Die Hard with a Vengeance Review

Bringing McTiernan back fixed the direction and Samuel L. Jackson fixed everything else. Pairing McClane with Zeus Carver, a Harlem shop owner who resents him on sight and never stops saying so, gives the series its only real relationship, and the two of them arguing about race and marriage while sprinting across Manhattan is better writing than this franchise had any right to receive.

The Simon Says structure is a genuinely good engine for two acts, moving them from a subway car to Central Park to a water jug puzzle against a clock. Jeremy Irons is enjoyable as a villain with a grudge that ties the trilogy together. Peter Menzies Jr. shoots a hot, grubby, unglamorous New York, and the taxi ride through the park is staged with the camera inside the car rather than hovering above it.

Then the third act arrives and the film loses its nerve. The gold heist reveal drains the tension out of the bomb threat, and the finale, relocated to a highway in Canada after the original ending was scrapped, is an anticlimax with almost no connection to the movie you were watching. Two thirds of a great sequel, and the best two thirds the series managed after 1988.