Die Hard 3: Try Harder (The Novelization)

Die Hard 3 is one of cinema’s biggest piles of shit (Disagree? You’re wrong.), which is hardly surprising since it didn’t even start out as a Die Hard movie. See, the original plan was for Part 3 to feature terrorists seizing a cruise ship, only to run afoul of a vacationing Die Hard, and by all indications ("all indications" being the sentence I just wrote) it would’ve been awesome. Unfortunately, some assholes went and made the movie Under Siege, which was basically the same thing, so naturally they dropped that idea because Hollywood would never release two movies with a remarkably similar premise all but simultaneously. Instead, they took some random script nobody could be bothered with up to that point, cut/pasted Die Hard’s name into it, and shot that, completely ignoring the fact that the script in question was criminally retarded. I mean, come the fuck on - the big gimmick is that the bad guy baffles the entire NYC police force with riddles we all learned in grade school. Cops may be a lot of things (slack-asses, corrupt, thugs), but they aren’t stupid. It’s like laziness and hackwork had a baby, and then it shit all over you while you were holding it. Die Hard with an Anus does feature one brilliant scene though: the jaw-dropping bit where Die Hard is walking through Harlem wearing a sandwich board and it’s suddenly revealed that the sandwich board says "I hate niggers". So how does the novelization handle this tense yet hilarious scene? By bitching out and having the sign read "I hate everybody".

What. The. FUCK???

Look, I get it. As an African American myself (hey, as far as you know), I hate the N word too. And if that’s your beef, fine, have the sign say "I hate black people" or something. But don’t set the whole thing up and then punk out entirely at the last second, especially when you have no problem using racial slurs against white people just a few sentences later. Fucking hypocrite. Seriously, how swollen does your vagina have to be to turn you into such a sniveling, PC cunt? (Oh, and don’t try to pretend you changed this scene to protect the reader from "spoilers". If someone didn’t want a movie spoiled for them, they wouldn’t be reading the goddamned novelization.)

And it’s not like the writing gets any better as the story progresses. At one point Die Hard yells "Bomb!" and we’re told nobody is impressed because they’re jaded New Yorkers. Then, 23 pages later, he yells "Bomb!" again (it’s a different bomb) and everyone panics because "This was New York. Anything was possible." Does the author really think that we aren’t going to remember what he said just a few pages ago? How dumb does he think we are? Fuck you, asshole.

So this book licks bung, but it may still be of interest to some people, because like a lot of movie novelizations it contains scenes that weren’t included in the final version of the film, including the original ending where Die Hard and the main bad guy play Russian roulette with a rocket launcher. (This ending is incredibly stupid, by the way.) For my money though, the guy who wrote this ("D. Chiel", obviously a made-up name. Or part of one, anyway.) should stick to subjects he’s more familiar with. Maybe he could write a book called "Cry Hard".

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