The first to consider is Hans Fucking Gruber. Played superbly by the man’s man of bad guys: Alan Rickman. He of "I’ll get you Robin Hood" fame, "I’ll get you Sweeney Todd" fame, "I’ll get you Harry Potter" fame and last but not least, Love Actually.

Hans is the ultimo in 80s corporate robbery. A thief using international terrorism as a cover. A man with a funny German accent and a tendency to shout "DETONATORS". He and his gang of European stereotypes take over the Nakatomi tower for the purpose of stealing bearer bonds. How 80’s is that! Now that’s a difficult plan to pull off but Hans has a disguise. In order to bide time so he can crack the electromagnetic vault and kill yuppies, he claims to want the release of several terrorism groups including the Asian Dawn. This is an intelligent move from Gruber. It throws the LAPD and the FBI into chaos; they look bumbling and downright stupid. Gruber makes a fool out of Chief Dwayne T. Robinson (or to me and you, Mr Vernon from The Breakfast Club).

Whilst they are dicking about trying to save the hostages and failing to attack the building, Hans is using his "DETONATORS"  to wire up the roof, which he will blow up with the hostages in an attempt to fake his own death thus allowing him and his motley crew a safe getaway. The man is clearly a genius.

 What’s more, he’s a funny one. Hans is so quotable you could make a little red book for European terrorists. "Nice suit..I hear Arafat buys his there", "Mr Mystery guest", "Mr Takagi, I’m going to count to three.." and my particular favourite "When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer". He could be Jesus if he wasn’t so rough around the edges. If anyone thinks this makes Hans look light-hearted and not serious, you need to see him at work. He’s pretty fucking scary. Hans murders Takagi and Ellis in cold blood. Now I don’t give a shit about Ellis, he was a coke snorting yuppie 80’s cash whore and frankly I cheered when Hans decorated Holly’s office in his brain matter. But Takagi was a nobler man. A Japanese American who’d made it the top from nothing. In Hans’ world, though, he was an object. He didn’t know the codes and he paid with his life.

Hans’ ‘monkey in the wrench’ is John McClane. The vest-wearing, twinkie-hating Gary Cooper-like New Yorker who by sheer circumstance, that starts to get a little suspect, finds himself in a terrorist siege. I blame his wife. McClane with the help of the aforementioned Sgt. Al Powell really pisses off Hans. Firstly, by murdering the brother of Hans’ chief terrorist, Karl, who promptly goes a bit psycho. Secondly, by blowing up the building and wasting the precious C4. Thirdly, by killing all the terrorists one by one. Hans loses control of a situation and Hans doesn’t like that. It’s unlikely in a real situation that McClane would get away. Hans uses a combined force of about 15 terrorists to find him, who all fail and die and uses Holly (McClane’s wife) as a hostage which also fails because McClane is a quick thinker. In the words of so many failed athletes, it wasn’t meant to be. Hans plan should have succeeded, it was certainly original but for some reason factors went against him. McClane thwarted him at every turn. This brings us nicely and cheeringly to Hans’ most fantastic death.

Hans takes Holly hostage and McClane appears to surrender. The roof is blown, the FBI and all but one of the terrorists are dead, Hans has the loot and is ready to escape. McClane, though, has a twist; he has taped a revolver with two bullets onto his back. When Hans and the Texan terrorist are laughing, McClane grabs the gun, shoots Tex and wounds Hans who backs towards the window. He falls but drags Holly with him, 30 floors above central Los Angeles. Grabbing onto Holly’s watch, he tries in vain desperation to grab onto the building but McClane is fast and removes the watch. The last we see is Hans’ slow-motion fall to the icy ground blow. As deaths go, it’s bloody dramatic. What a way to go! 30 floors up and a sudden drop. Killed by a Rolex watch and a dirty alcoholic NYPD cop. 

That’s Hans Gruber. His death is as spectacular as the man himself. I dare say Americans hate Hans but for us European he becomes the best bit about Die Hard. Cocky, thwarting the useless cops and generally making fun of Yuppie culture in a way Wall Street could only dream of, Hans is a true anti-hero. He only kills those we don’t like or deserve to die in some way (Takagi created Ellis, so deserves to die). He’s super intelligent, pretty dignified until the very end, cool, charming, and wears a fantastic suit, all at the same time. He’s not a great physical presence but mentally, he’s right up there. He’ll get to you. Hans Gruber may be a thief but in his own words he is an "exceptional thief who is moving up to kidnapping, so you better be more polite". So stand up, take off your berets and salute perhaps the greatest of movie villains; Hans Fucking Gruber.

 

Let’s clear one thing up before we start, Colonel Stuart was for the most part...well, frankly rubbish. He was a wooden one-dimensional wannabe Ed Harris in The Rock.  There was no reason for this supposedly loyal highly-decorated US Colonel to suddenly turn renegade and help a drug lord called Esperanza (a thinly veiled Noriega). What’s more he managed to take his platoon with him and also persuade a Special Forces unit to join his dastardly plan. This has no logic. The only reason could be monetary gain but are we really expected to believe around 30 soldiers would suddenly go "well, y’know, this army shits kinda dull, hey let’s help the South American drug lord, we’ll get loads of money for that". Ridiculous. And thus is the problem of looking at Colonel Stuart and his role in Die Hard 2: Die Harder; the more ridiculous he becomes, the more brilliant he gets.

Stuart is one of those bad guys where you just don’t need to think. With Hans, you were wondering who the hell is he and where did he get those suits? With Simon, you were wondering does he really want McClane and why the hell did he bring the Hungarian guy in the first place? Stuart is so stupidly shallow that everything you see is there. There’s no deep rooted psychological reason to what he’s doing or indeed any reason whatsoever. The biggest twist of the whole film is when you realise Major Grant’s group are in on it and that’s only after an entirely pointless gun battle and snowmobile chase. (This is supposed to dupe McClane, but why the hell didn’t they just kill him in the first place?) Stuart offers no great quotes, has none of Hans’ charm or Simon’s comedy. He’s just a dull toughened army officer who does martial arts naked.

To write him off as just this though would be unrepresentative. Stuart is more evil than the other two combined. The bit in Die Hard where Hans lets the pregnant lady sit down, Stuart would have torn the screaming foetus from her body and let her slowly bleed to death. The fake bomb in the school Simon plants, Stuart would have put three bombs in there just for a bit of comedy. Stuart’s absolute bastardly evil is shown when he crashes the British, yes British, airliner into the Washington DC snow. After having impressively hacked into the air traffic control system from a symbolic church, Stuart proceeds to punish the airport for trying to re-establish communications. By messing with some complicated instruments, he messes with the airliner’s altitude and proceeds to chillingly bring the plane straight into the ground, all the time plainly saying "I’ve got ya..I’ve got ya". I must admit to being pretty freaked out when this fucked up circumstance was first shown. This guy had executed 150 people by aircraft crash! I mean this guy had to be one hell of an SOB. And what’s more he was prepared to do more, letting all the other planes run out of fuel by denying them a runway to land on.

McClane’s involvement in all this is somewhat strange. He is there, of course, by circumstance picking up his wife who is, of course, on one of the circling fuel leaking planes. Circumstance again. He kills one of Stuart’s gang when he catches them  messing with the luggage system and therefore he gets in on all the action, survives an ambush and generally fails to fuck around with Stuart’s plan. The only time McClane comes remotely close to beating Stuart is when he takes Esperanza hostage for all of 2 minutes before being cornered by the renegades and escaping via a conveniently placed ejector seat. McClane is actually pretty useless. Stuart bats him away like a midge and ignores him like a uncaring parent. Which turns out to be his downfall. Stuart’s ignorance of McClane leads to him to continue with his dull plan and forget about the mad New York bastard, who can’t fail because he has Sgt. Al Powell on his side.

Stuart’s death is dull. A simple plane explosion, which wipes out him and his men. Why couldn’t he have had the death of Major Grant (sucked into a jet engine) or his unnamed goon (Stalactite to the eye). I like the way it was done. McClane is beaten off the wing by karate Stuart who smugly grins in a rare moment of emotion. McClane, though, has taken off the fuel cap and lights the trail leading to the plane, murmuring "Yippe Ki-Ay Motherfucker" as the speeding jet ignites into a fireball.

To sum up, Colonel Stuart was boring, dull, wooden, look up all those words in a thesaurus and you will find his smug face right there. But!!! He was evil beyond evil, an absolute cold-hearted monster on par with Phil Collins (We would prefer for Chris De Burgh to be used as an example of ultimate evil - ED). No one was allowed to stand in the way of his inconsistent and strange plan. He was also strong enough to keep McClane away for a majority of the film and unlike the other two; he engineered his own downfall by not killing Johnny Mac earlier. He could have done so much better. So that’s Colonel Stuart; potentially brilliant and potentially one of the few terrorist success stories in 90’s thrillers, but in the end, just plain stupid.