Die Hard: With a Vengeance

Buddy Formula

Die Hard and Die Hard 2 had a few things in common: Bruce Willis, bad guys with insanely elaborate plans, a few mind games, and big explosions. The third entry in the franchise, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, contains all of these. As an added bonus, they threw in a buddy in the form of Samuel L. Jackson. Willis and Jackson, reunited in a sense from Pulp Fiction, work flawlessly together. They're both playing nicely conflicted characters who suffer a bit in the line of duty.

Director Returns

John McTiernan has made quite a name for himself with action movies. Die Hard was only his second movie, but it made him famous. Renny Harlin did a nice job with Die Hard 2, but it's nice to have McTiernan in the chair again. The action sequences are very well executed.

Batteries

Does anyone else find it funny that Energizer got the product placement in this one? Granted, it's just a joke about the commercials since no batteries are themselves shown, but the Die Hard name represents another line of batteries altogether. Maybe Sears wasn't feeling generous.

Nitpicking Spoilers!

• Goldfinger introduced us to the logistical problems of moving gold. As an added bonus, Bond spelled out the difficulty of moving a Fort Knox worth of gold. To make things even better, Simon is kind enough to inform us that ten times the gold of Fort Knox is being moved. And they do it in less than a day? Since the apparent attempt to wipe out the gold reserves appears to be the goal for a few minutes, I'd think they'd've gone back to Goldfinger and accounted for this.
• The editing eliminates a bit of the mind game with the water jugs. They magically end up with two gallons in the three-gallon jug and a full five-gallon jug, leaving only the one step to the end. It's easy to figure out how to get there. Fill the five-gallon jug. Pour three gallons of those five into the three-gallon jug. That leaves two in the five-gallon jug. Dump the three-gallon and transfer the two gallons from the five-gallon. Refill the five-gallon, then transfer the final gallon to fill the three-gallon. Voila. I once had a CS professor who assigned this problem as a programming project, but he wanted the solution for the general case of any amount of liquid and the fewest possible transfers.
• I'm not usually one to notice goofs, but I find it amusing that Katya's shirt is closed when she shoots at the helicopter even though it was ripped open by Simon in an earlier scene. Actually, I'd really like to nitpick the insufficient screen time that Sam Phillips gets. :-)