Sweet 'Vengeance'.

Rating: 7/10 (13 October 2007)

My Take: Not as good and thrilling as the first, but has all the right ingredients to make it an explosive adventure.
Sequels like DIE HARD: WITH A VENGEANCE don't come much around anymore. It's not as good as the ones that preceded it, but it doesn't care about that, all it wants is to be a great, stand-alone action thriller that does what it is intended to do. Granted, it's not as great as the original, or as wildly exciting as the second, but in its own stand-alone way, it delivers thrill after thrill, then, when the explosions calm down, it delivers suspense after suspense. It's like a bomb, when it explodes, it's edge-of-your-seat stuff, when it's not, it's still edgy waiting for it to happen. Since it's a DIE HARD picture, you know there will be an explosion, but it's hidden with a great amount of suspense, you hardly notice how predictable it might have been.
Once again, Bruce Willis is back as John McLane, he's divorced and on vacation from his police work in New York. He is, though, called in back when a mad-bombing terrorist has frequently blown-up a couple of New York department stores. McLane, joined by a racist partner, a store clerk, named Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson), they get frequent pay phone calls from a guy named Simon (Jeremy Irons), the terrorist, who has placed bombs after bombs in New York city's train subways, trash cans and many other places, which he uses to play cat-and-mouse with McLane.
This leads to a numerous amount of action sequences that are almost twice as exciting as the ones in the previous films. We have a mad dash in Central Park, a race thru a flooding sewer line, a chase/shootout st the streets and a lot of other actions and explosions to keep you busy.
Like the first film, DIE HARD: WITH A VENGEANCE is directed by John McTiernan, who, once again, give us an endless supply of action and thrills, and a good dose of comedy and characters as well. Willis' and Jackson's characters never get boring or thin, and Irons' villainous performance makes him the best of the DIE HARD villains in my book. What McTiernan does lack in this chapter is the appeal of its other central character, John's wife Holly McLane, who is completely absent in this film, thus betraying much of the chemistry that they had which actually worked.
DIE HARD: WITH A VENGEANCE is not the best of the series and really doesn't catch up with its predecessors, but it's a great entertainment nonetheless and is, in fact, on a league of its own.
Rating: ***1/2 out of 5.