Summer of ‘95: Die Hard With a Vengeance

Yippee-kai-yay, summer movies.

Die Hard With a Vengeance is a Christmas movie.

Just kidding. But it might be the ultimate summer movie¹.

Watching the third entry in the John McClane saga with my dad (and with my youth pastor!) at age 15 in a theater on a hot Saturday afternoon is one of my most-cherished summer movie memories. It was only my second R-rated movie in theaters – I’d seen my first a week earlier – and I believe it was only my second exposure to the Die Hard franchise; I’d watched the first movie on VHS about a year earlier. I had so much fun with the third that I rented Die Hard 2 that evening.

There was a long period when Die Hard With a Vengeance was my platonic ideal of a summer movie. Honestly, it might still be. In the ages before CGI and superheroes², summer escapism was defined by stunt-heavy setpieces and theater-rattling explosions. And you can’t get much bigger and louder than John McClane causing chaos throughout New York City.

I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Audiences turned out in droves; Die Hard With a Vengeance raked in $366 million worldwide to become the highest global grosser of the year. Critics were initially mixed – the film sits at 60% on Rotten Tomatoes, although in recent years it’s become more of an accepted classic (especially as two more Die Hard movies proved what a truly bad Die Hard movie looks like).

Let’s get this out of the way: I’ve always loved Die Hard With a Vengeance, and I still do. Let’s get into it.

Another bad day

After Die Hard 2 served as a water-down retread of its predecessor, Die Hard With a Vengeance doesn’t abandon the idea of John McClane fighting terrorists in a confined space so much as expand the setting. It’s still McClane against a cabal of bad guys, blowing things up and mowing them down, but now he has all of New York City as his sandbox.

As goes with most Die Hard movies, the script for the third entry wasn’t originally intended as a McClane adventure³. Jonathan Hensleigh wrote the spec script Simon Says, about a madman forcing a cop to go through a series of obstacles, and the film was originally considered as a Lethal Weapon sequel before it was eventually purchased by Fox and folded into the Die Hard franchise.

What’s surprising is that, despite its non-saga origins, this is the only Die Hard sequel interested in exploring McClane’s personality and treating him as more than a quippy superhero. Yes, Die Hard is an action masterpiece, with some of the most bone-crunching stunts and ear-splitting explosions ever put to film. But John McClane is its heart: A New York cop who doesn’t want to play the hero but knows he’s the only chance of survival. He’s a good cop having a very bad day. Subsequent movies, starting with Die Hard 2, instead made him eager to run into the fray and perform increasing heroic feats.

Die Hard With a Vengeance goes back to the basics, with McClane being drawn in against his will. When the film begins, he’s been suspended and appears to spend his days drinking heavily and watching kids’ TV. When a mysterious man calls asking specifically for him after setting off a bomb in a Manhattan department store, McClane is begrudgingly dragged back into action, even though he’s fighting a massive hangover. At least he’s wearing shoes.

The mysterious caller, who goes by the name “Simon,” wants to put McClane through the wringer before killing him, telling him to complete a series of tasks or else he’ll set off another bomb. The first command? Go to Harlem and stand on the corner wearing a sandwich board that has a racial slur written on it. After that – if he lives – McClane has to make his way across town in NYC traffic to board a subway train before it explodes.

In Die Hard, Willis’ first big role as a movie star, McClane was a refreshing break from Schwarzenegger or Stallone heroes, a regular guy who had a quip just as ready as his fists. The second film kept the spark in McClane’s eye but lacked any underdog element – in the first film, he’s trying to win his wife back; in part two, he’s just picking her up from the airport – and made him come off as a smarmy jerk. Here, McClane is miserable. He’s hungover, reeks of booze (one of his colleagues reminds him “beer is usually taken internally"), his boss hates him and he’s separated from his wife.

It sets Willis up for what is possibly his best performance as McClane and – despite the character’s woes – maybe the funniest. The actor has a blast making John a belligerent, grumpy cuss, still able to spit out one-liners that piss off the villains and his partners. It’s offset by the half-smirk Willis keeps affixed to his face, and the fact that unlikable as he might be, John McClane is still the best at beating the bad guys.

This is also the first Die Hard movie to give McClane an actual partner for the entire runtime. Previously, he’d been a lone gun with assistance over walkie-talkies (or living in the bowels of an airport). But this time, McClane is saddled with shopkeeper Zeus, who Simon makes part of the game after he intervenes. Just one year after Pulp Fiction made Samuel L. Jackson a bona fide name, he and Willis appear again – and this time get to share the screen (they’d, of course, do it again in Unbreakable and Glass).

Giving McClane a frenemy to banter and argue with gives the film a wonderful jolt of energy and humor. Future Die Hards would also incorporate partners, to diminishing returns (how the heck you go from Samuel L. Jackson to Justin Long and Jai Courtney is beyond me), but it’s never been better used than here. And that’s all due to Jackson being a hell of an actor in his own right, willing to go toe-to-toe with Willis and unafraid to be just as stubborn and abrasive.

This means that even when the action ebbs – which isn’t a lot – there’s a good deal of bickering and bantering between two actors who can drop F-bombs and insults like no one else. Even during the action sequences – such as a mad dash across town – the dialogue peppers lines like “I know what I’m doing”/”Not even God knows what you’re doing,” or “Are you aiming for these people,” and McClane’s deadpan “No; well, maybe that mime.”⁴ It gives the film an energy and makes it easily the funniest of the Die Hard movies, although sometimes the racial humor – often framed so that Willis is accusing Jackson’s character of racism – is a bit dated, and McClane’s penchant for homophobic insults was probably regressive even in the mid-90s.

What Die Hard With a Vengeance nails is McClane’s bullheadedness and stubbornness – the qualities that make him a great cop but also a difficult human being. After the first film reunited him with his wife and the second showed them happily married, it’s still not surprising that John McClane would eventually lose Holly because they got in an argument and he refused to call her back. I wish that Bonnie Bedelia had been brought back at the end to provide a true reconciliation – Holly and John are divorced by the next film – just as I wish that Reginald Vel Johnson had been brought back as Al Powell. But if it opens up a side universe where McClane and Zeus go on after this film to hang out and troll the bars, I’m all for it.

Summer in the city

Of course, as much as I love what Willis brings to the table this time, Die Hard With a Vengeance isn’t a character drama. It’s a bombastic summer action movie, and with McTiernan back behind the camera – and with something to prove in his follow-up to the (unfairly) maligned Last Action Hero – it’s a bigger and more set-piece heavy addition to the franchise than the more claustrophobic earlier entries.

The film opens with a department store bombing and it rarely lets its foot off the gas. The film’s standout sequence involves a subway explosion where the train tears through a crowded station. It’s suspenseful, loud and tactile, a reminder of how much we lost when practical effects were replaced by CGI. That scene is preceded by a taxi dash through New York in which McClane and Zeus tear through Central Park, dodge pedestrians and try to follow an ambulance to their destination. It’s a newer, bigger type of action for Die Hard – a series largely focused on shootouts and fistfights (although there is a snowmobile chase in Die Hard 2) – and under McTiernan’s direction, it’s thrilling and fun.

Admittedly, Die Hard With a Vengeance is best in its first hour or so, when McClane and Zeus are jumping through hoops for Simon without quite knowing why. The script has so much fun having the two grumbling men playing kid games – I still can’t quite figure out the solution to the fountain in the park – that it’s almost disappointing when it reveals that “Simon” is the brother of Die Hard’s Simon Gruber, out on a quest for revenge. From there, the movie’s a pretty straightforward Die Hard movie, with McClane trying to figure out what the terrorists are really up to, engage in a few brawls and shootouts, and save the day before a bomb goes off in a school.

But it’s hard to complain when McTiernan populates the film with so much good stuff in a way that feels part of Die Hard formula while also opening it up. Key, of course, is Irons as Simon. While he doesn’t quite crackle with the same energy Alan Rickman showed in the first film, Irons brings his own wry sense of humor to the role, and I like his banter with Willis. He’s also just as eager as his brother to pull the wool over his enemies’ eyes, and I particularly like the moment where he pretends to be a New York construction worker to get into the Federal Reserve. It’s perhaps a bit too cute to make this Gruber someone who’s also more interested in a heist than in actually making a political statement, but I like the idea that Simon’s out there just doing whatever he pleases – if that means’ stealing world’s gold reserves and making the cop who killed his brother jump through some hoops, so be it.

There’s also a solid supporting cast throughout and, unlike the first Die Hard, where there’s a fair criticism that it’s too overstuffed with characters, here John’s police buddies or Simon’s henchmen give just enough color without dominating too much of the movie. I really like Graham Greene, Larry Bryggman and Colleen Camp as the officers who bust John’s balls but also are presented as capable, everyday heroes – not supercops constantly cracking wise. And while I think Irons gives the second-best villain performance in the franchise, it’s singer-songwriter Sam Phillips who might be the film’s most fearsome bad guy, silently stalking around the Federal Reserve and dispatching bad guys with a scythe.

The film is packed with moments that just work. The opening montage, set to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” kicks things off with a bang. There’s a great sequence where McClane must escape a rapidly flooding aqueduct, followed by a pretty solid car chase/shootout. There’s the great gag of McClane and Zeus plummeting via cable onto a ship and bisecting a terrorist. Plus, McTiernan lets the B-team have their own suspenseful sequence where they try to save a group of kids from a bomb. It’s just one thing after another, and while it lacks the meticulousness of Die Hard’s script, it’s the only one of the four sequels that comes near the first in terms of quality.

The ending, I’ll admit, lacks some punch. The film’s original climax saw a defeated McClane tracking down Simon in Europe and defeating him in a more talky scene. When audiences rejected that, they rushed and filmed the helicopter shootout that isn’t bad but feels like a step down from the chaos that had come before and ends a bit too abruptly – even John’s “Yippee-kai-yay” feels a bit obligatory. But that’s about five minutes in a 128-minute movie; the rest totally rips.

As I said, Die Hard With a Vengeance was the biggest hit around the world in 1995. It’s one of the great action movies of the ‘90s. It can’t quite escape the shadow of its predecessors, but that it comes so close is pretty impressive.

Previous entries in Summer of 1995:

• Crimson Tide

1. Obligatory sidebar: There’s always the weird question about whether Die Hard and Die Hard 2 are Christmas movies. The answer is yes. In the case of the first, I get frustrated because it obscures the fact that Die Hard is also just a great movie, period. Die Hard 2 is worse than its predecessor, but arguably a more appropriate Christmas movie.

Both films are so identified with the holiday season that it’s easy to forget they were both summer releases. Die Hard With a Vengeance, released in May and taking place in the late summer or early fall (school is in session and one character refers to the weather as ‘Indian summer’), winks at the franchise’s yuletide roots when a kid tells McClane “It’s like Christmas, you could steal City Hall” and has a sequence in which McClane talks about Santa to distract a terrorist.

2. Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park might have pioneered the use of computer effects, but it would take a few years before they fully dominated Hollywood megablockbusters. I think 1996’s Twister was probably one of the ones to put CGI at its forefront – even though that same year’s top-grosser, Independence Day, utilized CGI fairly sparingly and made strong use of models. In 1997,The Lost World, Spawn and Titanic made liberal use of CGI beasts, costumes, characters and sets. By 1998, both Godzilla and Armageddon had their computer effects front and center, and The Matrix in 1999 was the point of no return.

3. A refresher: Die Hard was based on a Roderick Thorpe novel called Nothing Lasts Forever that was actually a sequel to a novel whose film adaptation starred Frank Sinatra. Die Hard 2 was based on the Walter Wager airport novel 58 Minutes. Even the fourth entry, Live Free or Die Hard would be inspired by a magazine article. Only A Good Day to Die Hard was written as a McClane story from its inception – and it has the “honor” of being not only the worst Die Hard movie but one of the worst action movies of the last 20 years.

4. Actually, with Jackson playing the more cautious partner and McClane the wild card, you don’t have to squint too hard to see this as a Riggs/Murtaugh adventure.