Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

It used to be that if you were watching a movie on TV, you were stuck with full screen and stereo. Nowadays you can watch in glorious 16x9 wide screen, HD and full surround sound. It's nice for those of us that would rather see a cleaned up, edited version of a film like the movies from the Die Hard series, but want the full experience. Only problem is, there are some films that just don't work when they get cleaned up, no matter how good your sound and picture are.

I think I have seen most of Die Hard films on TV at one point or another, and I seem to remember thinking I liked this one the best. It definitely has some great twists, and the conflict/cooperation between McClane and Zeus keeps things snappy. Unfortunately, whoever wrote this script must have been a big fan of swear words, because every sentence seems to have three or four words blanked out. These are not just interjections, they are adjectives, verbs, nouns, and everything in between. And with them gone the dialog is often very hard to follow.

The other problem is the violence. There were times where they cut huge chunks of time to get rid of something excessively violent, and the jump in the editing leaves you confused as to what just happened. At one point you see McClane is bleeding very profusely from a wound to his shoulder, but we missed the scene where the injury happened. And John's big fight scene on the boat must have been quite extreme, because half of it was gone. I have no idea what happened in any of it.

Is it better than being assaulted if the words and violence were left in? Oh, very much so. However, after the editing are you left with a good movie? Not really. Of course, while many people would disagree with me, I am not sure it was that great of a movie to begin with.

There were times where I had to say to myself, "come on!". McClane gets blown out of the tunnel by the rushing water, flying twenty feet into the air, and just happens to land by the side the of road where Zeus is driving at that very moment? What were the chances of that? And the film was that way throughout. Although I think the weakest part of the film was the dialog. With the swear words gone, it was obvious just how thin most of the dialog was.

Over all, I would not say it is a terrible movie, but not a very strong one either. And unfortunately, they tried to pad it with the very stuff that gets cleaned out when they show a movie on TV. So unless you like that kinda stuff and are going to watch the rated R theater release, I would say this movie is not really worth watching. Of course, I would say the rated R version is not worth watching either.