It's important that you know right up front that I did not come here today to say Die Hard with a Vengeance is a better movie than Die Hard, although the two John McClane (Bruce Willis) adventures are closer in quality than you might remember. Alas, there aren't many movies, period, that are better than Die Hard. Not many things, overall, in the world, including the hypothetical birth of my first child. I'm also not gonna' say that Jeremy Irons' performance as Simon Gruber is "better" than Alan Rickman's performance as Hans Gruber. Comparing a Rickman performance to an Irons performance is like comparing thunder to lightning; never presume you understand the work of the gods enough to hold one against the other. Both these men have voices that sound like smooth jazz being played through the speakers of a Mad Max war rig. These are not the facts we've come to debate.
The Brothers Gruber are two of the best action movie villains of all time, but what the data shows, objectively studied, on an impartial Gruber Scale, is that Irons' Simon Gruber is simply the Superior Gruber. It's truth. It's fact. It isn't just hard science.
It's Die Hard science.
Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.
The Subjects
Hans Gruber: Former member of the West German radical group, the Volksrei. Criminal mastermind. Goatee icon. In 1988, Gruber assembled a team of terrorists mostly composed of Frost Giants and one super-hacker, Theo (Clarence Gilyard Jr.), to steal $640 million in bearer bonds from the seven-vault Nakatomi Plaza building. This homicidal maniac with the voice of an evil Disney panther hatched a near-perfect plan—fake a terrorist attack to force the city to open the building's seventh vault, stage an explosion on the roof to kill all witnesses and throw authorities off his tail—which only goes awry because an NYPD officer named John McClane was attending Nakatomi's Christmas party to reconcile with his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia). In the end, McClane crawls through flames and glass to toss Hans off the 30th floor of Nakatomi, leaving us with one of the best reaction GIFS of all time and a villain that changed action movies forever. Thanks to Rickman—who got the part after producer Joel Silver saw him in Broadway's Les Liaisons Dangereuses—film literally got a new class of criminal, one who could quote Nietzsche before shooting you in the goddamn face.
Simon Gruber: Former Colonel in the East German People's Army. Mercenary for hire. Owner of the world's tiniest sunglasses. Six years after the events of the Nakatomi Tower heist, Hans Gruber's bleach-blonde brother Simon concocted history's pettiest terrorist attack, folding his personal vendetta against John McClane into a daring plan that encompassed all of New York City. A series of bombings and a psychotic "Simon Says" game send McClane and the entire NYPD on a wild goose chase while Simon steals $140 billion in gold from the Federal Reserve. Like his brother, the one thing Simon didn't factor in is one hungover cop's stubborn ability to not die. With the help of an intelligent electrician named Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson)—and following a scene where John McClane escapes a flood that doesn't NOT remind me of Escape from L.A.—Simon Gruber is quite literally shot out of the sky with a handgun.
Two icons iconic baddies, but one with a few clear edges. Including:
A Better Plan
Do you want to know the true brilliance of Alan Rickman's performance as Hans Gruber? He's so eloquent, so charming, and so distractingly confident that you don't even notice his plan needs several miracles to end in him escaping scot-free. Hans entrenched himself on the 30th floor of a massive skyscraper and then called the LAPD and the FBI into the city. Do you know why Scream had to lampoon the idea of horror victims who flee up the stairs? Because up is the worst direction to head if you want to escape any situation. Die Hard is a marvel of a movie, and part of that is a script by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza that makes it seem like things are clicking into place perfectly. You sit back and admire the moxie of a heist that requires the FBI's involvement to work perfectly, and it takes a while to realize that maybe the time and effort could have gone into a plan that doesn't involve calling the cops on yourself?
Meanwhile, Simon Gruber is Jigsaw in this bitch. Die Hard with a Vengeance is basically a Saw movie. There is an elaborate scale contraption. Like most of cinema's best threequels, the creative teams knew that the only way to up the ante was to scrap all pretense of logic. Simon Gruber's plan to drive a fleet of dump trucks and one of the drills from Armageddon into the most secure building in New York involves 1) An encyclopedic knowledge of the layout and schedule of the subway system, 2) Completely secret access to every building in the city, including Yankee Stadium, and 3) Enough understanding of the psychoanalytic sciences to know just how much the NYPD's on-call analyst will underestimate you if you stutter at just the right time. I love Simon Gruber because he has all the class of his brother combined with the execution of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. My dude is not only bamboozling an entire city, it turns out he's also double-crossing the organization who hired him to do it. Die Hard with a Vengeance ties itself into such a knot with Simon's plan it can only foil it by turning noted blockhead John McClane into Sherlock goddamn Holmes. Simon gifts McClane with a bottle of aspirin before blowing him to bits, which the NYPD officer recognizes from a truck stop in Quebec. I reject this plot development. Simon Gruber would be sipping Mai Tais on a beach and reading about the events of Live Free or Die Hard with sardonic amusement.
A Better Shoulder Workout
This is inarguable.
A Personal Connection to Our Hero
A significant part of Die Hard's lasting charm is John McClane's everyman aesthetic, the idea he's just a regular dude who got caught up in something that had nothing to do with him. It's a foolproof formula that changed the trajectory of action storytelling, but if Die Hard with a Vengeance has any slight nudge over the original, it's in dramatic stakes on the personal level from frame one. (Zeus actually slides into the original McClane role to wonderful results.) We only get about five minutes into the movie before a mysterious voice asks for John McClane and it's off to the races. Your mileage may vary, but I think there really are only two all-time classic Die Hard movies, and the Grubers' operatic villainy across from John McClane's street-tough attitude is the secret sauce that put them on that pedestal. Die Hard with a Vengeance is the movie that cements that fact. The scene in which an FBI agent asks John if "the name Gruber means anything to you" is a genuinely chilling Big Reveal moment, giving off serious destined-to-do-this-forever vibes. And the kicker? Simon didn't even like Hans that much. "There's a difference, you know, between not liking one's brother and not caring when some dumb Irish flatfoot drops him out of a window."
We stan a petty, megalomaniac king with the voice of a rock slide crushing an orchestral performance of the Jaws score. We stan the Superior Gruber.