STREAM IT: 25 years ago, John McClane traded a Los Angeles skyscraper for New York’s mean streets in Die Hard With a Vengeance
Hot town, summer in the city: You’d best believe John McClane’s tank top is getting dirty and gritty. Bruce Willis’ssuper-cop had his third — and some have argued, best — adventure 25 years ago when Die Hard With a Vengeance blasted its way into theaters. After sitting out Die Hard 2, returning director John McTiernan and screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh retrofitted Hensleigh’s original screenplay, Simon Says, into a trilogy-capping joyride that turned an entire city, rather than a single skyscraper, into a danger-filled gauntlet for the death-averse hero. Die Hard With a Vengeance also gets plenty of mileage out of Samuel L. Jackson’s performance as Zeus Carver, an ordinary New Yorker who becomes McClane’s unlikely sidekick in combating an ingenious revenge scheme orchestrated by Jeremy Irons’s Simon Gruber, brother of Alan Rickman’s legendary big-screen bad guy, Hans. (The year before Vengeance, Willis and Jackson appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s era-defining Pulp Fiction, but didn’t share any scenes together.) After planting bombs around Manhattan, Gruber sends McClane scurrying from neighborhood to neighborhood, starting in Harlem where the cop is forced to wear an outrageously offensive sandwich board — a scene that the filmmakers almost certainly wouldn’t be able to include today. (Although it’s worth noting that the sign Willis wore during filming contained a much less inflammatory statement that was later amended in post-production.) Twelve years after Die Hard With a Vengeance, Willis sought to revive his signature franchise with 2007’s Live Free or Die Hard and 2013’s A Good Day to Die Hard, but neither of those latter-day sequels packs this movie’s firepower… or entertainment factor. — Ethan Alter
Die Hard With a Vengeance is currently streaming on HBO Go and HBO Now.
WATCH IT: Turtles and Frogs and Night Angels, oh my! Who will win The Masked Singer?
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Providing the escapist, absurdist entertainment we all need — and transporting us back to a time when the word “mask” was associated with fun phenomena — this Wednesday, The Masked Singer Season 3 concludes with a bonkers showdown between its final celebrity cosplayers. If you’re into spoilers, check out our expert predictions about who will be unmasked during this epic triple-reveal. — Lyndsey Parker
The Season 3 finale of The Masked Singer airs Wednesday, May 20 at 8 p.m. on Fox.
STREAM IT: Man of many talents Patton Oswalt returns to stand-up with a new special
In the ubiquitous TV star’s last stand-up special, 2017’s Annihilation, he covered the unexpected death of his wife, Michelle McNamara. This time around, Oswalt, who married actress Meredith Salenger in July 2017, addresses the more mundane, like being in his fifties. Oswalt riffs on choosing a breakfast cereal, attending his daughter’s second-grade art show and all that buying a house entails. In the trailer, he cracked that he found a contractor a friend likened to Michelangelo — it sounds much funnier when he says it. — Raechal Shewfelt
WATCH IT: New Top Gun release holds us over until delayed sequel lands
We were supposed to get a new Top Gun movie next month, with the long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick originally scheduled for release in late June before the coronavirus wiped out (at least) the first half of the summer movie season. It will now take flight in theaters Christmas weekend, but in the meantime fans of Tom Cruise and his fellow flyboys do get some consolation. This week Paramount is releasing the 1986 favorite in a newly remastered 4K Ultra HD edition that includes a new featurette with the creators of both the original and sequel discussing the film’s legacy, and a retrospective piece from 2016 looking at three decades of Top Gun love. For fans who celebrate Cruise’s entire catalog, a pair of the actor’s other films — Days of Thunder and War of the Worlds — also get spiffy new 4K treatments this week. — Kevin Polowy
This article was originally published on yahoo.com/entertainment
