NYPD Det. John McClane (Bruce Willis) is presently on suspension for undisclosed reasons, and hence hung over and unshaven, when a massive explosion rips through the Bonwit Teller department store (no casualty report: such is the level of human interest); and the German-accented, nursery-rhyming mad bomber (Jeremy Irons) phones up the police to demand that McClane be put on the case. (Knock-us-over-with-a-feather revelation: the bomber turns out to be the brother of the German-accented villain in the original Die Hard.) The innovation, if copying a different series instead of copying one's own series can be called an innovation, is that the quintessential lone-wolf cop is here transformed into one half of a comical buddy team. The moviemakers, obviously mindful of the Lethal Weapon formula (headlong white cop, foot-dragging black cop), have to go to great lengths to enact the transformation: the bomber's first test for McClane obliges him, in his boxer shorts, to stroll down a Harlem sidewalk wearing a sandwich board proclaiming "I hate niggers." By all rights, the game ought to end immediately, but a good-Samaritan shopowner (Samuel L. Jackson) comes to the detective's rescue, and the bomber thereafter includes him in the instructions for all subsequent tests. (He remains at McClane's side long after he logically needs to, even after taking a bullet in the leg.) Big, long, loud, absurdly plotted, sloppily staged (by John McTiernan), fundamentally timid and unventuresome. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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