Effectively reversing most of what happened in the first two films,

Rating: 8/10 (15 March 2008)

Effectively reversing most of what happened in the first two films, It is no longer Christmas Eve, it's the dead of summer, in the middle of a drought. McClane is not in some foreign territory, he is back home in Manhattan. He does not catch on to another terrorist type of plot. A terrorist bomber, calling himself Simon, detonates a bomb at the crack of dawn on the first day of school, then calls the NYPD to announce his presence, and ask for McClane personally. He's out for revenge for something McClane has done in his past, and threatening to blow up random locations in New York City unless McClane cooperates and does everything Simon tells him to do.
In the first two films, McClane begins the film dressed well, and ends up in tatters. Here, we are introduced to McClane already a mess, a half-employed cop in a vest/ undershirt, what appears to be three or so days of beard stubble, an alcoholic nursing a hangover. Filmmakers this time basically cut to the chase, and show us McClane in tatters in the first scene.
Now 40 years old McClane is not the reluctant hero this time, here he has been (successfully, I think) turned into an antihero. Zeus comes into things early on, his character has nothing to do with the story, he's just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Simon says that he has to play along with the game- and in the end, Zeus does more to stop the villain than McClane does. Zeus figures out some of Simon's games long before McClane does, like Simon's telephone number and the bit with the 42nd president, and getting to the payphone at Wall Street. Zues is the reluctant hero this time, McClane is really an antihero this time, both caught in Simon's elaborate game of revenge. The two men spend the rest of the day careering around Manhattan, trying to accomplish the progressively more and more inane tasks set for them, in retaliation against McClane, for something he has done in the past, while the NYPD and FBI are largely helpless to stop him.
There's a lot of action here, a lot of great one liners, and a few clever, well written references to the first film without ripping off the original Die Hard. My personal favourite sequence was the elevator sequence, it had the same claustrophobic feeling of the first movie. It was just as well photographed as the original movie, the camera slowly zooms in on McClane's eyes (an effect completely lost in the pan-and-scan version) as he sees the fake cop's badge and he realises that he's in a crowded elevator surrounded by terrorist thugs. He distracts them by asking what the lotto numbers were, while at the same time sizing up the terrorists and where they're standing behind him, before opening fire on them, culminating with a clever and well done standoff between McClane and Otto. The musical score was convincing and memorable, also the full, rich, vivid colours, and was violent without being too over the top, and it was short- less than 60 seconds. Short but memorable.
The film loses momentum in the final third, and a couple of the action scenes lack logic- I've always wondered how anyone stops the water at the aquaduct after the bomb has been detonated, and how McClane and Zeus survive a thirty foot drop onto the deck of the cargo ship, much less the explosion on the ship later on, and the contrived happy ending- making this film the weakest of the trilogy, effective in the smaller scale sequences but faltering in the larger scale action scenes, but still a damn good movie, better than can be expected.
I prefer the original ending to the one we saw in the original theatrical release, with McClane's shaky mental condition at the start of the film, added to by the events of that horrible day ultimately pushing him over the edge, he tracks down Simon to East Germany for his own game of revenge, as McClane fully becomes the antihero, with Simon almost becoming an anti-villain. The ending that we see now is a rather anticlimactic, badly edited, and contrived "happy ending", which looks as though it were written and filmed rather quickly.
Avoid the awful pan-and-scan version shown on television and only watch the widescreen version.