Well-made, enjoyable example of the action thriller genre

Rating: 6/10 (5 January 2009)

The cinema's first generation of tough cops- Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry and Walt Coogan, Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle, Steve McQueen's Frank Bullitt and the like- started to appear in the late sixties and early seventies. Bruce Willis's John McClane, along with Nick Nolte's Jack Cates and the characters played by Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the "Lethal Weapon" series, was part of the second generation which started to replace them in the 1980s.
"Die Hard with a Vengeance" was the third film in the "Die Hard" series. It opens with McClane under suspension for some unspecified offence (a fate which often befell Harry Callahan as well, although in his case his offence was normally performing his duties with excessive zeal). Following an explosion in a city department store, a man identifying himself as "Simon" telephones the NYPD and threatens that further explosions will follow unless McClane is recalled to duty.
In colloquial usage the phrase "with a vengeance" means something like "to a very high degree". The use of this phrase in the film's title, however, also contains a pun on the more formal meaning of the word "vengeance"; it transpires that Simon is the brother of Hans Gruber, the German terrorist killed by McClane in the first "Die Hard" film. The police therefore assume (incorrectly, as it turns out) that Simon's obsession with McClane is linked to a desire to avenge his brother's death. Simon forces McClane to race around the city, solving riddles and performing a series of absurd tasks, warning him that further bomb explosions will follow should he fail in any of these assignments. The plot thereafter becomes very complex, but Simon's plan is to make a false threat to blow up one of the city's schools, thereby distracting the police by from his real purpose, which is to steal a vast amount of gold bullion from the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
A feature of second-generation tough cop movies was that they often teamed together a white detective with a black partner, a theme pioneered in "In the Heat of the Night" from 1967. Thus the "Lethal Weapon" films team together the black Roger Murtaugh and the white Martin Riggs, and in "48 Hours" the white Cates was assisted by the black criminal Reggie Hammond. In "Die Hard with a Vengeance" McClane's unofficial, and reluctant, "partner" is a black shopkeeper, Zeus Carver. With the police preoccupied by Simon's threat, it falls to McClane and Zeus to thwart his plot to steal the gold.
Like Eastwood, Willis has created one of the iconic action heroes of the cinema, and their creations have certain things in common. Both are insubordinate, impatient with their superiors and take a "shoot first, ask questions later" attitude to crime. There are, however, differences; Callahan is an ascetic, a widower whose obsession with crime may stem from the fact that his wife was killed by a drunk driver. McClane, who is separated from his wife, is a slob, a chain-smoker and heavy drinker, "about two steps shy of becoming a full-blown alcoholic".
This film, like the original "Die Hard", is also different in style to the "Dirty Harry" series. (I have not seen "Die Hard 2"). Most of the "Dirty Harry" series, especially the first film, were not just action movies; they also asked some serious questions about the ethics of law enforcement and vigilantism. The one which came closest to "Die Hard with a Vengeance" was the final episode in the series, "The Dead Pool", which attempted to combine action with comedy. Unfortunately, that attempt was never a very successful one, and I was never sure whether "The Dead Pool" was intended to be taken seriously or not.
"Die Hard with a Vengeance", by contrast, has its tongue quite definitely in its cheek, although that does not mean that there are no thrills; the action sequences are very well done and provide plenty of nail-biting moments. The mixture of excitement and tongue-in-cheek humour means that the film has some similarities to a James Bond film, albeit one set in the world of policing rather than espionage. Jeremy Irons' Simon is the sort of over-the-top megalomaniac who would be very much at home as a Bond villain; his scheme to corner the world's gold market, for example, is reminiscent of Goldfinger's. This role came as something of a surprise to me, as I had normally thought of Irons as an actor most at home in deeply serious films like "The Mission" or "Waterland". There is nothing deeply serious about "Die Hard with a Vengeance", but it is nevertheless a well-made, enjoyable example of the action thriller genre. 6/10