Die Hard with a Vengeance
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| Die Hard: With a Vengeance | |
|---|---|
 Die Hard: With a Vengeance theatrical poster |
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| Directed by | John McTiernan |
| Produced by | John McTiernan Michael Tadross |
| Written by | Roderick Thorp Jonathan Hensleigh |
| Starring | Bruce Willis Jeremy Irons Samuel L. Jackson Larry Bryggman Graham Greene |
| Music by | Michael Kamen |
| Cinematography | Peter Menzies Jr. |
| Editing by | John Wright |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox Cinergi DVD: Touchstone Pictures |
| Release date(s) |  May 19, 1995 |
| Running time | Theatrical Cut: 115 min. Unrated Cut: 131 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $90,000,000 |
| Gross revenue | Domestic: $100,012,499 Worldwide: $361,212,499 |
| Preceded by | Die Hard 2 |
| Followed by | Live Free or Die Hard (Die Hard 4.0) |
| IMDb profile | |
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.
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[edit] Plot
The antagonist in this movie is Simon Gruber (Jeremy Irons), brother of Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman, who, like Irons, was an English actor playing a German). Hans was a German criminal who was killed by NYPD cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) in Los Angeles at the climax of Die Hard, the first film in the series. It first appears as though Simon is out to avenge his brother's death, but it is later revealed that other motives are at work.
He begins by blowing up a bomb in a department store and telling McClane's superior, Inspector Walter Cobb, using his first name Simon, that McClane must walk through Harlem displaying a sandwich board reading "I hate niggers" (this has since been edited, and current versions shown on TV display "I hate everybody"), or expect 'another big bang in a very public place'. When some offended African Americans threaten him, they are held back at gunpoint by shopkeeper Zeus Carver (Samuel L. Jackson). Carver gets McClane away, not out of concern for a white man, but that the colleagues of a white cop might go gunning for every black person in the area if one of their own is killed; "One white cop dies in Harlem, tomorrow we got a thousand white cops, all of 'em with itchy trigger fingers." Back at the police station, Simon calls and insists that this "Good Samaritan" has become part of the game whether he likes it or not.
Simon has planted real as well as phony bombs throughout the city, and forces McClane and Carver to participate in a game of "Simon says", which usually consists of giving them information about a bomb and giving them a chance to defuse them.
The first game happens at a public telephone. Simon calls and reads them the As I Was Going to St Ives riddle. To answer the riddle, McClane needs to dial 555 followed by the answer within 30 seconds. They make the call, but are 10 seconds late. Simon laughs and says there is no bomb, since he "didn't say 'Simon Says'."
McClane is told they have half an hour to go to a phone at the New York City Subway station Wall Street Station from where they are on the upper west side. To do this, McClane commandeers a taxi and drives through Central Park and makes a radio call for an ambulance which they follow through heavy traffic. McClane later manages to climb into the subway train from a grating and finds the bomb, quickly chucking it out the train window. Only Zeus makes it to the station to pick up the call. Simon says that McClane's absence is a breach of the rules and the bomb is detonated, however he had intended for the bomb to detonate regardless, since an activation switch was placed on the subway tracks to detonate the bomb once the subway car hit the switch. Only the audience is aware of the fact at this time.
After the bomb is detonated, they must go to another park to answer another riddle. This time, Simon says "What has four legs and is always ready to travel?" Zeus figures out that it is an elephant, and they find a briefcase bomb in an elephant fountain in the park. After a short argument on whether to open the briefcase, John decides to open it. When he does, an LCD screen reads "I am a bomb. You have just armed me." Simon then calls them again, telling them that they must use a 5 gallon and a 3 gallon jug to put exactly 4 gallons of water on the bomb's scale to disarm it, which they do in the nick of time.
When Simon next calls, he states that there is a bomb within one of the schools in New York. They must not evacuate schools, but the police start a massive search for the bomb. Simon's next riddle is "What is 21 out of 42?", and Zeus figures out that there have been 42 Presidents of the United States but is unable to remember who the 21st was. Later, a truck driver tells McClane he was Chester A. Arthur, and it identifies a school in which Simon claims to have placed a bomb — it is later found to be Chester A. Arthur Elementary School, the very school where Zeus' two nephews happen to be attending.
As Zeus and McClane are traveling between destinations, McClane catches and reprimands a boy for stealing a candy bar in plain sight. The boy comments that every cop in the city is "into something" and one could, as the boy puts it, "steal City Hall". McClane abruptly realizes the nature of Simon's plan.
So far the police have been led to believe that all this is an overblown act of revenge. However, it is really a diversion from Simon's real goal: to rob the high-security vault in the basement of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which holds the gold reserves of many nations, even more than Fort Knox. The need to search the thousands of schools in New York, none of which are located in the financial district, means that the police, emergency and Federal agencies are all occupied elsewhere. This enables Simon and his army of East European mercenaries to break into the vault and make their escape with a dozen dump trucks filled to the brim with gold bars.
McClane later goes inside the bank building, and sees one of Simon's henchmen disguised as a bank security cop. As the two converse, the terrorist, presumably schooled in British English, slips up and calls the elevator a lift and shows his ignorance in idioms by getting the phrase "Raining cats and dogs" the wrong way round, instead saying "Dogs and cats". McClane becomes suspicious.
Entering the elevator, the two are joined by more of Simon's henchmen, disguised as Federal Reserve guards and NYPD officers. McClane's suspicions are confirmed when he realizes that the badge (#6991) used by one of the henchmen is the same as one of the other officers, Detective Walsh, who was accidentally killed earlier by Simon's henchmen earlier in the film. Before the elevator enters the vault, McClane kills everyone in the elevator, and enters the subway, where he ends back up with Carver.
After McClane and Carver see through the plan, they catch up with the gang as they embark their trucks on board a ship. They are captured and left on the ship with a huge bomb. When McClane first sees this bomb, he realizes that there is no bomb in the school - the bomb that police found is an elaborate dummy filled with pancake syrup. Simon and McClane finally meet face to face, where Simon says that "I'm a soldier not a monster" referring to his unwillingness to carry out an act as heinous as destroying a school full of children. Simon advises McClane that "some gentlemen in the Middle East seem to think they'll make a lot of money" when a substantial portion of the world's gold reserves are destroyed. Carver asks what this has to do with killing McClane to which Simon replies, "Life has its little bonuses." The two men are left handcuffed to each other sitting astride the bomb, even though both John and Simon agreed that Hans "was an asshole".
At this point they hold a heart-to-heart, with McClane admitting that he and his wife are yet again estranged, and Carver trying to convince him to try to at least call her. They both manage to get off the ship just as the bomb explodes, destroying the ship.
Simon has (via a taped message transmitted over the ship's radio) led the authorities to believe that the gold was still aboard the ship and that the whole affair was a plot to upset the world economy. However, McClane surmises that it is yet another diversion and that the gold is safe elsewhere, based on experience with Simon's brother, Hans. After suffering a horrible headache all day, McClane had obtained a bottle of aspirin from Simon himself. Based on Carver's prompting, McClane then calls his estranged wife. As the call is connecting, McClane goes to take one of the pills, and a label on the bottom of the bottle shows that they were purchased from a pharmacy in Quebec, Canada. Realizing what this means, McClane is forced to leave the phone to pursue Simon, and leaves his wife hanging on the line. This leads the action to a warehouse in Canada where Simon and his gang have indeed taken the gold. There they witness Simon's gang being caught by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Just then, their helicopter is fired upon by Simon in another chopper. The chopper occupants are evacuated. The final battle ensues and as the helicopter hovers underneath some power lines, Simon gets a final look at McClane, but McClane cleverly shoots out the power lines with his last two shots from the revolver obtained from the chopper, destroying the helicopter and killing Simon.
As the film ends, McClane calls his wife on a nearby pay phone, despite worrying about the fact that he left her on hold. The credits roll as the call is connecting.
[edit] Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Bruce Willis | Lt. John McClane |
| Jeremy Irons | Simon Gruber |
| 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 |
| John McTiernan, Sr. | Fisherman |
[edit] 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 half 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. An episode of The Batman had a very similar plot, where The Riddler planted fake bombs around Gotham City while stealing the codes to all of the city's networks.
[edit] Original ending
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.
In this version the crook has dumped 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.
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 24 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.
[edit] 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.[1]
[edit] Production notes
- On the DVD commentary, screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh says the idea for the film's plot came to him when he imagined what would happen if one of his childhood friends, who was injured after Hensleigh threw a rock at him, decided to seek revenge on him as an adult.
- The protagonist in Hensleigh's original Simon Says script was a New York cop named Alex Bradshaw, and the character that became Zeus Carver was a woman. The film studio wanted Hensleigh to change Zeus's race from black to either white or Asian.
- In the director commentary, director McTiernan states that future Vice President Dick Cheney makes an uncredited cameo in the film.
- Much of the film was shot around Charleston, South Carolina, including the subway scenes (which were shot on a set) and the bridge scenes (which were shot on the John P. Grace Memorial Bridge).
- In the scene where Detective Walsh (Anthony Peck) enters the subway with Simon's henchmen (disguised as city engineers), he mentions off hand the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which is in the background of the scene at that precise moment.
- Hensleigh and the production were questioned by the FBI due to the accuracy of the robbery details found in the script. Since the production had used actual blue prints in formulating the robbery to ensure its accuracy, apparently it was too accurate as such a plan could actually work.
- In the scene where the police are informed of the school bomb, one of the police officials is played by Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy's (who went uncredited for this participation).
- McClane (Bruce Willis) tells Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson) "I was livin' on a nice fat suspension, smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo." The second line is from the song "Flowers on the Wall" by The Statler Brothers from the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction (1994), starring both Willis and Jackson. Willis's character (Butch) sang the song in Fabienne's car when he spotted Marsellus Wallace.
- The FBI agents in the movie say that Simon Gruber was a colonel in the East German Army.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Die Hard: With a Vengeance at the Internet Movie Database
- Die Hard: With a Vengeance at Rotten Tomatoes
- Worldwide DVD Forums
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