Superhero Media: Die Hard With A Vengeance

Before I get to talking about Die Hard With A Vengeance, I just wanted to mention two throw-away comedy lines that have dated hilariously. One is a 911 Call-centre Operator making a joke about marrying Donald Trump, and the other is about Hillary Clinton being the likely 43rd President of the United States. I really hope Trump isn't still in office when this comes through the backlog. Hell, I kind of hope he isn't alive anymore, but what can you do? Five years after saving his wife and other passengers at Dulles Airport, John McClaine is back in New York, having lost some status and his wife and picked up a serious drinking habit. Expecting to have a day off to nurse his perpetual hangover, McClaine is pulled out of the drunk tank when a terrorist known only as Simon demands he play his little game before more people die. Soon an electrician named Zeus (Sam Mutherfukin' Jackson!) is caught up in the game and the FBI comes in to tell McClaine that Simon is really Simon Gruber, brother of Hans and played by, a shockingly buff, Jeremy Irons. 

The film progresses into a great series of tasks and puzzles McClaine and Zeus have to run to that seems ripped from a really exciting role playing game I wish I could have played. Despite having the entirety of New York City to play in, and actually including scenes in Canada, Die Hard With A Vengeance manages to be tense, fast-paced and often nerve wracking, as the whole NYPD rushes with McClaine and Zeus to prevent a series of bombs going off. Honestly, this may be one of the best sequels of all time, right up there with The Empire Strikes Back and The Godfather Part II, with flashbacks to the original Die Hard and McClaine using his knowledge of Hans Gruber and experience of previous films to win the day. Those too young to remember a world before the Marvel Cinematic Universe may be shocked to learn that sequels referring to other films directly used to be something of a rarity. Seeing Hans again nearly a decade later, even only for an instant, is a great bit and gives McClaine a great moment of character development that's pretty rare in Action cinema. 

The fact that we got two more Die Hard films (at the time of writing, there is a 6th in the works) after With A Vengeance is generally considered to not be a great thing, with most finding Live Free or Die Hard and A Good Day to Die Hard to be pretty poor. You'll have to wait for my take on those, but I do think that their existence has forced people to go back and get a better appreciation for the first three, especially Die Harder. That these films are great should go without saying, but the fact that they remain so great is worth celebrating as well; that the ways in which they have dated, and they have, are pretty minor and doesn't detract too much. Yes, there are almost no decent female characters in the franchise, and that kind of sucks, but the films aren't outright sexist or misogynistic in any real way. The interactions between McClaine and Zeus are a little dated, and occasionally awkward, but I know I don't expect McClaine to be a bastion of post-racial enlightenment. Ok, two more to go in this series.