Barnes & Noble

These three suspenseful, action-packed shoot-'em-ups -- the first of which revitalized Bruce Willis's flagging career and inspired countless imitations -- arrive in a beautifully packaged box set loaded with supplemental features. The 1985 original, Die Hard, pits hard-boiled New York cop Willis against terrorist Alan Rickman, whose operatives infiltrate a Los Angeles office building and hold one company's employees hostage -- including Willis's wife, Bonnie Bedelia. The visual and editorial techniques employed in this slam-bang thriller by director John McTiernan (The Hunt for Red October) have since been emulated -- if rarely matched -- by innumerable filmmakers. One of the more talented, Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger), directed Die Hard 2 (1990), which creates similarly claustrophobic tension by placing its hostages aboard a hijacked plane headed for Washington's Dulles Airport. Harlin upped the ante by making the sequel's action even more violent, but his effort was topped by the returning McTiernan in 1995's Die Hard with a Vengeance. The third film sacrifices logic for roller-coaster thrills and gives Willis a formidable costar in Samuel L. Jackson, who helps him defeat mad bomber Jeremy Irons in the streets of New York. All three films are elaborately mounted and breathlessly paced, and the intricacies of the productions are explored in the DVD supplements. Die Hard, for example, includes a detailed commentary by special-effects maestro Richard Endlund, along with a featurette chronicling the film's postproduction phase, deleted scenes, bloopers, and DVD-ROM content. Part Two offers a commentary by Harlan in addition to an HBO "making-of" featurette, four deleted scenes, vignettes showing the preparation and execution of stunts, and side-by-side comparisons of composite effects shots. The third film is accompanied by a McTiernan commentary, special production featurettes that appeared on CBS and HBO, an alternate ending, more stunt work studies, and storyboarded sequences. These are the definitive home-video versions of these popular "popcorn" movies, and they belongs in every significant DVD collection. Ed Hulse

All Movie Guide

It's Christmas time in L.A., and there's an employee party in progress on the 30th floor of the Nakatomi Corporation building. The revelry comes to a violent end when the partygoers are taken hostage by a group of terrorists headed by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), who plan to steal the 600 million dollars locked in Nakatomi's high-tech safe. In truth, Gruber and his henchmen are only pretending to be politically motivated to throw the authorities off track; also in truth, Gruber has no intention of allowing anyone to get out of the building alive. Meanwhile, New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) has come to L.A. to visit his estranged wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), who happens to be one of the hostages. Disregarding the orders of the authorities surrounding the building, McClane, who fears nothing (except heights), takes on the villains, armed with one handgun and plenty of chutzpah. Until Die Hard came along, Bruce Willis was merely that wisecracking guy on Moonlighting. After the film's profits started rolling in, Willis found himself one of the highest-paid and most sought-after leading men in Hollywood. Hal Erickson

All Movie Guide

"Another basement, another elevator...how can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?" asks John McClane (Bruce Willis), in what is doubtless the key question of this second Die Hard film. A year after foiling the terrorist takeover of a high-rise office building in the first movie, McClane is waiting to pick up his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), at Dulles International Airport just outside Washington, D.C., on Christmas Eve. Scheduled to arrive the same evening is Ramon Esperanza (Franco Nero), a South American political figure who is being brought to the United States to stand trial for his role in a drug-smuggling ring. However, a group of terrorists, led by renegade American military officer Col. Stuart (William Sadler), take control of the airport, scuttling radio transmissions and placing their own men in the control tower. Stuart and his men ensure that Esperanza's plane lands safely, and then demand that Stuart and his men be given a fully-fueled 747 and free passage wherever they choose to go. Otherwise, they will guide the many circling jets waiting for landing instructions into definite crash landings, killing the many passengers on board. Not willing to stand aside as terrorists once again threaten his wife's life, the wise-cracking McClane once again leaps into action to foil Stuart's plans and bring the passenger jets safely to the ground. William Atherton, John Amos, Dennis Franz, and John Leguizamo highlight the supporting cast. Mark Deming

All Movie Guide

Bruce Willis returns as misfit cop John McClane in the third film in the Die Hard series. McClane has fallen on hard times; after moving to New York City and breaking up with his wife, he's developed a drinking problem and has been suspended from the NYPD. However, his past comes back to haunt him in the form of Simon (Jeremy Irons), a terrorist bomber who has been using McClane as his contact as he plants a series of bombs in public places and gives McClane inane "clues" to their whereabouts in the form of riddles and bizarre games. McClane soon discovers he's been involved in Simon's scheme as part of a personal grudge; while associated with an international terrorist group, Simon is also the brother of the man McClane threw off the side of a skyscraper several years back (in the original Die Hard). Now McClane, with the help of a Harlem shopkeeper named Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson), has to find out where Simon has planted the bombs, guess where he'll strike next, and try to find his base of operations before more bombs go off and thousands of people die. The supporting cast features Graham Greene and Colleen Camp; singer Sam Phillips made her acting debut as a member of Simon's terrorist group (Phillips never speaks, so as to not to reveal her Texas accent). Mark Deming

Product Details

• UPC: 024543440826
• Source: 20TH CENTURY FOX
• Region Code: 1
• Aspect Ratio: Cinemascope (2.35:1)
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Sound: DTS 5.1-Channel Surround Sound, THX-Supervised Mastering, Dolby Digital Surround, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
• Language: English, Français
• Subtitles: English, Español
• Time: 6:27:00
• Sales Rank: 2,155

This set contains DVDs which may be available separately:

• Die Hard
• Die Hard 2
• Die Hard With a Vengeance

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