1995 - DIE HARD WITH A VENGANCE, aka Die Hard 3

The third installment in the Die Hard series, In this film we follow Detective John McClane who is now on suspension.  He's being pursued by the brother of Hans Gruber the villain from the first Die Hard movie.  But all is not as it seems as McClane starts to piece together the real reason that chief bad guy Simon Peter Gruber is messing around with him.

I'll give them credit they approached this sequel with some new ideas.  This time McClane has a partner played by Samuel L. Jackson.  The main bad guy is played by Jeremy Irons in kind of a paycheck performance but a very witty paycheck performance.  The other main character is New York City.  A lot of Die Hard 3 was shot there and they did a pretty good job of capturing the vibe of the city.

Die Hard 3 also has a decent sense of humor with Willis tossing off the one liners while taking on the usual small army of terrorists.  The director John McTiernan is back at the helm of this film and he keeps things perking along from one action scene to the next.

 

The chief problem with Die Hard 3 is as usual it's length.  Once the action moves out of New York City the tension kind of dissipates and it's mostly a matter of the story going through it's paces so we can wrap it up with the now Willis signature line "Yippee- Ki-Ya..." etc as he takes down another elaborate bad guy plot.  This is the last Die Hard film that was any good.  The subsequent sequels had a major drop in the quality department.

The film was written by Jonathan Hensleigh with a little more wit this time.  The film runs an overlong 128 minutes.