Let the record reflect something that has never happened before and may never happen again: what follows was drafted by Matt, reviewed by Norm, and ratified by Management, and not one word was fought over. Frame this page. It is the site's only unanimous exhibit.
Die Hard with a Vengeance should not work. It's a threequel, which is usually where franchises go to become merchandise. It began life as a spec script called Simon Says that wasn't even a Die Hard movie — Hollywood shopped it around town, at one point as a possible Lethal Weapon sequel, before someone realized the smartest move in the building: give it to John McClane, and give McClane back to John McTiernan, the director who built Nakatomi Plaza in the first place.
A hungover McClane in a sandwich board, a furious stranger who wants nothing to do with him, and a bomber playing Simon Says with all of New York. Three movies of setup, paid off in one morning.
What makes it the best of the franchise is that it inverts the first film instead of photocopying it. Die Hard locked one man in a tower; Vengeance takes the lid off and makes the maze the size of Manhattan — subways, aqueducts, Harlem to Wall Street in rush hour, every set piece with an address you can find on a map. And it's secretly a mystery: Jeremy Irons' Simon Gruber runs the whole picture as a riddle game, including the three-gallon/five-gallon water jug puzzle that has ruined more dinner-party napkins than any scene in action history. A thriller's brain in a summer movie's body.
Then there's the engine: Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson, the finest two-hander the genre ever produced, precisely because Zeus Carver is not a sidekick. He's a co-lead who thinks McClane is a menace, says so, and is frequently right. Their argument is the movie, which may explain why this particular film received unanimous approval at this particular website. Audiences agreed — it finished as the highest-grossing film in the world in 1995, a fact people keep forgetting because it seems too reasonable to be true.
Runtime: 2 hours 11 minutes. Norm has reviewed the ledger and waived the tax in full — every minute is load-bearing, and the third act arrives on schedule like a man who respects your time. Management notes for the file that the picture is post-1975, mystery-forward, dry as sand, and plotted like a Swiss watch with a grudge: eligibility was never in question. The trivia footnote, because the Vault runs on them: McTiernan reshot the ending — the original, darker close (McClane hunting Simon across Europe with a riddle of his own) was scrapped for the helicopter finale, and for once the studio-mandated version was the right call.
The Vault's takeaway: sequels fail when they repeat and succeed when they invert. Vengeance took the tower and turned it inside out. Signed — for the first and possibly last time — all three thumbs of Two Thumbs Down.