NOTHING LASTS FOREVER (Part 2 - Wait...But I Thought...WHAT HAPPENED?

Die Hard With a Vengence (DH3) came out in 1995.  Movies had changed somewhat since DH2 in 1990 and a lot since DH in 1988.  There was a dwindling level of emotional content in action movies taking place in the 1990s.  Maybe it was audience impatience.  Maybe studios just figured what audiences really wanted was a little less conversation, a little more action.  Whatever the reason for this changing aesthetic, DH3 fit in perfectly with it.

Now, there's a lot about DH3 worth liking (more on that below).  Another terrorist - a mad bomber this time - is blowing up buildings and throwing NY into chaos.  For some strange reason, he talks in puzzles and demands that one man be brought in to be a part of the drama, John McClane.  The department is happy about this because John can be a bundle of trouble.  But to stop the killing of innocent citizens, they haul him in.  And this is the one of the first looks we get at John McClane in this latest installment.

He's back in NY (no longer LAPD), beaten down, hungover, angry and - for reasons only agents and business affairs executives will ever really know - once again estranged from Holly.  This represents the film's first major lapse in judgement.  Though it makes perfect sense that Holly shouldn't be given the exact same story function she held in the first two movies (heck she needn't be in the film at all for that matter), but to deny her essential importance to John's character arc through two entire films, explaining away their separation as a the result of marriage doomed to failure due to John's character flaws was a cynical and lazy choice.  He overcame those character flaws and won her back.  We saw it happen.  So why were they trying to tell us now that he's incapable of change?  In choosing this path for McClane, the filmmakers consciously decided to step back from the originality of the character and redirect him to be a generic James Bond knock-off.  From this decision on, his job was to save the world, not just stop a crime that endangered a group of innocents that happened to include someone he cared about deeply.  Again, I'm not insisting that Holly had to be a part of this story, but she didn't need to be thrown to the lions either.  In fact, the wasted opportunity here is for John to be the one in danger for a change.  To know that someone out there cares for you and needs you around is a strong motivation for survival.  This is especially true for first responders, like, say, cops.

So starting with the original premise: A mad bomber is terrorizing New York City.  His one big demand is that John McClane be forced to play a role in whatever effort is made to stop it.  The feds are involved now and McClane's being hauled in against his will anyway, so why not haul him in from LA to join the NYPD for a special investigation?  Maybe he's grown to like the sunshine of Los Angeles.  Maybe he's starting to wonder why he didn't come here sooner?  He and Holly and the kids have a nice house.  Al Powell is an easygoing partner.  Life ain't so bad.  Then the feds come and tell him they need him to come back to hellish, congested Manhattan in the middle of an August heatwave to stop a madman.  He's driven by duty, because he's that kind of guy.  Holly knows it, so she sends him off with a kiss and a dire warning that he better come back in one piece.  And, now, John McClane, who loves his wife and hates to fly, has to leave her behind and board a plane for JFK - unsure of why this murderous lunatic is demanding his attention.   Had they opened that way, well, then now I still feel like I'm in the world of Die Hard.

Once he's in NY, we could still have all the things that work well about the film as it stands: Seeing McClane on the streets of NY, the serious and unglamorous team of cops led by Larry Bryggman's weary but reliable Inspector Cobb.  Fellow cops Joe Lambert (Graham Greene) and Connie Kowalski (Colleen Camp) and the others can (and should) still be in the fold, talking smack about playing their badge numbers in the lottery and busting each others' chops like they do.  (These are the people McClane came up with.  They're not impressed with his adventure at Nakatomi or Dulles.  Imagine the fun they'd have at Hollywood McClane's expense.)

The guys don't mess around.

Putting John McClane back in NY was actually one of the things this film did right.  It gave the series the grit and sweat of a great, old, big-city cop movie.  It gives us a glimpse into the NY cop in his element for a change.  But it would have worked better to have him dragged back there.  That way,  when we find out later that the bomber is actually the vengeful brother of Hans Gruber, who has a personal vendetta against John McClane's, his return would make good thematic sense.  His past is thrust at him in ways he thought they never would be if he had any say in the matter.  He's forced to face what he left behind in more ways than one.

Now the action can begin with a nice foundation of emotional backstory.  Now we have a reason to get on his side other than wanting to hear the solutions to the puzzles thrown his way.  And above all, no mater what happens, we want him to accomplish two things beyond stopping the bomber. 1) Make peace with his old NYPD chums and 2) Get safely back to Holly where he belongs.  The added bonus to all this is that you haven't blown up the bridge to Die Hard 1 & 2, in fact, you've built  a new one.

And much of what is great about Die Hard is at work in DH3.  I enjoyed the addition of new sidekick, Zeus, played by Samuel L. Jackson.

Manhattan on foot in the sweltering heat was a great arena for testing McClane's physical limits.  The public schools being threatened, the subway cars at risk of being blown to pieces, the taxi chase through Central Park - all of this was fresh territory for the series.  But the one scene that stands out, in my estimation, that really feels like a microcosm of how the math of a Die Hard movie works, is the scene on the elevator in the Federal bank.

McClane is escorted by a bad guy dressed in and NYPD uniform and he recognizes the badge number of this imposter as that of a fallen fellow officer.  How does he remember a detail like the badge number?  Because he just had the conversation about playing badge numbers in the lottery earlier in the film.  McClane knows he's in the presence of a villain, but the villain doesn't know he knows.  It's a brilliant reversal of the Hans Gruber/Bill Clay scene from DH1.  McClane plays it cool until he sees an opening that allows him to take down everyone in the elevator.  It's that kind of detective-work moment that made us love McClane in the first two films because it allowed us to think, "Yeah, if I were him, I would've remembered that, too."

However, if the first major misstep of DH3 is the handling of Holly, the second is the gradual elimination of McClane's vulnerability.  By the end, he survives a hundred foot drop onto the deck of a ship and goes on fighting for one-and-a-quarter acts.  In DH 1 & 2, when McClane got beat up, he needed time to recover.  That ended up being valuable time for us to get inside his soul as he assessed what really mattered to him in this crazy world.  He wasn't allowed that here.  Instead, he bounces back from his and falls like he's made of steel.  When that happens, he started to drift away from being the guy we knew, the new kind of action hero that took us by surprise, and he became a much more conventional, and less interesting superhero.  AND becausee they never set up a still strong and meaningful relationship with John and Holly, the ending where he calls her to make amends (again!) just rings hollow.  They cheated themselves out of a stronger, more emotionally-satisfying ending in which he could have re-earned the respect of his old NYPD partners and headed back to L.A. wiser man who is still grateful he survived to see her another day.

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