New York. A bomb explodes in a store, and a mysterious Simon calls the police and threatens to detonate more bombs unless Lt. John McLane walks with a "I Hate Niggers" sign on the streets of Harlem. John has to comply, and gets into trouble on the streets, but is saved by clerk Zeus. Simon phones again and poses a riddle next, after which he detonates a bomb in a subway train. While the police are busy trying to find an alleged bomb in a school, Simon Gruber, Hans Gruber's brother, sets his real plan into motion: disguised as railway repair crew, Simon enters the Federal Reserve Bank over it, whose alarm was nullified by the explosion, and robs its gold. Simon and his crew escape with the gold in a ship, but John and Zeus manage to find them, and the police raid catches them. In a shootout, Simon is killed in a helicopter.
Part III of the "Die Hard" franchize is considered better than part II, but still weaker than the classic part I, which was helmed by director John McTiernan, who retroactively returned the story to its roots. The protagonist John McLane (his name sounds similar to McTiernan's) is refreshingly brought into a story that is not set on Christmas, but is its very own thing, yet some of its elements are still repetitive, especially in the disappointing idea that his wife Holly is absent from the story, and is again in a feud with him, which negates their character arc from the first "Die Hard" film, and thus feels frustrating, as if we just got back to square one. "Die Hard with a Vengeance" works the best in its first half, where the villain Simon tricks the police by sending it on a wild goose chase equipped with neat riddles (in one that is very amusing, John and Zeus have to solve how to fill 4 gallons of water and place it on a scale using only a 5-gallon and 3-gallon jugs) only to distract them while he goes after his real target, robbing the gold from the Federal Reserve Bank, whose alarm system he conveniently nullified using a previous explosion in the subway. The rest of the film, the entire second hour, is just a standard action film repertoire, which never has neither the inspiration nor the style to engage the viewers on a deeper level. Some scenes are even a bit unconvincing and silly (the way John escapes from a driving truck, because a wall of water is flooding the tunnel behind him, so he emerges from the manhole in a fountain, and is conveniently seen by Zeus who just happens to pass the place in a car just at that moment; the rope attached from a car on the bridge to the passing ship), whereas this time around not every little detail plays a role later on. The anticlimactic ending seems a bit rushed and too neat, and thus the range of this part III was set to good, and it works within these parameters.
Grade:++
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