, while telling the police that a bomb has been hidden in one of the public schools in New York, and that any police-band radio transmissions could set them off. McClane and Carver leave to follow Simon's game to prevent detonation of the bomb, while the police organize a massive search of every school, leaving the Wall Street area unsecured. 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 heisted away by Simon using a number of dumptrucks. McClane attempts to follow them through an aqueduct, but Simon's men flood it. McClane is able to join Carver and they discover that the dumptrucks have unloaded onto a tanker. 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 original plan was to blow up the gold in New York harbor and destabilize the world's economy, Simon has murdered his Iranian handler and smuggled the gold off the ship to keep it for himself and his men. As Simon escapes, 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 stupdity 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 Zeus and McClane 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 powerline 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 a.k.a. 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 Hâlme	Roman
John McTiernan, Sr.	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 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 an Eastern European cafe.

In this version, Simon has killed or 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' 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 cause 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.

External links

• Die Hard: With a Vengeance at IMDb
• Die Hard: With a Vengeance at Rotten Tomatoes
• Worldwide DVD Forums