Tuesday Night is Film Night gets tough tonight. However, that's tough with a bit of cheese, a bit of swearing, a lot of bullets and a yippee-ki-yay thrown in for good measure! It can only be the return of John McClane, in his third outing;
Die Hard: With a Vengeance
I feel it hardly necessary to run through a full plot synopsis for a Die Hard film, they are clearly very popular and the basic premise is the same, but I'll give it a go anyway!
Bruce Willis rolls up yet again as the maverick cop John McClane in this, the third of what was then, a trilogy of films. This time he is working for the NYPD, albeit on suspension, when an explosion rocks the city centre. The perpetrator of this dastardly deed is soon on the 'phone to the New York Police Department demanding the attention of John McClane and insisting he carries out a task, otherwise another explosion will go off.
McClane is picked up, very hungover and in need of some aspirin, what he actually gets is a quick trip to Harlem wearing a rather disturbing sandwich board over his shoulders! Here he meets up with Zeus....
"Yeah, Zeus! As in, father of Apollo? Mount Olympus? Don't f**k with me or I'll shove a lightning bolt up your ass? Zeus! You got a problem with that?"
.....played by Samuel L Jackson. Zeus turns out to be McClane's Good Smaritan and unwittingly they end up as a double act running around New York at the beck and call of "Simon". Simon being the guy on the other end of the 'phone, passing on instructions to McLane and Zeus on what they need to do to prevent more bombs exploding. All these tests and bombs are merely a distraction for the main coup de grâce in Simon's plan, which is to remove the billions of dollars in gold from the Federal Reserve.
Simon turns out to be the brother of Hans Gruber, from the original Die Hard, who died spectacularly as McClane launched him from the Nakatomi Plaza building. So this is a double headed plot; get revenge on McClane whilst helping yourself to vast quantities of gold! Simple.
Simon is played superbly by Jeremy Irons, he is very much like the Alan Rickman (Hans Gruber) character in the first Die Hard, cool, calm, collected and virtually merciless in his intent to rid New York of McClane and the gold.
As with the all the Die Hard movies, this is a flight of fancy grounded in a modicum of reality, McClane manages to survive two hours of the film whilst being shot at, bombed, chased in cars, in trains and on boats. Punched, kicked, dropped from a great height, overturned in a car and many, many other feats of mini human destruction and he does this with probably the "worst headache ever", apparently. But that is what makes these films so good, you get totally engrossed in the constant mayhem, you are firmly gripped with the action with intertwining plots. Plus this time there is the added bonus of riddles and puzzles from Simon, that prompts a great deal of audience participation, trying to work out how to get exactly four gallons of water out of 3 and 5 gallon jugs!
Samuel L Jackson is fantastic as the impromptu sidekick and a great foil to Willis' McClane. They seem like an unlikely pairing, but they get the job done and done with style.
You know what you are getting with a Die Hard film, it is totally over the top action with the virtually indestructible McClane, but it is just brilliant. Bring on Die Hard 4! Fantastic stuff.
As for the TNiFN scores, it is a 8.6 out of 10. It would be more, but one of the female contingent marked it down!
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