"Are You Aiming For These People?!"

Rating: 9/10 (23 May 2010)

A fitting ta-ta to what should've remained the trilogy of lovingly crafted action thrillers, Die Hard with a Vengeance is about as good as it gets among the 1990s Hollywood action cycle. True to the Die Hard formula, Bruce Willis' crass old-school New York cop John McClane takes on a situation way over his head in roughly under a day's time. The charm of With a Vengeance is that it takes place in McClane's city, where McClane is in his element, but not. We see the crass old-school NYPD itself, resolving issues and doing detective work with profane exclamations, matter-of-course Styrofoam coffee cups and worn-out suits they've probably been sleeping in. It follows the old custom that hero cops are either suspended or should be, but that is not the opposition to McClane's as-the-crow-flies brand of individual police work. It is something much more complex, and personal.
I'm aware that Jonathan Hensleigh's script in the form of Die Hard 3 has been reworked from a potential Lethal Weapon 4, from there having been reworked from an original script called Simon Says. Regardless of whatever inevitable contrivance that was necessary to assert franchise characters into his original plot, the result is one of the very best-written Hollywood action-adventures of the '90s. Yes, there are some holes. One might go as far as to say the plot under real scrutiny is Swiss cheese: Our classy villain Simon could not have employed his necessary camouflage justification for his complex plan as long as required without arousing doubt among the police, which he would've had McClane been snuffed during his first chore in Harlem, which could've happened without any difficulty. That is the one major thing at variance with Simon's otherwise fail-safe plan, but then no one who is aware or becomes aware of the Federal Reserve incident either recalls, or finds it gracious or worthwhile enough to bring up that billions in stolen gold is laying in the Aqueduct following an explosion.
Nevertheless, in spite of it all, Hensleigh's screenplay transcends any boilerplate situations or characterizations with unique, and thus less predictable and more exciting, turns on their heads. The most prominent of these is Samuel L. Jackson as McClane's unwitting and unwilling shopkeeper partner Zeus, an ingenious departure from the buddy-cop blueprint. Upon his encounter with McClane in Harlem, he has no reason to like him, or believe what he finds he's gotten himself into, and yet he has little choice whenSimon says. Zeus has a racial chip on his shoulder, and for him to confront the reluctant and terrified McClane in the sadistic scenario Simon has forced him into, is to make a gesture of pure social conscience and shows various levels of humanity, automatically making him an exceptionally sympathetic character. And when he and McClane begin to bond, in their own cynical, acidic New Yorker ways, over the course of this phenomenally chaotic day of explosions, gunfights, helicopter catastrophes and unrelenting German soldiers, we feel we have seen real characters go from profoundly resenting to profoundly respecting one another.
The movie follows in the Reaganite blockbuster tradition of streamlined stunts and nonstop million-dollar set pieces of mass destruction, and they do rock, but scenes of dialogue and deduction are not mere bridges between those extravagant tableaux. Two irrevocably hostile and deeply imperfect people thrown together in a city of 8 million people like McClane and Zeus, an Irish Brooklynite cop and a black Harlem electronics store owner, bound not to get along much, are given thirty seconds to crack ancient nursery rhyme riddles and yet they just can't stop fighting and cursing each other. Mathematical problems and other brain busters segue back and forth between the problem at hand and the personal problems they have with each other. But they end up using their heads in ways the other didn't expect. They end up inextricably necessary to each other to foil Simon's plot, which all holes considered turns out to be rather brilliant.
Yes, Die Hard with a Vengeance is a real pleasure of its kind. McTiernan's back in the director's chair, and Jeremy Irons returns the series in the direction of classy, well-mannered villains, bad guys whose intentions are highly intelligent and mostly plausible, and who are scary because they are so nice to you when they talk. Even though they are threatening various lives and have comparatively mean thugs pointing guns at you, you still want to have a cup of coffee with them. It's difficult to say Rickman as Gruber in Die Hard 1 was anything but peerless, but Irons is a formidable comparison, I must admit. Iron's Simon is not a recycling of Rickman's Gruber. His mannered behavior is also not quite as infectious. But Irons, a powerful actor all his own, is his own fascinating, multi-dimensional beast, a soldier whose purpose and scheme are engraved like clockwork in his mind, from Plan A to Plan B all the way down the line. But what is his purpose? We think we know until there's yet another revelation, but what of the first revelation? It's true to some extent, but where do his ideals truly lie?