MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Die Hard,’ Harder, Hardest : The Latest Installment Takes Blow-’Em-Up Escapades to the Extreme

The kabooms start early in “Die Hard With a Vengeance.” Before we’ve had a chance to ease into our seats we’re treated to a rock-the-Dolby explosion in New York’s Bonwit Teller department store.

And the explosions--or the threat of explosions--just keep on coming. This third installment of the “Die Hard” series, starring Bruce Willis as the heroically beleaguered police officer John McClane, is a grand-scale demolition derby--a demolition derby on steroids. It throws the audience into a state of heightened, exhilarated queasiness.

The trigger for all the kapowie is a cat-and-mouse game between McClane and a malevolent genius--is there any other kind in these films?--who goes by the name Simon (Jeremy Irons). Simon, who has mastered the art of snooty, untraceable phone calls to the N.Y.P.D. and who bears a king-size, unexplained animus toward McClane, likes to play Simon Says.

The police play along because they have no other way of averting more bombings. And so McClane, on the skids with the police, separated from his wife, hung over, is delivered up for Simon’s delectation.

Simon’s first little game sends McClane into a life-threatening situation in Harlem, where he ends up uneasily allied with a shopkeeper, Zeus Carver (Samuel L. Jackson), who regards all white skin as a red flag. For most of the movie, Simon sends these two on a series of beat-the-clock escapades all over New York.

The “Die Hard” series was never exactly big on nuance, but this new installment relentlessly zeros in on sensation. It’s almost sadistically single-minded. Did Simon also direct it?

John McTiernan (who directed the first “Die Hard”) and screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh keep throwing conflagrations at us. They stage a chase scene through Central Park and another across 90 rush-hour blocks, that, strictly from the point of view of crowd-control logistics, are marvels.

In the popular imagination, it would be difficult to make New York seem any more horrific than it already is, but the filmmakers succeed. They deliver up a New York where everything is in hair-trigger peril: the subways, the buildings, the crowds.

There’s a double message for us in all these high jinks. The people who made the film are out to top not only the other two “Die Hard” movies but also every other film like it--including, most recently, “Speed.”

Their “generosity” is a form of drubbing. Are we supposed to be elevated by the idea that supposedly the only way we can be entertained by an action thriller these days is by having it pounded into our DNA?

Even McClane’s usual squiggles of wiseacre throwaway dialogue are mostly lost in the din. (This is the kind of film where everyone in the audience is always leaning over to ask, “What did he just say?”)

The big set pieces don’t build, really, they just pile up. The filmmakers throw in everything, even a children-in-peril ploy, just in case we thought one of our favorite disasters was being neglected. No doubt a lot of people in the audience will be thinking of Oklahoma City during “Die Hard With a Vengeance,” but it’s too flagrantly over-the-top to be truly disturbing in a real-world way. The subtext never becomes the text.

And what is the text? It’s an essay in adrenaline rush all done up in spray-painted graffiti and cartoon doodles. Willis and Jackson, as adept and entertaining as they often are, spend most of the movie huffing and puffing. They barely keep pace with the effects.

Screenwriter Hensleigh also worked on the “Indiana Jones” TV series, and he seems to have transposed a lot of Lucasland thrills intact into the bowels of New York. (There’s an underground aqueduct flooding scene that Indie will be sorry he missed out on.) The film’s spirit isn’t very Indiana Jones-ish, though. The Saturday-matinee feeling is uglified by all the pounding squalor. As McClane and Zeus press on in pursuit, they turn into blood-streaked speed demons. Tattered, they wear their welts like the latest fashion.

Speaking of fashion, why is it that terrorists in the movies always dress in the best threads? Simon, once we get to see the man behind the voice, is buffed and spiffy. He’s dressed for success.

Jeremy Irons gives Simon a maniacal elegance that occasionally lifts him into the realm of the best James Bond movie meanies. Simon enjoys how irrational the rational can be. He’s a nut-brained respite from the McClane/Zeus shenanigans, which resemble the “Roadrunner” crossed with “Lethal Weapon.”

Their brothers-under-the-skin badinage seems engineered for a new pairing, a new series--”Lethal Die Hard” perhaps? When Zeus scores McClane for being white, there’s no explosiveness behind it. It’s just shtick.

Still, it’s nice that something in this movie doesn’t explode.

* MPAA rating: R, for strong violence and pervasive strong language. It includes much cussing and graphic violence and children in peril.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

‘Die Hard With a Vengeance’ Bruce Willis: John McClane Jeremy Irons: Simon Samuel L. Jackson: Zeus Carver Graham Greene: Joe Lambert A 20th Century Fox presentation in association with Cinergi. Director John McTiernan. Producers John McTiernan, Michael Tadross. Executive producer Andrew G. Vajna. Screenplay by Jonathan Hensleigh. Cinematographer Peter Menzies. Editor John Wright. Costumes Joseph G. Aulisi. Music Michael Kamen. Production design Jackson DeGovia. Set decorator Leslie Bloom. Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.