Kill James Bond! - S4E4: Die Hard With a Vengeance

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

It's the holiday season once again, so we're back with KJB Christmas Staple John McClane to check out yet another Die Hard movie. And I gotta say, the first and second were maybe- MAYBE! - christmas movies. This one is set in the middle of a hot New York City summer. Happy Holidays, from our podcast family to your real family. Or just to you, if your family sucks. Fuck your family actually 🖕🖕 ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. For the past few months I've been talking to a family trapped in Gaza, working to cover their daily living costs amidst repeated displacements in the Genocide. Their names are Ahmed and Layla, and their 4 kids are Jana, Malik, Lana and Amir. Anything you can contribute would mean the world to me. They deserve to live. Attached is their gofundme, as well as three others that I can vouch for the authenticity of. https://www.gofundme.com/f/a8jzz-help-me-and-my-family-get-out-of-the-gaza-strip https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-and-my-family-to-find-a-safe-place https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-maher-and-my-family-to-leave-gaza-to-belgium https://www.gofundme.com/f/htdcj-evacuating-my-family-from-gaza https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate ----- Consider supporting us on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond ------ WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

Hey listen, we had a report of a guy coming through here with a 8 reindeers. Hello and welcome to Christmas episodes. NXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX my friends, and loyal elves, AvioThorn and Devon. ALICE Merry Christmas, listener! You, boy, what bond is it? ALICE Oh, it's Bondmas Day! ALICE It's Roger Mawson! ZACH It's just by three Kill James Bond hosts of Christmas past, present, and future. ALICE Which of us is which?

ZACH I look like the ghost of Christmas present, so I call that. Which unfortunately does mean one of you has to be the Grim Reaper and the other has to be a terrifying child, so fight amongst yourselves for that, I suppose. Oh, the spondimist past! I guess I'm the Reaper. Easily done. Rattling your chains towards the microphone. Oooh.

Those were my sleigh bells, and not a catgirl collar. Thank you for joining us. Those were my sleigh bells, and not a catgirl collar. ALICE LAUGHS Thank you for joining us, we hope you've had a tolerable 2024, and we, you know, would like to see this out with what is now the third entry in the Die Hard franchise. ALICE MMMM You might say to yourself, a film, people like to say, Die Hard is my favorite Christmas movie because it's a movie set at Christmas. Die Hard 2, it's nobody's favorite, but it's like, it's a Christmas movie, because it's

set at Christmas. And so continuing in that tradition, Die Hard 3, a movie set in the depths of a hot New York City summer. That's right. Nothing to do with Christmas. My favorite Christmas movie, Christmas never mentioned, extremely hot. One mention of Santa and you've already heard it, so... I am excited though, cause like, this is, I think the best Die Hard film, I think it's the best in the series, it's also genuinely one of my favorite movies, and has been for

my, like, my whole life. We're gonna learn a bit about our friend Abbey. You know, this is gonna be a whole situation here. RILEY It's a perfectly competent thriller. Like mid-90s thriller. RILEY I would say exceedingly competent. It's very well made.

It's a great action movie. This is one of those times when listeners I would say, like, if you haven't seen the movie before you listen to the podcast, go watch the movie, it's legit good. ALICE Wow. I'm just struck with this idea of us celebrating Christmas and the general winter holiday season by watching an extremely hot summer movie. It sounds crazy, but here in our little podcast of Kill James Bond, in many ways, we're all detective left-handed John McClane.

RILEY It's an Australian Christmas, which I believe takes place in July, because it's in summer. ALICE Horrible. But so, we begin... I think you're right, Abby, that this is, like, it's an interestingly, like, it's a fun watch. I had fun watching this one, but I think this represents a kind of a high point for this kind of action movie, specifically. There's a kind of, like, we threw everything at this in terms of budget, in terms of casting, and there's almost a hubris to it. This is as good as it's gonna get, like, if American quality of life peaked in 1999 right before 9-11 happened. This has a similar

kind of vibe, sort of like, this was peak action movie, like peak oil. Well, cause it's not only an action movie, it's also the movie that tackles race. Finally. Yes. Finally. They did it. They did it. This was the film that fixed racism in the United States. I assume, haven't checked. I assume that went well. But like, they did it. And like, even right from the start.

So we begin with a New York City heatwave, it's the summertime... It's almost like New York City is a character in the movie itself. It is, it is in many ways. And that character gets blown the fuck up immediately. Because the first thing that happens is the department store explodes. Did either of you get the drop that's just one of the first lines in the movie, where the NYPD is scrambling, and somebody says, why would anybody blow up a department store? And then one of the cops replies, ever see a woman miss a shoe sale?

Uh, women! We're crazy! We're crazy! We're crazy. Women. Women. They be shopping. They be shopping. It was probably a woman who did it.

Probably. Might well have been, you know? One of the sort of, like, uh, one of my favorite things about this kind of, um, 90s American bonhomie is this kind of like, oh, you know, we're like a family, we all get along. We're crazy, by the way. You know? Well, the other thing about women is a family, we all get along. We're crazy, by the way. You know? Women? Well, the other thing about women is that some of them are of colour. That's true.

And so this black lady who works for the NYPD, gets a phone call, it's obviously very urgent, and says to the chief as he's barking orders, chief, you gotta listen to this, and he's like, not right now! He shuts her up! And then she insists, she leans in, in fact, and she insists that he listen to it. And it's the Riddler. You're gonna want to accept this. And it is, it's for damn Riddler. It's the Riddler! It's the CEO's shooter, he's on the fucking phone.

D-D-Dus Riddler. D-Dus Riddler. D-Dus Riddler. So, I will say, incredible job of imitating Alan Rickman's fucking German accent from Die Hard 1. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This will be important later. ALICE This is Jeremy Irons! RILEY This fucking Jeremy Irons doing gay German

accent, which is great, I don't have any drops of it at all, but you know what it sounds like. It sounds like- ALICE Oh hello. You're here to blob your department store. ALICE Oh hello. I planted a series of bombs around New York. It's not that guy. Said simple Simon to supply man. Where are my pies? Where the heck are my pies?

NYPD is like, what the fuck are you talking about? He's like, find me Detective Inspector Sergeant General John McClain, NYPD PSD police squad. Get him. And he's like, we don't have him. He's been suspended on account of being a dipshit. And he's like, we don't have him, he's been suspended on it kind of being a dipshit, and he's like, no! ALICE He went something called Harry DuBois mode. It's the 90s, I don't know what this is. WILL I love when you get to the third movie and like, the detective is once again disgraced. Like, it's always so good.

ALICE Real peaks and troughs in this man's career. Not divorced, crucially, separated. His wife still won't leave him. So separated she's not in the movie. Yeah, she's in Los Angeles with the kids, he's back in New York being a disgraced NYPD detective, which it seems is the role he was born to play in life. He is Dubois mode as well, because they don't really imply that he's not a detective, he's actually got a bunch of cases on the go at the moment, and they end up reassigning them

all. Anyway, the gay German riddler says, find Bruce Willis, and then we're gonna play a game with Simon Says. Pull him out of the whirling in rags, and then you're gonna have to do all these little tasks for me. Otherwise, kaboom. We get a lot of, like, NYPD shit here, we don't... I note in sort of passing observation that you don't really get guys named Kowalski in

things anymore. You really don't. This is 100% the movie that has a Kowalski in it, like, every third guy in this scene is a Kowalski. it, like every third guy in this scene is a Kowalski. Everybody has two phones to each ear. I was in Cadets with a Kowalski and a Rybinski. It's a pretty common name. It's just Polish for blacksmith, it's just Smith, but like, it's kind of like the flattening

of the Polish-American experience, from extra that gets shouted at as, like, a cop character, Kowalski, to just nothing, you know? Very sad. Neo-liberalism. RILEY Yeah, it's crazy. Almost no Polish-American excellence in this movie at all. ALICE True. They go and pull John McClane out of the whirling rags. And he has a horrible hangover. This will be a recurring thing throughout the movie. He is, like, slamming aspirin. RILEY I get it. God, I get it.

He still looks hot here. This is an edge case, he's still hot in this movie. ALICE Interesting hairline is the thing. RILEY Fascinating hairline. Not the most interesting we've seen, but... That of course goes to the... Oh god, what was his name? He was in one of the Euro Spy movies, he used the fuckin' pipe gun. ALICE Oh, Mr. Pipe! Yeah, of course goes to the... Oh god, what was his name? He was in one of the Euro Spy movies, he used the fuckin' pipe gun.

ALICE Oh, Mr. Pipe! Yeah, of course, Mr. Pipe with the fuckin' pyro hairline. With the little like, you know... RILEY Not quite that bad? We're not talking like, great wave, but we are talking like, if this was a coastline it would be a great place to build a very defensible fortification. Like, this is a great... ALICE It's all angles, you know, like sometimes you

know how a hairline that's receding on both sides looks like a bell curve or something, it's not like that. This is like a digital audio form, it's like blocks, you know, it goes straight back, and then out, and then down again. RILEY Some extremely efficient script writing here, because he's taking his clothes off and he turns to the female detective and goes, you know, you're the first girl to see me do this since Holly.

Which implies, number one, he's separated from Holly. Number two, he hasn't lain with anyone else since. Number three, he's still free. Freeing with anyone. Biblical. He hasn't. Yeah. It's Christmas.

Detective John McLean went out. The marital bed is still fucking sacred, alright, they haven't besmirched it yet. He's not yet had knowledge of someone else. That's true, that's absolutely true, this is moral stuff. But so, they haven't told us what Simon has told John McClane to do, other than to go to a street corner in Harlem. And so, they get him in the back of an NYPD van, they take him to the thing, they give him a gun to duct tape to his back, as I guess a little callback to previous diehards.

To be like, we use your favorite gun duct tape trick, just to try and ease you back into the swing of things. Yeah. Concealed Carrie. Yeah. Four out of every five Americans has one. They put a sandwich board on him, and we don't yet see what it says, and they're like, we're gonna fall back ten blocks, he said, if you need anything, radio us on the emergency radio,

and we'll be here within five minutes, and he's like, I'm gonna be dead in two. He's like, take your time, pal, honestly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't worry about it. And then at this point we have to cut to Samuel L. Jackson. That's right. Yes. Samuel L. Jackson, who is a beloved community father figure, and owner of electronic store. This is an extremely high status position in 90s American society because he can fix

your VCR. A VCR was a thing that people used to use to watch movies, before companion podcasts had been invented. ALICE People used to, like, put movies onto a brick, and you had to take the brick home and put it into a brick reader, and it would show you the movie. SXSW Samuel L. Jackson is, uh, I don't know how to describe this character other than like, the good black guy? Yes, literally.

That's one of those. That seems to be how he's written. Like, his introductory scene is like, these two kids come in, and they've got a radio that's been stolen by someone else and given to them, and like, oh, you know, he said that you give us some money for this, and he's like, this is obviously stolen, don't handle stolen property because somebody else will get in trouble for it, You'll get in trouble for it. Don't do drugs. Go back to school. Help yourself and stay away from white people. He has this big, this big kind of monologue with these kids about like,

work hard to stay in school. Don't do drugs. Yeah. I got a little bit of it here. So who's going to help? We're going to help ourselves. And who do we not want to help us? White people. That's right. That's the character.

Yeah. Like there's more to it than that, but he does keep coming back to the I hate white people thing, which is, I think it's a fun way to talk about, to do your sort of anti-racist, like you've got your, your, your movie, you've got a white cop, you've got a black guy and they're going to work together and you're going to not ever shut the fuck up about the fact that they're two different races, but, crucially, you're gonna put this all in the mouth of the black guy, so that it's not weird. ALICE That's script-rising.

SONIC John calls him racist later on, he's like, you're racist against me because I'm white. And I'm like, oh my god. ALICE We'll get there, we'll get there. SONIC The kids look outside, and they see John McQuay, and then they tell Samuel L. Jackson, hey, you gotta come see this. And then he takes one look at John, and he says, call 911, somebody's about to die.

ALICE Yeah, because as we see, John McClane has been made to wear a sandwich board with the N-word on it. The formulation is, I hate racial slur for black people, right? The way they censored this for TV, by the way, is extremely funny, because they censored it for TV by replacing it with I hate everyone, which then implies that the entirety of Harlem is trying to kill John McClane for being a moral nihilist. Which is right to do. Which is correct. They all read that thing about the simplest way to refute a moral nihilist.

Yeah. Also, by the way, since we don't see anyone making this, I choose to believe the NYPD just had these sandwich boards already for personal use. Oh, Simon was just like, I didn't tell him. I told him to be naked. I didn't tell him to do it, he did that himself. I did not say it to dooses. Yeah, we just got this out of NYPD storage, they still have like, four thousand of these just in case.

They might have actually, they sold them to the community. But anyway, Simon L. Jackson goes up to him, and says, good morning! Yeah, he goes like, hey man, what's up? Are you good? Are you alright, pal? However. Yeah, and Bruce Willis is trying to let him know, like, tacitly that he doesn't mean it, that he's been forced...

This is such a, like, if the only way to disarm the bomb was to saying the word as Thor's experiment. It's so fucking racist. I mean, there's a bit before this where we see what's on the sign, where like, a sort of older black woman sees the sign and is like, sort of like, troubled by this, and you see McClane is like, wounded by having to do this, but immediately down the street we get the threatening stoop. Yeah. We've just got like a group of like, angry youths or whatever. We get the threatening stoop. Yeah, we've just got a group of angry youths or whatever.

Yeah, we get the bad black guys, we get the people from Live and Let Die. You know what the stereotype is here. They're like, listening to a boombox really loudly. They have a basketball. One of them has a basketball. And so... This is really disgusting. Yeah, and so Samuel L. Jackson's like, hey, as soon as you enter these guys' cone of vision, you

are gonna, like, aggro them. These guys aggro fucking range. They're going to kill you. And indeed, I mean, they're midway through explaining this, and we do hear one of them notice in this line. WHAT THE FUCK! This is great. This is good.

Really good. one of them notice in this line. What the fuck?! This is great. They come up and Samuel L. Jackson starts acting like a crazy person, so Bruce Willis is like, I am the avatar of Jesus Christ, like, yeah. The Johnny English Gambit! Quick, stop! These guys from the Danger Stoop, though, are so fascinating to me, both as a cultural artifact but also in terms of like, if you interpret the things that they actually do, because obviously they have a problem with the racial slur man coming to Harlem, but one of them's

first reaction is, and I love this guy forever for this, as I do, you do, anyone who has this in the repertoire comes up to him, insanely sick, instant, underarm, knife throw into the sandwich board. He just had that. He was ready to go with the knife throw. Just, you know. Just, drop of a hat. It's like Half-Frogg flicks the knife upwards, great. As they're kind of like questioning him about this, a guy bounces a basketball off the side

of McClane's head in a way that would be really funny to clip and loop as like a one or two second bumping. But they attack him. They do, they attack him, yeah. They pull the sandwich board off him, and Samuel L. Jackson sees the gun on his back, takes it, and starts pointing it at all of them. Why did the NYPD give him a gun? They shouldn't have given him a gun. Samuel L. Jackson sees the gun on his back, takes it, and starts pointing it at all of them. ALICE Why did the NYPD give him a gun?

WILL They shouldn't have given him a gun. ALICE I know it's just a callback to previous things, but like, what was he gonna do in that situation, like shoot his way out? The implication of the whole we're gonna be ten blocks away thing is we are terrified of a race riot that you're gonna like, start. And they just gave him a gun anyway, out of general cop vibes. Also, the things that this implies about, like, how the movie sees black people, as well.

It seems like it's just like a no-go zone, right? Yeah! Unbelievable. It's like a no-go zone, and also that, like, it's such a kind of like contrived way of making an acceptable way of making like black people like scary and threatening, right? Like if you went at this backwards and you said like, okay so we need a scene where McLean is like menaced by a bunch of black presumably gang members based on some of the dialogue earlier, then you'd go, okay

well that's, you know, you might have to think about how to make that not racist. No we don't! Because actually, an evil German man made an NYPD officer be racist. Before that, had never happened. Actually, not the first time an evil German man specifically has made an NYPD officer racist. He was Austrian. They react like this because this has never ever happened before. And I guess it's the novelty of seeing a racist white cop in Harlem that they're just so confused by. Anyway, Samuel L. Jackson grabs the gun and I do really like his acting in this moment in that he's clearly panicking. He doesn't know how to use this gun. He's just waving it around. He gets wounded, like somebody that cuts him with the knife. I think he does fire the gun into a taxi window

and like shatters it, and then he gets a taxi driver at gunpoint and forces him to drive him and McClane out of Harlem. ALICE It's interesting as well that there is, aside from a couple of lines, these are people who know him? Like, by name? RILEY Yeah, they walked up and were like, hey Zeus, this guy a friend of yours? So like, they know him? Like, by name? Yeah, they walked up and were like, hey Zeus, this guy a friend of yours? So like, they know him? Immediately! I guess the knife guy has already like...

The stoop is across from his store, so like, presumably. Yeah, they've been, you know, but so, I guess if you have a cool knife, you probably want to use the cool knife, but even so, to graduate immediately to like, attempted murder here, is just like, this is fucking horrible. This scene in the back of the taxi, as they're driving away and putting themselves together, it's really nicely done. Shooting inside a vehicle, very difficult to do, but there's some fantastic focus pulling going on here, between McClain in the front and Samuel L. Jackson in the back, it's really

good. They really do let Samuel L. Jackson do some vintage Samuel L. Jackson as well. Oh, you're really good. ALICE They really do let Samuel L. Jackson do some, like, vintage Samuel L. Jackson as well. So he, I mean, my favorite line here is when McLean is trying to talk to him, and Zeus, Samuel L. Jackson, says, are you trying to relate to me? Talk like a white man? Which I really like. RILEY Because he says, bro. He says, like, calm down, bro. Someone let a calm down dude, and he's like, talk like a white man, which I really like. RILEY Because he says bro.

He says like, calm down, bro. Someone let him calm down, dude. He's like, talk like a white guy. I don't know what the fuck I would do in that situation if someone pointed at me and was like, talk like a white person. I'd be like, um... ALICE Immediately laps into perfect Richard Pryor white guy voice.

RILEY Just like, really hedge my bets, but like, gee willikers. DARREN I am Big Pentameter, I dunno, uh, shucks. Now what do you mean by that, you know? Walk around my side and it says I hate crackers. But um, also, Samuel L. Jackson's character, cause Bruce Willis keeps calling him Hey Zeus, and he's like, stop calling me Hey Zeus. And he says, the guy back there, he said, no, he said, hey Zeus, my name is Zeus, as in like, father of the gods, man olympus, don't fuck with me, I'm gonna put a lightning

bolt up your ass. You got a problem with that? You got a problem with that, as well, the kind of like, the implication, he's like touchy, he's got like a hair trigger, he's like, you know, waiting to be provoked and insulted, and it's like, I don't know if we have the facilities for you to write this kind of thing, Mr. Die Hard with a Vengeance Screenwriter, so. ALICE You can't be writing like that, presumed white

boy. ALICE Yeah, absolutely. I'm presuming pretty strongly, I could be wrong. But I don't think that I am. So they go back to the police precinct. ALICE Get a little 90s psychotherapy? ALICE We do. ALICE We love a bit little 90s psychotherapy? ALICE We do! Yeah.

ALICE We love a bit of psychotherapy, because the police psychiatrist is just like, this guy Simon, he's clearly obsessed with John, he's clearly angry, it's probably his real name, and Bruce Willis has this line, he's like, what, does he wanna put on a dress and fuck me? And I'm just like, well maybe he does, alright? Like, fuck you! ALICE This bit's interesting to me, because we're, I think, broadly familiar with the kind of contours of 90s action movie homophobia, and like, homo-sociality and all the rest

of it. And it starts at the kind of normal pitch of that, which is this psychiatrist saying of Simon, you know, this guy wants to pound on you until you crumble. Right? So, like, sit... Oh, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, like, this guy wants to pound on you until you crumble? Yeah, exactly. Which is like innuendo. And then McClane is the one who escalates it past that and says, oh, so he wants to put me in a dress and fuck me, then. And it's interesting, the kind of comedic role of John McClane there, to like, oh, he

can't say these things. To just kind of take it that step further and make the thing explicit, like, oh, this is kind of a gay joke we're making here. Yeah. And then we need some exposition as to how the explosives in this movie are gonna work, which I love! I love this fucking- This is my favorite guy.

We meet Charlie! ALICE We got the NYPD bombs autist, as I have learned, from several police procedurals. If you have a particular kind of autism, you can just kind of get into the police as their guy for that, and so their bomb disposal guy Charlie shows up, and he's just like a kind of bald smiley man who is so psyched about this bomb he just found. Yeah, he's a Vajorjka stanza phenotype, you know the kind of guy. Like, a classic American.

And he's, this is perfect, this is perfect screen running. It's a visually distinct kind of bomb, it's got a cool action mechanism, it's like a two part epoxy, they got like a big red tube and a big white tube, and like when they mix the stuff together that's when it becomes explosive. It's cool, this is great stuff. He does a little demonstration about putting a little drop of each liquid, because I found this bomb in a playground, he puts one drop of each together and then like, he says when they're apart they're totally safe, when you mix them, and then he like, he puts it on

a tiny piece of paper and like flicks it and it goes like a firecracker, and then it was like, Jesus, Charlie! And he's like, hey! And he's like, you can't disarm them, you can't tamper with them, he calls this a nasty little trick I once saw used in Lebanon, which hasn't aged very well. And yeah, so the deal with these is, as you say, it's a binary liquid, and when you see one liquid mixing into the other, it's gonna explode within like a few seconds. RILEY Yeah, a whole bunch of this has been stolen from a lab a couple weeks ago, so how much, and I can't remember exactly how much, but

it's like a fucking shit ton. ALICE Like, like, thousands of gallons of this. And they found this in, like, for them to find, in a playground in Chinatown. So Simon calls back, and he- The gay Riddler. The gay Riddler is like, I assure you found my gay bomb. So bombs that tones you gay, but also it kills you, so you don't really have time to find out.

Maybe you're already gay, you know? You experience a very brief moment of self-discovery. She immediately sends you directly to hell. He invented a weapon that sends you to hell no matter what. He says to Zeus, like, I wasn't planning on you getting involved, but I guess you're involved in the game now. And Simon Jackson tells him to stick it up his ass. Yeah, he hangs up on him.

Yeah, Bruce Willis being a piece of shit is so good. Cause like, he's so... when like the guy starts stuttering on the line cause he's getting made fun of. ALICE He slams that exploit disability button. ZACH Yeah. ALICE So, so, so good. ALICE The fact that he has the stutter on specifically a K sound makes it sound like Maoist standard English for a second.

Just calling John McClane a cracker. S Well what makes him angry is that McClane accuses him of cross dressing. A Yes. S He does, yeah. S That's when he gets pissed off. A Psychology is happening in this movie, right? The finest psychology of the 1990s.

S You must go into Wall Street wearing a science that says, I hate k-k-k-crackers. You see the opportunity, right? Do that shit in Staten Island, right, like, trillion, trillion dollar idea, get me back for the Die Hard 3 soft reboot. I'm always so scared to talk about, like, inter-New York, like, areas, because I don't know fucking shit about it, and I understand that America is our, like, most listened country or whatever, and I think half of all Americans are New Yorkers as far as I'm aware, so like, I know that there's a strong possibility of you listening know I'm getting things wrong if I talk about New York.

ALICE This is also a movie that goes for the absolute throat of like some very sensitive American cultural issues with no sense of responsibility about that whatsoever. This was back in the days when, and I should be clear, this is a bad thing when you could just be like, hey we're making a fucking movie here, you know? Like, it's all fun, we don't have to think about it. Yeah. This is Inspector Cobb, I can appreciate your feelings for McClane. You know?

This kind of thing. He's kind of hot, you know? Yeah. The gay riddler tells him, get across town to a subway payphone in fifteen minutes, or the train, as it pulls into that station, is gonna go fucking boom. Get a move on. Yeah. So, so, McClane gets a shield back, which is a little bit emotional. His,

his like, captain's like, his, his, you know, badge and gun back, you awful piece of shit, I wish he had like, drowned as a child. It's perfunctory, but you still go, yeah, he's fucking, he's back in the game. LIAM He's black, baby. ALICE And then, so, Zeus is gonna leave, and McClane has to like, get him back in because Simon has like, specifically said, yeah, you're in the fucking, like, you know, Riddler maze now. Well, so Zeus says it's a white guy problem, call me when he crosses 110th street. Mm-hmm.

Which is like, no. Which is a place we all know where it is. Yeah, that's the 110th street. Well, it's next to 109th and 111th. Ah, that's the hundred and tenth street. Well, it's next to a hundred and ninth and a hundred and eleventh. Ah, that makes sense. So, McClane lies, and he says that the bomb that they found in Chinatown they actually found in Harlem.

And so... He says, hang on, he says... This guy doesn't care about skin colour. Even if you do. Stop it! You can't be talking like that, white baby! You can't be doing this! And you see the contours of this movie, right, which is we are gonna end racism through this kind of like buddy cop movie, even though Zeus is in the cop. And so Zeus is like, well, okay, fine, I guess I'll be dragged along onto this bullshit.

Yeah. There's a POWMIA flag up as well, I just noticed that in the background. ALICE Funny. So, we go to this payphone, and, you know, surrounded by people, New York City, character in the movie, and Simon calls and says, there's a gay bomb in the gay trash can in your feet, I need you to do this escape room bullshit. This is kind of filler to be honest Sort of wasting your time honestly. Yeah, yeah kind of jerking you off here I'm body shaming this woman's that was on the phone before you

Indicates that I can see you yeah Threat because they're late answering the phone because there is that there is a lady who's on it And then he says why were you late and they go I don't know it's New York City And he said you could have just told me there was a lady who's on it, and then he says, why were you late? And they go, I dunno, it's New York City, and he said, you could have just told me there was a fat lady on the phone and you needed a second to get her off it. And then like, he can see us! She's not actually even that much, she's just kinda normal. He gives them a riddle, which in the pre-internet days would have been very difficult, because

now you could just look it up, and it's like, it's a classic, because I was going to St. Ives, I met a guy with seven wives, each wife had seven sacks, and each sack was seven dicks. ALICE Yeah, it's one guy. It's one guy going to St. Ives. RILEY It's one guy. He was going to St. Ives. RILEY How many were going to St. Ives? You got thirty seconds to answer.

And we get this, like, scene where Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis try to figure this out, and it's actually Zeus who figures it out, and it's like... ALICE Zeus does the math in his head pretty good. RILEY It's one guy. It's one guy. ALICE Zeus is smarter than McLean, this is one of the things, and that's one of the things that's meant to be like, wow, they're not racist. Y'know?

But so, they dial the phone number 555-0001, which, incredible that he managed to get that. Yes. That's like the God's phone number, when God's in New York. Which is less and less these days. I don't even know, I don't actually know what I meant by that, but it sounded good. It did, didn't it, it was evocative. Yeah, I think so. I was prepared to just be like, yes.

I was with you on it. You see like, a grate beneath them, and you can see like, the roof of the train that's pulling into the station, through that grate, and I have to ask, is that real? That seems like the most dangerous thing I can fucking imagine. I have no idea. I know there are steam grades. Yeah. This becomes important later.

It does. I have a little bit about it, but they do. So first of all, he fakes them out by being like, you're too late, so I'm going to detonate Segei Bomb. And they have to like fling themselves and everybody else away from it only for nothing to happen. And he just laughs at them. I fooled you. But actually you do-

It's called trolling, actually. We do a little bit of trolling. If you don't get across town in 30 minutes and do this scene again somewhere else, then I will actually blow up that one. I've placed a gay bomb on the train. If you do not get to this payphone, the second payphone, I realize it's getting a little repetitive. This is not silly bullshit, I cannot stress enough, this one is real.

You should be so invested in this one actually. This isn't what the German accent is like at all by the way. It's 100% like this. No, it's quite like Alan Rickman's in Mr. Takagi, joining us for the rest of his life kind of. It is very like that, yes. Isn't it? JUSTIN Yeah, it's really good.

Like, genuinely, shoutout to Jeremy Allen, really good impression of Alan Rickman's German accent. Really, really good. ALICE So they have to get across Manhattan in, like... ALICE 30 minutes. 30 minutes, no matter what. ALICE Yeah, it's like some impossible time, and with the traffic alone it would take double that, because

New York City has bad traffic. And so, how are we gonna do it? Well. This is sick, I'm afraid. This is a great scene. I love this scene. This is a fantastic scene. Just straightforwardly, it reminds me a bit of, there's a sort of similar, not chase scene,

but like race against time scene in the take of Pelham 123, another great New York City character in the movie film, that it, y'know, very reminiscent of. This has, like, more stunts in it and a bigger budget, and this is really like the high water mark for a lot of stunt driving for me. They carjack a taxi and take it through Central Park. They ramp this fucking thing off of things, like, three times, because McLean is crazy.

ALICE It rules. ALICE The process of filming this alone is... ALICE It must have been so much fun. RILEY They get in, and Zeus is like, I used to be a taxi driver, I know exactly the best way to go, like, down this street, and John McLean is like, no, we're gonna drive through the park. Through the park. Dead center. ALICE Just, even the driving, the fact that it's like a kind of older Ford Crown Victoria, there's a shot of it going round a corner, and the whole thing just slides so much, and I'm like, that's the movies!

That's the fucker, that's when the car does the thing! FANTASTIC. LIAM It's getting air off of like, vague humps, it's just going. ALICE You can't beat it. You can't beat it. Absolutely. At one point, Simon Jackson says you aiming for these people and McClane says, no, maybe that mime. He takes out, he takes out a bike rack immediately after this, which leads me to a little sidebar called things John McClane hates. So therefore we've got bikes and mimes and we can, and I guess vaguely Europeans,

we can add to this as we go on. So you'll recall that part of the plot of the second Die Hard movie was that computers are gay. That is true. And this, bikes, gay. Also a lot of cell phones, cell phones are also very gay. He hates cell phones. Funny detail I liked in this is Zeus going, how do Catholics do their thing?

And McClane goes, oh yeah, it's north, south, west, east. And Zeus crosses himself, which is really funny. But so, the way they get through this is local knowledge, and specifically John McClane's local knowledge. New York street knowledge. I like this! I like this too, because like, the past two Die Hard movies he'd always been like a fish out of water, and here we're seeing him in his element.

And so he gets on the taxi radio and he calls in, hey, two cops just got shot at this, like, specific address. Which prompts an ambulance from a hospital where he knows where it is, that's gonna break through traffic, and he's gonna follow it. And just to like, hype him up a bit more, Zeus is like, why not go all the way to the place where we're going, he's like, that's a different hospital. It's like, competence, we like this. Really good writing, actually, to display this as someone who's confident and assured in their kind of element.

I think this was originally gonna be another film. It was originally just a standalone film called Simon Says, which then got retooled into Die Hard 3. And I looked the guy up who wrote this, he is a white guy, he also wrote Jumanji, that movie? It's like a weird hit and miss, some of the stuff he's written is like, stinking, but some of it is like really fucking good. There's so many directors like that out there. Also, thing I really like about this, thank you to High Definition, Possible On Demand Video for showing us very clearly the stunt driver, not Bruce Willis. I know it's not, but like, you look at it and you go, that man has hair, that's not

Bruce Willis. It's the movies, it's cinema. It's really funny to have a stunt driver that just doesn't look like the guy. ALICE So he ditches Zeus part way through, and he's like, you drive the cab to the payphone, I'm gonna try and get onto the train, because we're ahead of it. And then he pulls up one of these grates. People don't know this, right?

Those grates, they're not attached to anything, they're not secured by anything, and they are free. You can take them. I have fifty greats. People are like, why is the MTA losing money? It's not Fair Evo, it's me. It's great. Great theft.

Yeah, you can't see this because it's a visual medium, but I'm looking at November's webcam right now and it's just piles of greats back there. Yeah. Listen, I'm gonna use them for something. Sooner or later, eventually. I'm cooking something. It's gotta be all kinds of diseases on those things. That's fine. I'm gonna go and keep taking the 420 mile marker as well like everyone hates me.

Just like doing like jumping the turnstile things and you take the turnstile and just walk away with it. I need this. We're back to taking a Palom 123 just rob the New York City subway station. Physical taking a Palom 123. A physical taking of fellow mutants. It's outta here, we're gone with it. Yeah, just jack up the train, like, take it off the tracks and just leave? If you've got a turnstile and somebody runs at you, you can plant that in front of them and they'll just, that'll flip them over. Exactly.

And then they'll be running the other way. Like Le Mancat. That's so true. Yeah. In fact he does jump the turnstile and we see some fuckin' fascist toddler NYPD cop, like, start to come after him. Yeah, that's interesting actually. Yeah, we get a minute here where Zeus is kind of the perspective character, and we use this

to teach that maybe, just maybe, white people have some responsibility in racism too. Because a white yuppie gets in his cab, and like, condescendingly, is like, hey, you know, are you a taxi or not? What's the matter, you hate white people? This is really funny too, because this is the first thing he asks, he asks it unprompted, and he asks a guy who, as we know from earlier, actually does hate white people. Just like, playing Battleships. GARETH Just don't fucking throw that out. That

shouldn't be an early gambit in your conversation. ALICE Just like, incredible po- but so, yeah, he like, drives the rest of the way, terrifies this yuppie. So John McClane, by proxy, kind of, he hates yuppies. Fine, we hate yuppies. DION Makes sense. ALICE Die Hard 1 he hates yuppies, it, we hate Yuppies. Die Hard 1 he hated Yuppies, but then he jumps the turnstiles, and let me say, New York Police Department Transit Bureau, or as it was in these days at New York City Transit Police, a force for evil, in a more petty way than like other cops, from that day to this.

Yeah, genuinely. Well they show remarkable restraint relative to now, because a white cop sees Zeus jump the barracks, he's gotta get to the payphone to answer it, and he doesn't immediately kill him. He does draw his gun. He doesn't immediately kill four or five people around him, either. He, like, holds him at gunpoint, and the cop is both obviously racist and extremely scared. He's, like, shaking.

Meanwhile, as a guy on the payphone, and Zeus is there like, can you please get off that phone, I need it. ALICE Yeah. LORENZO Soon. Like, I'm expecting a call, pal. ZUZZA And he's just like, you don't like white people? It's like the same guy again. Every guy's like this. ALICE Aww, was that your reverse, racist?

ALICE Inadvertently doing quite a good commentary where everybody is the same white person. But so, he pushes the guy off the phone and is about to answer it when the racist cop, the unusually racist cop, catches up with him to like, hold him at gunpoint, and he has to, Zeus has to like, pass a speech check, effectively? Yeah. This is a perfect, I'm thirsty, I'm going for the water, sort of situation, you know? ALICE Yeah, same accent. JUSTIN I need to get that phone.

It's ringing, they're all just staring at each other. Meanwhile the train is coming in, yeah. ALICE Yeah, McClane has been on the train, he's like pushing his way through people, and he has found the bomb in a police call box. And is, like, taking it off the wall, and at the last second... Yeah, I love him going through the car trying to find it, because he can't say that there's a bomb. It's just sort of like looking under people's, like, under the seats, and everyone's going, AHH!

It's like, hey, have you seen an object? No. But yeah, so he throws the thing clear at the last second and stunt budget hits again because we get to swing. This is an incredible scene. It's all practical. We had to swing an entire subway car through a station concourse. This is later we're supposed to believe this hasn't killed anyone.

Bullshit. I'm amazed this didn't kill anyone in real life. Like, this should have taken out a dozen extras. Yeah, this is all practical, like, fantastic. Just really, really good to see, like, a big set piece. You don't do a practical effect like this anymore. This is what I mean about High Watermark and about Hubris. Yeah, this would be fucking on the computer.

They'd put this in with the computer. You'd film an empty station. It's so much easier. It's like, no, no, no, I want a bunch of, like, coked out racist Hollywood producers to close down a subway station for three months, so they can do this one shot in a movie. I can see later on and be like, yeah! I want 40 to 50 people to be paid a living wage for half a year to construct, like, breakaway pillars in a fucking fake subway station in New York City.

Yes! I cannot stress enough. I wanna be in this movie, and then that's the only job you have to do all year, because acting pays you enough to live on. It would be good. And the films would be better. What's the thing that they use to flip cars? The steam pump or whatever. The pneumatic thing.

Yeah, America's little pneumatic thing industry is in fucking shambles, right? In shambles. Yeah. Only Hollywood can fix it unless we start flipping cars over in our creation. America's little pneumatic thing belt has been fucking languishing forever. Yeah. It used to be a little pneumatic thing town, now it's a ghost town. Now we don't make little pneumatic anything.

They don't make pneumatic shit in America. Now we't make Mnemonic shit in the MNSTN. ALICE Now we just make racism. Which is what this movie's not about. ALICE But so, it destroys the station, we see people... Unfortunately quite 9-11 evocative shots of people covered in dust helping each other out of the station. RILEY Yeah, of like, businessmen covered in dust, right?

There's one specific shot I'm thinking of that is extremely 9-11. It's genuinely, yeah. Well, as we learned, this is, in fact, this is Wall Street station. And McClain, as they're kind of dusting themselves off, is just like, there's no way we were gonna find that in time, we weren't supposed to succeed, this was a setup, and also, why here at Wall Street? It doesn't make sense, weird. He has been blown up at this point, so he's back in the vest, as well. He's like covered in dust and blood. The bomb has blown his

hair back another three inches. MOLLY Yeah. ALICE That's what happened to me. ALICE It's like really alarming at this point. MOLLY There's a big hole in the ground outside Wall Street. ALICE Yeah. The rest of the NYPD seals off the thing, and McLean gets put in a van with a guy from the FBI and a guy who, as he says,

I'm with another agency. It's like, remember they made Feds cool? This is a real trajectory as well from Die Hard 1. It could be an acting agency. That guy's from Hamilton Hottle. He's just like, yeah. Yeah, actually, McLean, we really like your work, but we're not signing anyone right now in your age demographic.

That's how I'm talking about Acorn. I'm just like, yeah, I'm from a different agency. Dyehard won the FBI with, like, dickheads, right? Like, absolutely, like, cowboys, kind of implied to be gay a bit, weird Vietnam War references, here we're just back to like, it's a federal bureaucrat, you know, this guy's kinda, he's on the side of the angels. Yeah. But he's gay. We've filed some hard edges off of Die Hard.

Well he's only gay because he's not John McClane, or Zeus. And then this is where... They show a picture of Jeremy Irons, and they're like, do you recognize this guy? And he's like, yeah, that's Jeremy Irons, he's a famous British actor, he was in The Lion King, he was in Assassin's Creed, which wasn't very good, and then a number of other things. Those were the two, yeah. Yeah, those are the main two, yeah. That one with Robert De Niro, where he was a Jesuit, like, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. This guy's East German, and he does freelance terrorism by contract, so the fucking gig economy is coming for terrorism. He's got the app, he's got the hedge app. And at this point, we now confront something which I've been wanting to talk about for the whole movie, which is John McLean has a hangover so fucking bad that when a guy calls him talking with Alan Rickman's German accent he does not remember the time that he threw a similarly accented German man off a fucking building

until now. Because the FBI guy says, does the name Hans Gruber mean anything to you? And he's like, yeah, that's Alan Rickman from the first movie. I dropped off a building. He threw off a building. And then we cut to a couple of seconds of Die Hard where we see Alan Rickman falling off Nakatomi Plaza. A different cop leans over to a cop in the background and goes, you know, the fuckin' New York thing. It's the LA thing, you know?

It's like, oh yeah, the guy I dropped off a building! Jeremy Irons is, the name of his character in this movie, John, is Simon Gruber. He's Hans Gruber's brother. Which, first of all, funny. That's why he wants revenge on you, and it's like, oh shit! I just think that that's really, like, that speaks to John McClane, because he didn't remember that the main thing about this guy was that he was German, you know, he is another guy with a similar German accent, and he's not assuming on the spot that it's a connected

thing. It would be racist of him if he did, it would be profiled. He's colourblind. You know? Yeah. You might not care about German-ness, but this guy does. Kev, you're white, black, German. Yeah, those are the three. Oh yeah, those are the three. But so, Simon calls them, and is like- I love this. I love this. This is so funny. I can see that you're all in your gay little van together. He knows which FBI agents are in the car by name.

Mm. Mm-hmm. He's like, say hello, and I'm like, gay man. What's up? He's like, I planted gay bombs in a school. One big gay bomb. One massive gay bomb. Some big tequila.

One massive gay bomb. Large gay bomb. In a school in New York City. There are over 1,000 schools in New York City, so it will take you some time to find some, have fun. RILEY You can't evac- there's a bomb in a school in New York, you can't evacuate, at 3pm today it explodes unless you've found it. Best off.

ALICE And then we get a real... RILEY Oh, and also, yeah, sorry, and also you can't use like, police radio at all, because it'll blow it up. ALICE We then get maybe one of the most cop sequences of all time, it's a real snapshot of New York City in the 90s, in that you've got all of the NYPD, Caprices and Crown Vicks and the old livery, the best livery, you get a little shoutout to Port Authority police and housing police and shit. RILEY Yeah, all the different fucked police departments.

Every cop is aggro'd. Yeah, every cop is aggro'd. He's like, scrambling to search this, and then he says, and, uh, McLean and Zeus, you've gotta cut across town in thirty minutes, and you'll find which school it's in, cause there's be more riddles. Yeah, you've got some more bullshit to do. This is also basically Bane's plan, from the Dark Knight Rises. If you just aggro enough cops, you

can just do whatever, you know? SORRY. Nobody cared who I was until I put on some masks. ALICE. It's going to be extremely painful for you all. ZACH. We get a scene as we cut into a communications office, because they're not allowed to use the radio, so all the communications get routed through one office, and so all the phones start lighting up. ALICE. Oh Yes, do we have the drop? And so all the phones start lighting up. Oh shit, I've got the drop. And then the boss says like, the boss says, uh, oh, all the communications are being handled

here now, and the lady says, And I'm gonna marry Donald Trump! Whaa? Huh? Stop putting this guy in my movies. I keep watching movies. Donald Trump? The cameo star of Die Hard with the Vengeance?

Donald Trump? And Home Alone 2? Yeah Hard with the Vengeance? Donald Trump? And Home Alone 2? Yeah, what are we doing? Well, he's up to nowadays. Anyway, um, McLane and Zeus are running across town to get to another payphone to do more riddle bullshit, and at this point we get the reveal, because we slowly pan up, and we, for the first time in the movie, like halfway through, actually see Jeremy Irons in person, watching them through binoculars from the rooftop and he just goes, they bought it.

Yeah, that it's really good because you get like this fucking police guy be like, he fully locks in he's like, all right, am I gonna get any fucking jurisdictional nonsense from you and the FBI? No, perfect. All right. I need everyone. I'm gonna act like he does a big speech to all of his boys. He's like, we're gonna search all of these schools. We're gonna do it. And like we see them all split, and it's like, FAN- yeah! And it pulls up and he's like, they fuck fucking idiots. Dumbass. ALICE So Simon then goes to his real target, he's

like dressed in this insane stupid tie with a big apple on it, tiny 90s glasses, he's surrounded by some of the biggest, most alarmingly Nazi looking henchmen you've ever seen in your fucking life. All shoulders. The other key thing about this, Jeremy Niles, he can do a great German accent, can't do an American one, he sounds like John Lithgow. Like, it's crazy. ALICE Well, he sounds like a German doing a bad American accent.

RILEY No, he's... This is fantastic. He sounds like he's doing his German character's impression of an American if it isn't good. ALICE Sounds like John Lithgow, weirdly. NIGEL Which is extremely close to John Lithgow, interestingly. ALICE It's weird. NIGEL Yeah, he's like, hello sir, we are the New

York Department of Public Works' most Germanic soldiers. We are all at least six and a half feet. ALICE New York City architect special German squad because there's a there's a big hole in the ground outside Wall Street and and he turns up with 15 dump trucks and was like we're from the city engineering office and and these are the dump trucks that we heard earlier on McLean was investigating the disappearance of and he's like there's a big hole in the ground show me where the hole in the ground is we're here to fix it oh shit I didn't realize he was that's oh yeah yeah the cops fucking walk him in to the subway through the hole he asks

this guy and he goes yeah yeah sure timmy we got the flashlight come on we're gonna go down here boys did you get the drop as he's walking them down oh i'm afraid not so we get it we get a joke here on the behalf of the movie that has unfortunately aged very poorly because as the cops are walking him down to the subway, the cop says the line, oh, you guys were probably at the World Trade Center. You know what a mess that was. Yeah, fuck, I didn't get that. 1993, World Trade Center bombing.

They're referring to that. And like the joke that the movie is making in 1997 is like, yeah, these guys were at the World Trade Center bombing because they're terrorists, but now it has retroactively become a much different joke. This is a specific detective who McLean knows, he was talking in the van earlier about, like, he plays his badge number for the lottery so McLean knows what his badge number is, and this cop immediately gets shot and killed, and they take his badge. Yeah.

And we establish that they've got a guy who doesn't speak English with them. A big fella called Otto. Yeah. Yeah, shoutout to Otto. Cool. Well they, so we get some music, which is Johnny Comes Marching Home, and this big plan kicks into gear, they have like a tunneling thunderbird, they've got a smokin' hot broad... Yeah, hello to this woman and her boots and

her cigarettes. NICOLAS They do. Hello to this Nazi lady. RILEY Yeah, there's at least one shot of her just smoking only lit by red light, but I'm like, that was only put in for November. NICOLAS Yeah. Yeah. They made this one for me.

RILEY Yeah, it's nice of them. NICOLAS And Jeremy Irons and his boys, they walk into the Federal Reserve Bank, and the guy, like, he's obviously arranged to be there to, you know, he's posing as a high roller. Under the name Mr. Vanderflug, which is... Yeah. Yeah, funny. And the bank manager's like, oh, that explosion, it says it, knocked out all of our alarms,

like, I feel like he knew what was happening, and he's like, chh-chh-chh. Oh fuck, it's a robbery! Yeah, he's like, truth be told, we're fucked, man. Yeah. He just has time to get out some expositionosition where he's like, yeah, the Federal Reserve's not really like a typical consumer bank, mostly what we do is hold gold reserves to the why are you killing me, and impersonating all of my employees. They break into the vault downstairs, the smoke and hop broad, like, slices up a guard? Yeah, shout out to this security guard, specifically,

because first of all, y'know, I like a security guard, but second of all, he sees some weird shit happening, immediately starts blasting. RILEY Yeah, shoutout to all my security guards listening right now. ALICE If you're outside the vault, like, I guess that makes sense. RILEY Yeah. ALICE Like, the Federal Reserve.

But like, he's running a pump action shotgun constantly screaming, and this lady takes him out with a karambit. Might be the earliest film appearance for karambit. RILEY They tunnel through the train tunnel into the Vault, and she comes out of the Vault, so he's not expecting it at all, and she fuckin' disassembles, my boy. And this is some classic mid-90s bright red like fake blood. Really good.

Mm. Catch-up shit. And so they get it to the vault and it's like, it's full of gold bars and Jeremiah has this like, 140 billion dollars Fort Knox is for tourists and they start just like swacking up all this fucking gold. But this one I'm like, yeah, steal the gold! Nah, this is sick. It's like he did it. There's also a guy in there and I don't know. There's a guy, the German like Mongo, who's like the big guy. Yes. Yeah.

He lets off a perfect big John Bosch after they get into this fucking thing. Listen to this. Dashing Bosch. Bosch. Just got into the fucking Federal Reserve. What brand is your dishwasher? This whole sequence is sick as fuck.

I love it. Yeah, no, this is great. This is fucking great. Meanwhile across town, like, McLean and Zeus are like sprinting to the next thing. They're still in movie one. They don't know that movie two has- Exactly! I like this.

This is so good. It's the highest contained within an action movie. They're still in movie one, they don't know that movie two has- Exactly! I like this! This is so good! It's the highest contained within an action movie. Cause now we want them to figure it out, like we have the knowledge. Yeah, McClane gives his backstory, he's like, yeah I was in Los Angeles dropping a guy off a building, but he says, I was in Los Angeles and Zeus says, yeah I saw the Rodney King tape or whatever, which is like, it's a fucking brutal joke out of nowhere. I don't know what that means.

It was a famous incident of police brutality, by the LAPD. So we're doing like a comic effect there. So we get more riddles bullshit. Yeah, they make it to some riddles bullshit. The riddle here is, well one thing I like is they open a suitcase and it just says on the little screen, I am a bomb, you have just armed me. I immediately pack bomb to the bomb, I'm like, aww. I don't wanna defuse it, it'll be disappointed. Aw.

But so, yeah, he has them do some bullshit about filling a jug with exactly four gallons of water. Yeah, it's a three gallon jug and a five gallon jug, and I fill, fill one of these with four gallons to the dot and put it on like a little measuring plate. And if you're wrong it'll explode or whatever. Yeah, this episode of Taskmaster fucking sucks. Like, it just- And this is where we get the bit where like, Zeus, quote unquote, makes it about race, and John calls him a racist because he's like, you don't like me because I'm white.

Okay, this is a two hit thing, I've got two drops I split it in half first of all this is a if you're if this is a great thing to just drop on your white friends this is a great way to end any argument. You dumb mother fay it! You were gonna call me a nigger weren't you? No I wasn't! Great way to do that I've had that shown to me at least once no response possible but and then we get the fucking here we go. You got some fucking problem because great way to do that, I've had that shown to me at least once. No response possible. But and then we get the fucking, here we go. You got some fucking problem with me because I'm white, Zeus, is that it? Have I oppressed

you? Have I oppressed your people somehow? I'll tell you what your problem is, you don't like me because you're a racist. What? You're a racist, you don't like me because I'm white. I don't like you because you're gonna get me killed! Have I oppressed you somehow? You're an NYPD officer! Yes, you have! Yeah! Yeah, man! Probably directly. Yeah! Fucking hell, man. Yeah. Anti-white racism, remember when, like, white people thought that was a thing, or like, insisted? I know we still do sometimes, but like... NICCOHONTIE What do you mean, remember when? Affirmative

action was struck down within the last two years. ALICE No, I know, but like, that was, just like, I swear to God, whoever came up with that one must have felt so fucking clever for a hot minute to be like, actually, maybe it's them who are the racists. NICCOHONTIE In a lot of ways it's kind of like, reverse racism. ALICE It's reverse racism. NICCOHONTIE Yeah. NICCOHONTIE Shut up. Oh, maybe it's them who are the racists. In a lot of ways it's kind of like reverse racism. It's reverse racism. Yeah.

Shut up. Oh, fuck it. So finally, McLean has this moment of realization, he figures it out. Not quite yet. Not quite yet. So they figure out the puzzle and then Sam is like, yeah, well done. Now the next round is you've gotta go to Yankee Stadium and figure out what's half of 42, and they're like, okay fine.

What's 21 out of 42, and they're like, okay fine. They take the bomb with them. ALICE Yeah, what's 21 out of 42 is the specific. SONIA Yeah. They take the bomb with them so nobody finds it, and then John, they happen to see two kids shoplifting, and John catches them, he's like, what are you doing? You wanna go to jail over a Butterfinger bar? And then the kid says... ALICE What are you talking about?

Every cop in New York City is running around like a headless chicken. You could steal anything. LIAM You could steal City Hall! JORDAN Look around pal, no cops, it's Christmas, you could steal City Hall! And then John's like, ehhhhhh. LIAM John's like, oh shit. They're probably stealing City Hall. This is fantastic.

I love any, I love this little shit. New York kid. Fantastic stuff. JORDAN I love the camera angle that they get on Joan as he realizes, just like really low looking up to him and revolving around him as he just realizes, I am the dumbest motherfucker in the world. Oh my god. He's like, fucking alright, you take this bomb, hand it to... oh they go back to the

site, right? To Wall Street. Yeah. To be like, what's going on, right? And Simon's goons are dressed as cops. Yeah. Hand, Zeus, hand this bomb to the suspiciously stylish European looking cops. I'm gonna go in the bank.

Wall Street has no schools, so every cop is elsewhere right now. Yeah. Bam. But it's got a shitload of money. It's got so much gold, pal. Yes, yeah. So, uh... I love gold.

Gruber's on the radio with his cops being like, yeah don't kill him, just like, you know, get rid of him. There is a cute moment where Zeus gives them the bomb and one of them's about to leave it behind and then it's like, no, a kid could find that, like, come on, we gotta take it with us. I really do like the implication, but these two German guys are also in the middle of like a buddy comedy of their own. You know what?

You are an anti-Bavarian racist. Cause it's the same, like one of them was gonna leave it and Zeus or something was like what if a kid finds it? And the cops do the same thing. Sois? Sois? But so, McClane goes in the bank, and we get, it's kind of a rerun of a bit and die hard one, but we get the like-

Gronsteyn Rosette to this guy, this specific goon. Obvious crypto-German, who is like, yeah I love being an American, it's crazy, I sound like John Lithgow, kind of. My name is Bobson Dugnut. Yeah, we've had cops through this whole time, you know, since the explosion of Ventoff, not a big deal. Do you want to come down into the bank of-, you know, since the explosion went off, not big deal. Do you want to come down into the bunker with me?

Would you like to ride the lift this year? Would you like to get in? Have you seen Captain America Civil War? It's been raining dogs and cats and... Yeah, dogs and cats is very funny. Yeah. And the whole time you don't see McLean's reaction, so it's just left to you, the audience though, and you're like, wait a second, this motherfucker's European. Which I really like.

NICOLAS We can't let a European work in the Federal Reserve. ALICE Yeah. ALICE And he gets in the lift with, like, three of these goons, including Otto, who is wearing the dead cop's badge, and you see that McLean knows the badge number, knows the guy, puts it together in the elevator, and you get a really visceral fight, because McClane ends up, like, he kills all of these guys, he shoots one of them in the head, like, next to him. Mm. Again, big bright red 60s fake blood everywhere.

Crazy stuff. Yeah. It's gorgeous. It's actually better than the Civil War one, I referenced it, but it's actually like a tighter... They get down there, and he reunites with Zeus, and they realize that all the fucking gold is gone. He's like, how could they have gotten all of this gold out, there's like, shit tons

of it, you'd need like fourteen dump trucks to... Ohhhhhhhhhh. Exactly. Like, oh, it was the fourteenhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh uhhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uhhhh uh And, you know, it's about figuring it out and stopping him, but still. I'm completely onside with Zeus here as well, because he sees a gold brick and he's like, oh shit! And just picks it up and tries to take it with him. Just like, they're not gonna let you keep it, man. And he's like, we'll see, we'll see.

So at this point they have to get a car. And they use the universal key, which is the gold brick, to steal a Yugo. And through the window. The Yugo's a joke, however, I'm not thrilled about the fact that Zeus is kind of presented as knowing how to hotwire a car as like a racial ability. RILEY Yeah, I will say I think it's because he's a tech repair guy. RILEY He even says, McQueen says, can you hotwire

a car? And he says, of course I can, I'm an electrician. Which I quite like. RILEY That's kind of fun. Yeah, I know what you're getting at, and I agree broadly. ALICE He says that, but you know, it's quicker to do it this way, and then uses the gold brick to start the car, and it's like, what? Why is he doing this?

Yeah, so they steal the joke, you go. And as they're driving down the highway in pursuit of these dump trucks, the line comes up... Do we have this drop? The second one that took me out of the fucking plane of existence that I'm currently on, along with Donald Trump? No, I don't think so. No.

Well one of them, like... Bosh. Bosh. It goes, who do you think you are? Hillary Clinton. Oh fuck, I didn't get that. goes, who do you think you are? Hillary Clinton. McLean says it to her. A woman driver cuts him off and he goes, hey lady, who do you think you are? Hillary Clinton. ZUZE Yeah.

ALICE And when Zeus goes, who's that? McLean says, she's the 43rd president. Which is so incredibly wrong. ZUZ. Uh oh. Forty third president was George W. Bush, man. Happy birthday to this future pres- there's still time. She can still pull it out. But that lets them put it together, yeah, happy birthday to this future highway user. I really like that John McLean is like, still with her.

Yeah, that's one of the funniest aspects. He was with her before anyone else. He's a Hillary guy. He's a Hillary guy in 1996. This is what I mean about the optimism and hubris and peakingness of this, it's gonna get more progressive-ish forever. Hillary Clinton's gonna be president, you know? I guess Benghazi hasn't happened yet, so like, that's what's gonna stop the John McLean

types from being on Hillary. Yeah. They steal another better car, a Mercedes, you know, which is made in a capitalist country. Yeah, and as they're driving away, Zeus leans out the window and yells at the guy that's stealing the car, who's the twenty first president? The guy's like, fuck you! He's like, this guy hates me, I don't know what's going on. He leaves the gold brick in the thing to pay him, which is like, nice.

Um, but so, they get to the site of Water Tunnel Number Three, legitimately one of the greatest human achievements of civil engineering of an hour or any time. Because first they pull over the wrong truck, and the guy's like, oh shit, where would you send a shit ton of dump trucks? And the guy's like, they've, where would you send a shit ton of dump trucks? And the guy's like, I've probably gone through water tunnel three. Yeah, he pulls over some like guy and it turns out to be like a random trucker and I... Alright, this is the hottest guy in the movie. I know who I am.

I'm not going to get too far into this because it would be disrespect for me to get properly into what I want this guy to do to me. But this is the hottest guy in the movie, hands down. This is the autistic truck driver. GARETH Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is, yeah. RILEY Because he drives John into the tunnel, he's like, yeah, 15 dump trucks came through here a second ago, what's going on? ALICE Yeah, there's a lot of, like, blue colonists.

RILEY Yeah. As Zeus is speeding to Yankee Stadium, the autistic truck driver is driving John through the tunnels and explaining all about the tunnels. ALICE We can name him. This is Jerry. GARETH Yeah, I'm gonna name him. ALICE John McClane borrows Jerry's hat, which has Jerry written on it, and becomes Jerry for a second. Also, he has to have a, like, a

kind of very blue collar conversation with the foreman, who is John Doman from fucking every other thing. And it is like, hey, you know, lots of stuff like this. ZACH Yeah. All the classic, authentic New York stuff. Yeah, because John McClane's a working class cop. Threatened for his life, but by the second that are actually in the tunnel, he's like giving him little factoids about it, he's clearly so enthusiastic about the engineering works that they're doing, just fantastic, lovely.

It's not all of it, but that's a factor. He's like, did you know that Water Town Hall number three is the greatest peacetime infrastructure project in human history. And so, incidentally, well, so they run up on one of the trucks, and this is where you get the Santa line from the beginning, because McClane just straight up executes two guys. He does, yeah. I don't know if there was a cop way to handle this, but this is one of the conceits of an action movie, is you remove all of those things, and then you go, oh, of course he had to, like, just shoot two guys with a sub-machine gun.

Yeah, they excuse it by having, like, a shot of the two of them in the car beforehand, being like, wait until he gets along sides and open fire, or something, just to be like, they were gonna kill him, it's fine. Mmhmm. Retroactively. Yeah, right. He didn't know that. So he takes the thing, and on the way out he's like, hey, Jerry, what does the 21 out

of 42 mean? And Jerry locks the fuck in. This is part of why I like him so much. He goes like, hey man, can you tell everyone all of this stuff, can you update them on the position, and can you get them to find out who the 21st president is? And this guy goes, ah, it's just yesterday after. And just rattles off a bunch of dates about him as well. N.Y.U.

Jerry! He was customs inspector in New York City. And I'm just like, I will fuck you. I will fuck you. Well, that's not the way it would go down, but like, I'll have sex with you. My note just says, God bless autism. Mine says autism saves the day. He knows, he was pre years pre- Chester A Arthur.

Chester A Arthur Public School, which is in Harlem, which retroactively makes McLean kind of not a liar. And that's where Zeus's two kids from earlier are, that's where the bomb is. I have a real contempt for this next shot, where we see the cops getting in to try and evacuate it and the school is surrounded by kind of ambiently rioting black people? ALICE Well, so Simon calls into a big radio show and tells them, hey, my cousin's a cop, there's a bomb in a school and that's why they're searching all the schools, so he starts a panic.

And so I think these are all the parents who are like, you gotta get the kids out of the school. ALICE Yeah, and it's presented like a riot, it's filmed that way. It's nasty. LIAM It is, yeah. You gotta get the kids out of the school. ALICE Yeah, and it's presented like a riot, it's filmed that way. It's nasty. RILEY It is, yeah. No, like, I thought this was the back entrance, like, it is the back entrance, and things like that, to really sell, that it's worse out front, or whatever.

ALICE So as the cops are trying to find the bomb, McLean has grabbed a radio from the two guys he killed and does some more Yippee-kay-ay shit. RILEY Yeah, he loves to do this, this is his brand bar. ALICE Of course, in a traditional familial inherited Gruber hubris, or Grubris, Simon talks back to him and is like, yeah, I guess, well done, you figured out the fact that they were going to fuck you up.

I hope your friend's not still at Yankee Stadium, because like, that would be bad. ZACH He's like, yeah, it's a shame we're gonna have to kill your friend but have a vexed acting grubrik. LIAM He also says to him, the truck that you're carrying contains 14 billion dollars in gold bullion. Do you wanna just take it and fuck off? And McClane's like, no, I'm gonna drive it up your ass. ALICE Yeah, classic. ALICE I woulda taken the gold.

ALICE I watched this with some friends and I inadvertently got a huge laugh out of them with a stupid throwaway joke, which is one thing we know about Simon that we're told earlier, is that he gets really bad migraines. And so, as he leaves the tunnel with the last of the gold, we see him like, necking a bunch of aspirin, but because it's the US they come in a little bottle. This is an important plot point, however, I see him get out of the truck and do a little bottle of something, and I go, oh, doing a quick Yakult, keep the blood sugar up. And for some reason, just the concept of, like, just one-shotting a Yakult mid-heist

is just one that... I'm talking about me and my little bandolier, y'know. I take God's help very seriously, Mr. MacLaine. Alright? You need to have a very well adjusted macro-biome to do this. I've got sixteen Yakults and then a little thing of poppers at the top, and I cannot get these confused. Unfortunately you will not be bioactive much longer. Oh fuck.

So, right, so the cops have arrived at Chester Ray Arthur School and they're like getting all the kids together, because they can't evacuate them, but they do want to evacuate them very strongly, so they're like, let's get them all together in the fucking auditorium, they're all singing a round of Row Row Row Your Bow. ALICE Yeah, sing like, Kumbaya, or... ALICE Yeah, classic. RILEY That's like, we're the fire department, we have a new, like, fire drill that we're practicing, or something like that. Anyway.

ALICE Meanwhile, Simon is like, okay, I'm done with my act, Amel, blow up the fucking tunnel, seal off our escape route, kill McClane. RILEY Using the spare bomb from earlier, it's a very tight script. ALICE It is, yeah. is like, okay, I'm done with my actamel, blow up the fucking tunnel, seal off our escape, root kill McClane. D&J. Using the spare bomb from earlier, it's a very tight script. ALICE. Yeah. And so, McClane gets confronted by a wall of early, early CGI water, because sadly there

was, I guess, no practical way to do this. And he very nearly goes out like Cole Phelps. Like, he- D&J. Yeah, he does. But luckily for him, he J-turns a truck and then surfs it down the tunnel? Yes he does. And then he grabs an escape hatch and gets fired out of it, or something like that. That's why they call it Flushing Meadows.

That's funny. Zeus has escaped Yankee Stadium, where a couple of guys were like, should we shoot him? I guess we shouldn't shoot him, but we should follow him. When they find McClane with him, they then try to attack him, and my note just says, I'd love to be a big bald Eastern European guy with a submachine gun, which I'm not sure what gender that is. We'll file that for you. M- No, yeah, it is a distinct one.

Yeah. Big bald European guy with a submachine gun is real as hell. ALICE- Yeah, my note says car goes spinning. M- You could just sit car chase, McClane does a cool spin, yeah it does indeed. Another classic car chase. We get some more smarm from McClane where they get flipped over and McClane's like, you got a triple A card? Yeah.

Both the two big bald German dudes get killed. McClane wants some more aspirin, because he loves aspirin, he has a bad headache and a bad hangover. And he figures out the plan, which is they've already loaded it onto a boat, and they're just gonna take the gold on the boat. RILEY Because all the goons had like ten quarters or whatever for like the toll bridge, and that's how he puts it over. RILEY Gonna smuggle it out on a boat.

RILEY I fuck up the entire heist by losing a quarter. RILEY Charlie the bomb guy, um, earns the good night cross? Because they figure out that they've got... he's got two minutes left to defuse the bomb, they run all the kids out of the school, realizing Simon's probably not watching anyway, and then, of course, Zeus' two kids are hiding from the fire drill and they're stuck inside. And so Charlie the bomb guy's like, I'm not gonna evacuate, I'm gonna spend the last two minutes trying to defuse it. RILEY He logs in, Good Night Cross 100% for Charlie,

I love this guy so much. ALICE He's having a fantastic time, this is what he was born to do, and yeah, he, like, volunteers to, like, sacrifice his life. TANVI It's so tense, it's really good. RILEY Classic, big, big, like, again, cause we've seen the way this setup is, he's got two big cylinders, one with red liquid and one with clear, and it starts spilling the red liquid into the clear. It's like, oh shit, it's sweating. Really visually cool bomb.

Just good stuff. Great stuff! And then when the counter hits zero, or like, he punches one of them, to try and let some of the liquid out, and it's like, wait a second, this is pancake syrup! Which, to immediately identify that, like, with not- Yeah, second good night cross. Incredible work. Absolutely incredible stuff.

It's a fake bomb. Interesting. John and Zeus get onto the boat, we get my favorite moment as Zeus sneaks up on Simon with an SMG, and he doesn't know how to work it, and he's like, I'm gonna shoot you, and Simon's like, go do what you gotta do, and then he can't shoot him and he goes, you've left the safety catch on. Just takes it off him, takes the safety catch off him and kneecaps him. ALICE Yeah, that's really good.

RILEY He's eating an egg this entire time as well. ALICE Yeah. It's true. It's so funny. ALICE It's in microbiomes and nutrients, it's in macros. RILEY He takes a big bite out of it for his like, yeah, you should probably let the safety off next time. Bam!

And shoots him in the leg. Love how much play the MP5K gets in this as well, but yeah, real 90s stuff. They get onto the ship by jumping down a fucking cable and it ghost ships a guy, like a guy gets fucking cut in half by the cable. Crazy. Yeah, he does really bisect the guy. We also disrespect the Coast Guard a couple of times, because they're like, why don't we just stop the boat without getting on it, and McClane's like, ah the Coast Guard put

me on hold, or whatever. Yeah, and he laughs with Simon about it, because Simon catches them. Yeah, Simon's got on boat for this point. Before he does, we get like a little mini boss battle in the hold with the big German guy, and the thing I like for this, McClane whips him across the back with a chain a few times to no effect. They have to shoot this very strangely to make Bruce Willis seem like, you know, small and this guy big.

But so, the guy's throwing around, he's like, Vi-Von-Chu just die! And Mclane, covered in blood, grinning, is like, I'm like that fucking Energizer bunny. This is gender, this is fucking brat energy, I really like it. Big fan. Big big fan. Bunny. So, yeah. ALICE Yeah, being brat while you're getting tortured

to death, honest to God, that's so good. ALICE I do my best. LOREN I hope so. ALICE Yeah. That's the experience of being alive in Britain. ALICE Simon gets them at gunpoint, he's like, obviously I'm not gonna blow up a school, like I'm not a monster. ALICE Yeah, it's a fake bomb, obviously. ALICE And Bruce Willis tries to taunt him, and he's Britain. SXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX not liking one's brother and not caring when a dumb Irish flatfoot throws him off a building. That's fair. So they put out the communique with the accent on it, and the communique is like a sort of

bullshit communist thing which says that because of the West's crimes, all of this gold, a really hard line, has been redistributed by explosive across the bottom of the Long Island South. Yeah, they're gonna gold finger it, they're not gonna steal it, they're gonna blow it the fuck up! I love gold! I love to punch gold! Without some commuter care, it's just a little... Get blown the fuck up!

I'm like, I love gold! You, however, the two of you, we're gonna tie you to the bomb, which is a very real bomb, and yeah, there's no... Yeah, we're just gonna leave you here. There's no fucking riddle, no bullshit like that, you are dying. Okay. And McLean, in his kind of like, dying human moment, is like, I have a really fucking bad headache.

Yeah, do you have an aspirin, man? He's been taking so many... his blood is so thin at this point. Well that's why he's losing so much of it. Well, he's handcuffed to the bomb, and he's like, can you go on the aspirin? And Sam's like, it's your lucky day. Chucks him his bottle of aspirin, which lands in his lap, and obviously he can't use it because he's handcuffed to the bomb, and he's like, can you go on the aspirin, and Sam's like, it's your lucky day. Chucks him his bottle of aspirin, which lands in his lap, and obviously he can't use it because it's handcuffed. ALICE Yeah, he's like, keep the bottle.

Which is cool. Right. Hey, hey dickhead, you have any Yakult? This is your lucky day. Woop! And then, as they tie together, McLean does a kind of NYPD, creditory crime analysis, where he's like, there's no fuckin' gold on this boat. Because I know this guy's brother, and, logically, brothers do crime the same way, and he's just

stealing that gold. RILEY Yeah, he's like, listen, he's taking the gold, he's gonna blow it up, what's better than blowing up it? Taking it away and making everyone think you blew it up. Which is like, it's the best method. SINGLE Simon tells him some gentleman in the Middle East think they'll make an awful lot of money when I gold finger this. Yeah. But of course he's also stealing the gold. Don't say gold finger this.

I'm going to gold finger it. It's a gold finger. I'm gold fingering it. Stop saying this. Um, but so, again, the homoeroticism of this next scene, where Zeus has to like, pick the handcuffs that they're in, McClane has to spit a handcuff, like a shim, a little piece of metal or whatever, into his hand. It's like, they're covered in sweat and blood and they're kind of grinding on each other. Mclane's saying things like, will you stop this racial shit? Yeah.

That would be pretty cool. Cool to keep going with that. These men will homoerotically end racism by spitting in each other's hands. They talk about his ex-wife, or I guess, wife. Yeah. Cause they're not actually separated, what it turns out is that they like, live apart and they had an argument and Mcclain and McCain just never fucking called her again. Like he just got too nervous to ever do it.

ALICE McClain has ADHD and executive dysfunction, and probably autism, it's not always easy for him to initiate conversations, and you just have to be patient with him and keep trying, y'know? I realize it's a lot to ask, for anyone. But, yeah. So they get out of the thing, they jump clear of the explosion, this is a real vintage jump clear of the explosion moment. Yeah.

Really cool. Yeah. All fantastic stuff. Very cool. I really like that, like, there's a bit where Zeus is like, man, leave me. Like, get yourself out of here, save yourself, and Jon's like, no, man, what the fuck are you talking about, think! We have to end racism together.

He's like, I've got a bad enough day without having your death on my fucking conscience, alright? Get serious. Which, I do like. ALICE They get out of the thing, John looks at the little bottle of Yakult, and it says, this was purchased at next location. ZEKE Not yet! Because like...

ZEKE There's like a big stop before they realize that, like, he's won. ALICE Oh, fuck, my bad. My bad. Yeah, they're like, fuck, he beat us. ZEKE He doesn't notice until he's on the phone later on. ALICE Got away. And Zeus gives him a quarter to call his wife, and as he's doing it he looks at the aspirin

bottle and it says next location on it. Yeah, it's just a man. Yeah, aspirin bought from scenic next location. Which is Canada! Meanwhile at scenic, how do you say next location in French? Location prochaine or whatever? Because it's bilingual location, because it's a Canadian border stop, and at this Canadian border stop, the boys, the big Nazi looking boys, are thrilled that

they got away with it. It's gonna be like, laboratory in there, this many henchmask Germans, all this happy at once, a bunch of them have their shirts off. Full disclosure, I just went to try to find out what like, next location would be in German, and instead of opening Translate I just googled the word German, and now I'm just sitting here looking at it and being like, yeah, that's what I did. But they're like, you know, we are an army without a country, and tomorrow we will at least try to decide what country we should buy, you know? Like, he does a big speech at the end. Everyone's fucking great. I gotta be honest, this would

probably be the greatest party of all time. Can you imagine the feeling after pulling this shit off? They're celebrating with bottles of Dom Perignon, and I'm like, okay, you are celebrating. Even if I had just stolen 140 billion, I'd be like, well, let's not go crazy, you know? You're like a billionist? With a B? Well, you know, Dom let's not go crazy. You know, don't burn your fucking expenses. Also don't shake it up and waste it like in saber. It's not how rich they are. You gotta, this is the thing is when you complete a high, you gotta fuck on the loot. His species like gentlemen, I'm going to attempt to have sex with a woman now. We'll see how this goes. So like, damn, let's not go crazy.

Yeah, all of these guys are like, cool, we'll be out here doing our thing, but if you want to do all this buy stuff, fine. This one, by the way, no lines. No lines. She's got like a big scar over her throat, so the implication is she can't speak. But so, they're about to fuck on the money. And also we find out how, because earlier on in some exposition scenes they're like, oh yeah, the Israelis tried to kill her.

Yeah, they put like a bomb in their bed or whatever. Her and the big German mongo. Yeah. So they were involved, don't worry about it. They're about to fuck, and McClane cock blocks him with a helicopter, which takes some flying. Yeah. One of the worst cock blockings of all time, just turn on a big spotlight from the helicopter onto the two of you.

Oh, you'd hate- you would hate to be spotlit! If I'm mid-sex and I get spotlit unexpectedly, I don't know how I'm dealing with that situation. It's over. It's over. Like a prison escape. I'm just like, huh. Immediately running. I dunno.

I'd probably keep going. That's- wow. Fuck it, yeah. Spotlights are part of your setup, as far as I'm aware. Yeah. So he grabs an M60 machine gun, along with the bluest balls of all time, as like, I'm gonna kill that fucking cop. Yeah. Weird fashion sense, Zeus keeps calling themselves the Exterminators. Yeah.

I don't know why he's doing that. Zeus is still here because of friendship. Why is he here? What's going on? Um, his lines get way worse. Another thing about this, they're both wearing paramedic jackets, because, like, they've been treated by the paramedics. I would say a key part of being a paramedic is to, like, it's like I'm getting fucking

murdered on leather bags here tweet, don't give them your jacket. You're gonna run out of fucking jackets. You know, like the NHS's jacket budget, through the roof, you know? Every time I have any kind of health emergency I'm getting a free jacket out of it, you know? Most of my wardrobe is bottle green at this point. Um. So they have a helicopter dogfight.

Helicopter fight. Helicopter fight. Pretty sick. And McClane ends up shooting them down and like, crashing them into power lines. Wait a sec. Wait wait wait wait wait a second. The helicopter that McClane and Zeus are flying in is, I think, an air ambulance. Which means, first of all, you're not just losing the jacket, you're losing the fucking

helicopter. Second of all, that's probably a war crime. Third of all, kind of implies that they're flying Zeus up to Canada for the free healthcare? RILEY A little bit. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Maybe like Medicaid fraud? RILEY Yeah, this final sequence was actually a reshoot, and you can kind of tell a little bit.

ALICE Yeah, you can tell they added this on. RILEY Yeah. ALICE The original ending was very very different, and I'll tell you about it in a second, but anyway, McLean manages to take it down, he does the yippee-ki-yay motherfucker thing, Zeus says let him cook, he calls his wife, end of a movie! Say goodbye to his uncle. We get some absolutely dogshit cop car livery at the end as the Canadians show up, that's

a surete de Quebec, awful cars, terrible. And then I look at the credits and I go, yo, one of the kids was Aldous Hodge from Leverage? Asif Mandvi is in this as Arabcabie? All the minor character names in the credits are insanely racist. Just note that down. But yeah. Well if you're interested, the original ending of this, the one that they had to reshoot, was it cut to six months later, in Hungary, when McClane has been disgraced, he's been like totally fired off the force for beansing this whole thing, catches up with Simon in

a bar in Hungary, forces him to play Russian roulette with a rocket launcher and kills him in cold blood. Insanely stupid. How did he play Russian roulette? I don't know. But they re-edited it, because they didn't like the idea that McClane was just like a psycho revenge killer, and also they wanted the whole thing to happen within 24 hours, which is part of the conceit of Die Hard as this is One Day.

I don't know that either of these are particularly good endings. No, not particularly. I appreciate the next location Yakult bottle, but other than that, like... Yeah. It cut to black and then it came up with a little like, it was like executive producer Andrew G. Vagina, which did like, cause me a little bit of problems. Yeah, I noticed that too. Well, Mr. Vagina, this was a weird one. Yeah, Mr. Vagina, I gotta say. What has Vagina produced?

Odd. Vagina has produced all of us, in the end. Wow. That's profound. Some of us were from our mother's womb's untimely rich, I think. Some of us were not of women born. Two out of three, yeah. I actually wasn't, I was induced, though.

I just wanted to get that reference. I was about to do a whole bit about Caesarian section section correlates with being a podcast host, but y'know. GOOSE You are the gold star-est of gold star lesbians if you're born by c-section. RILEY Yeah, I've never even interacted. GOOSE Wait, no, that would be a gold star gay guy, wouldn't it? RILEY Gold star gay, yeah.

GOOSE Never been like, fuck! RILEY Gold star homosexual, never interacted with a vagina in any way. Not even touched that shit. GOOSE Born by c-section, yeah. ALICE That's like a different kind of star if you've like, I've never had sex with a cis lesbian. Like, I don't even know what you would call that, you know?

Like a platinum star, right? Kick it off. I don't want to imply that it's like, better. I've been on record as being a trans supremacist from day one. I don't want to investigate like a concept as like, portentous as only having had lesbian sex with trans lesbians in the dying minutes of a podcast about die hard with a vengeance. That's fine. We should probably end it. We don't have to rank lesbianism subjectively because we have a science podcast on this

podcast called LGBT spectrum. So it's a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. How lesbian is this movie on a scale of one to seven? How smarmy is this movie? I... very. Pretty smarmy, yeah. It's a classic diehard situation. It's very very smarmy.

Like, you got a double A card? It's part of the appeal. Yeah, it is. It's characteristic. This has gotta be like, six at least. Like... Yeah, I think it's actually in some ways less smarmy than Die Hard or even Die Hard 2. It's characteristic. This has got to be like six at least. Yeah, I think it's actually in some ways less smarmy than Die Hard or even Die Hard 2. Like, he's not really clowning on anyone except Simon. If you look at like Die Hard 2, a den of frowns,

you know, getting all the like Glock 7 porcelain gun shit. I think it's like less smarmy slightly. It is less smarmy, you're right. I disagree because I think the we're gonna tackle race with this thing speaks to the movie being very pleased with itself. That is true. That's true, yeah. I guess we're gonna put that under C, I suppose. Well, I think in part, I think we can score it negatively on both.

I think we could do like a six here, that's sweetening. Yeah, six I think is fine. Cultural insensitivity. Cultural insensitivity. How do we... It's like New York City is like a character in the movie, and one of the things about New York City is that, you know, it's messy, but ultimately you can end racism with the power of friendship. Yeah.

So who's gonna help? We're gonna help ourselves. And who do we not want to help with? White people. That's right. See, that's the thing that he learns, you he learns not to do from the movie, is to not be an anti-white racist. Shoot me in the fucking head.

JUSTIN Yeah, that is his- LIAM This guy didn't care about skin color. Even for you, dude. ALICE John doesn't really go on a racial journey. All the kind of tackling of race is done by black people realizing that white people are chill, actually. JUSTIN Yeah, Samuel L. learns that white people are okay. A lesson that will be completely removed from him by the next 24 hours.

It is willing to show you that white people can be racist, and that white pops can be racist and violent, but it's like so subsumed in that, like it references the fucking Rodney King tape and it's like, yeah, but these guys are buddies, right? So like, that's the thing, if real life awareness of that is dwarfing the action movie then you can't really give it credit for that. So I don't, do we want, it's like paternalistic, certainly, and patronizing, condescending. It's not consciously hostile, which in some ways is like, y'know, makes it more annoying. I dunno, like, five or six, maybe? SONIA Yeah, I feel like I'm giving a lot and then

maybe taking one back. ALICE Yeah. SONIA Six, let's take the Arab cab driver. ALICE Oh, sorry, you mean Astif Manfia's Arab cabbie? Yeah. Fuck me. Six. Yeah, six.

Six at least. Unprovoked violence. McLean does, like, fully execute two Eurotrash Frankfurt perverts. Yes. Like, he... he doesn't do that. He takes them out, but that's, I mean, I guess, I don't think that's unreasonable. No, and the movie always presents it as like, oh, these guys are just about to kill him.

RILEY Yeah, I guess I will say that he didn't know that. That's something that was given to us so that we could justify it, but he didn't know they were gonna open fire. ALICE He bisects a guy with a crane? RILEY Yeah. RILEY Yeah. That's more of the guy being in the way, I guess. ALICE That's a kind of like poor cable handling thing.

But still, the movie wants us to think that this is cool. Yes, well that is certain. I don't... I mean, in some ways lower than like Die Hard, you know, he's not like stalking and ambushing these guys. It is less unprovoked violence. Like Die Hard 2, he's being put in more of a situation these times. So on that basis, I think, like, I dunno.

Four? I'd do like a three. Okay. Yeah. That fits for me. And then Misogyny. Holly gets like a line on the phone where she's like, as like a comedy bit- For one dollar, name a woman.

Yeah. Yeah. Holly MacLean literally phoning this, phoning her line in, and she immediately gets dumped for next location, which really sort of tells you how the movie feels about women. Which is, you know, impediment to think. Yeah, pretty bad. Can't name a single female character in this. I can picture them.

Mute sexy woman. There's a lady who works in, like, the police department, there's a lady who works in the switchboard, that we never got into, but she's there. There are female characters, but they don't actually have anything specific to them. It's aware of the existence of women. It's one of those things where, like we've said in the past, where we've had an all-male movie where one of these people could have been a woman and it would have been fine. Like it would have been effortless.

It feels like they've gone exactly that far and no further. ALICE Check this shit out, Simone Gruber. LIAM How about that. ALICE Hans' sister. ALICE Oh yeah, let me play along. ALICE Put me in charge of a remake of this, you know? I make John McClane black, he's wearing a defund the NYPD billboard in Staten Island. Oh god.

Yeah, I generally swap all of these guys to third gender Native American. That's it. All of them. They're all two-spirit now. Yeah, no, misogyny, I wanna give it like a four or something. Four? Okay cool. I'm being generous.

Night King's a total score of 19. Which is decent as far as films go, it's also continuing the trend because I can now reveal that Die Hard 1 got a 14, Die Hard 2 got an 18, so they are getting worse. And I think this trend is going to continue because I have seen Die Hard 4. That's about right. Yeah. Yeah. Oh god, we got a good Die Hard 4 next year, man. ALICE I'm so excited, yeah, to join you, Christmas

2025 for Live Free or Die Hard. ZACH I don't know if there even will be a Christmas 2025, but we'll fucking watch Die Hard for it if it's around. ALICE In the ruins watching Live Free or Die Hard. ZACH Justin, long. ALICE Was it five or six Die Hard movies? ALICE I don't remember. ZACH That's a great question, let me look this up,

I'm not sure. ALICE We'll have to figure out what to do after this in 2026. Was it five or six Die Hard movies? I don't remember. That's a great question, let me look this up. We'll have to figure out what to do after this in 2026. Okay. Okay, next one is gonna be Live Free or Die Hard, and the next one is A Good Day to Die Hard. In Europe it was called Die Hard 4.0. Terrible.

With the hackers, okay. Yeah, because computers are gay! We're locked in for the next two years, chat, don't worry about it. Alright, listen the fuck up. You gotta survive 2025, so that you can hear us do Die Hard 4.0, because that is a dogshit movie. I can't wait. I actually look forward to it.

Thank you so much for your support this year, we hope to see you again this time next year. It's been emotional, genuinely, like a little bit of a state of the Kill James Bond, I'm just like, I'm really happy with it, and I'm so glad that people seem to keep enjoying it, so thank you. Having more fun than ever, it's been a wonderful year. It's been a splendid year. This year for me has been about, I guess we can do this in the New Year, special next week or whatever, but like, this year for me has been about taking the stability that this podcast has given me and using it to like, promote as much justice as I can for the people in my immediate surroundings

in Cardiff, and this has been wonderful. I'd like to thank everyone for supporting us this whole year, this has been incredible. Thank you so much. I hope we've entertained you for an hour, maybe. Like, collectively. The solemn, meaningful yippee-kayay from our house to yours. Yeah. Merry Christmas, motherfucker.

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Hit the non-alcoholic nog, and we will see you next year. Bye everyone. Yeah, fucking bye. Mwah. Thank you for listening to yet another episode of Kill James Bond in two weeks time on the free feed. It's gonna be Oceans 12, the sequel to Oceans 11. But if that is simply too long for you to wait, then next week on the free feed, because it's a new year special is Star Wars Episode 2 Attack of the Clones. This was voted for by our beautiful followers on X.com and BlueSky. Thank you for being a

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