In my opinion it's the best of the "Diehard" series, (it has a lot of great action and plot twists) and Tati had never seen it, so we sat down to watch it...
Here's the basic plot, from IMDB:
There's a scene very early in the movie where Bruce Willis, (McClane) is directed by Simon to go stand out on a street corner deep in Harlem in his underwear wearing a sandwich board...John McClane is now almost a full-blown alcoholic and is suspended from the NYPD. But when a bomb goes off in the Bonwit Teller Department Store the police go insane trying to figure out what's going on. Soon, a man named Simon calls and asks for McClane. Simon tells Inspector Walter Cobb that McClane is going to play a game called "Simon Says". He says that McClane is going to do the tasks he assigns him. If not, he'll blow off another bomb. With the help of a Harlem electrician, John McClane must race all over New York trying to figure out the frustrating puzzles that the crafty terrorist gives him.
It's a critical scene, because it sets up the relationship between McClane and "Zeus" (the Harlem repair shop owner, played brilliantly by Samuel L. Jackson) which is central to the movie.
In the original version, the words that the terrorist tells McClane he has to have written in big letters on this sandwich board, as he stand wearing it in his underwear on a street corner in Harlem are:
I HATE NIGGERS
Jackson sees this, comes out of his shop realizing this is going to cause big trouble. A group of young local street toughs are provoked by this bizarre display, and attack them...
In the basic cable sanitized version we saw yesterday, the words on the sandwich board have been changed to:
I HATE EVERYBODY
Which makes the whole scene (Zeus running out to deal with McClane, and the subsequent attack and their escape, which sets the premise for the whole rest of the movie) make absolutely no sense...
It's one thing, I suppose, to butcher a movie in the name of Political Correctness by revising things that are peripheral, but if you're going to do it with something that's central to the plot development, why even bother to air the damn movie?
