Five years on from the events of DIE HARD 2, Detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) is back on duty in New York, having been estranged from wife Holly for a while, drunk and down on the floor.
However, a mysterious bomber-cum-terrorist announces to the NYPD via a bomb planted at the Bonwit-Teller store that unless McClane does what he asks in a game of ‘Simon Says’, a big bang in a very public place will occur.
McClane’s first task is to wear a racially provocative sign in deepest Harlem – and it is here that he encounters an unlikely ally in shopkeeper Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson, PULP FICTION) who rescues him from some irate black youths and they speed downtown to McClane’s precinct.
However, the tasks set by Simon (Jeremy Irons) hide a bigger plan – and an even bigger vendetta against McClane….
John McTiernan returned to the director’s chair having done the original 1988 classic with Bruce Willis in a movie that has shades of DIRTY HARRY and other films of the genre and returned the more human conflict that defined the original film as a true action classic.
Watchable and violent in equal terms.