Die Hard with a Vengeance (John McTiernan, 1995) opens with the Bonwit Teller department store in Manhattan blowing up. Minutes later a man calling himself “Simon” rings the police with his first order: Lieutenant John McClane must stand on a Harlem street corner wearing a sandwich board with a racial slur on it. If he refuses, there will be more bombs. McClane survives the corner thanks to Zeus Carver, a Harlem shopkeeper and electrician who steps in when a group of locals go for him, and the two end up running across the city to solve games of “Simon says”: riddles and races against the clock. Simon turns out to be Simon Gruber, played by Jeremy Irons, the brother of Hans Gruber, the thief McClane killed in Los Angeles. Everything points to personal revenge. But it is a smokescreen: while the police search for a bomb that, according to Simon, is in one of the city’s schools, his team of former soldiers empties the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and carries the gold off in trucks. McClane uncovers the deception and follows him to a truck stop in Quebec, on the Canadian border, where Simon dies when his helicopter hits a power line. A plan that covers a robbery with a vendetta, and a vendetta with riddles, belongs to the offender studied by bounded rational choice: someone who calculates a great deal, but not everything.
// The theoryCalculating with the head one has
Rational choice theory, by Derek Cornish and Ronald Clarke, set out in The Reasoning Criminal (1986), holds that offenders make decisions by weighing costs and benefits. But the authors built in from the start a decisive nuance, taken from the economist Herbert Simon: bounded rationality. People have neither complete information, nor time, nor the capacity to analyze every option. Instead of optimizing, they “satisfice”: they choose the first option that seems good enough. That is why the most planned crimes often fail through unforeseen factors, and perfect plans end up as botched jobs.
The perfect plan and its flaw
Simon Gruber is the closest thing in cinema to a fully rational offender. His plan is brilliant: it exploits the desire for revenge everyone attributes to him, uses the riddles to keep the police busy and the threat to the school to empty the streets. But even he has bounded rationality. He chooses McClane as his pawn because that makes the revenge story believable, and underestimates his capacity to improvise. That decision, which in the calculation seemed a stroke of genius, is what undoes him. Bounded rationality is not calculating badly, but being unable to calculate everything.
// The subjectThe brother who did not mourn his brother
Jeremy Irons plays Simon as a cultured, ironic and playful villain who enjoys his riddles and McClane’s frustration. The film’s twist is that the revenge was a useful mask: what he wanted was the gold. That brings him close to Hans, with whom he shares a taste for big jobs disguised as something else: Hans pretended to be a terrorist in order to steal, and Simon pretends to be an avenger for the same purpose.
The mask, though, was not entirely false. Aboard the ship where he has McClane and Zeus tied up next to a bomb, McClane tells him his brother was an asshole, and Simon laughs and agrees. Zeus reminds him that he had said he did not even like Hans. Simon’s answer adjusts the calculation the whole film had seemed to propose:
For rational choice, that line matters. Simon is not a pure calculator: choosing McClane as his pawn served the plan, because it made the vendetta believable, but it also settled a personal account. The decision that looked best on paper mixed profit and grudge, and that is just the kind of choice bounded rationality predicts: good enough for the one making it, with a blind spot he does not see. The blind spot was McClane.
Simon Gruber
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// The crackThe film rewards the hero too much
The boundedly rational offender theory explains why plans fail, but in Die Hard the failure almost always depends on a single exceptional hero. In reality, big robberies fail for more prosaic reasons: an accomplice who talks, a money trail, a camera nobody foresaw. The film replaces bounded rationality with epic.
Rational choice theory has also been criticized for explaining planned property crimes well and expressive or violent crimes much worse. Simon is its ideal case because he is unrepresentative: almost no real offender plans like that.
Protecting the target
Situational crime prevention, born of the same theory of Clarke’s, proposes reducing opportunities rather than pursuing offenders: hardening targets, controlling access, raising perceived risk. Large gold depositories, such as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, are protected by successive layers of security that do not depend on a single point. Simon’s plan needed to disable them all at once, and for that he had to stage half a city’s worth of distractions.
Three key ideas
- The boundedly rational offender (Cornish and Clarke, 1986; Simon) calculates with incomplete information and biases: he does not optimize, he picks what will do, which is why plans fail through the unforeseen.
- Simon Gruber fakes revenge against McClane to distract the police while he steals the Federal Reserve’s gold; he underestimates his pawn and loses everything.
- The crack: the film attributes the failure to an exceptional hero, and almost no real offender plans like Simon.
Sources · further reading
- Cornish, D. B. and Clarke, R. V. (eds.) (1986). The Reasoning Criminal: Rational Choice Perspectives on Offending. Springer-Verlag.
- Simon, H. A. (1955). “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice”. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 69(1), 99-118.
- Clarke, R. V. (ed.) (1997). Situational Crime Prevention: Successful Case Studies (2nd ed.). Harrow and Heston.
- Wright, R. and Decker, S. H. (1997). Armed Robbers in Action: Stickups and Street Culture. Northeastern University Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Simon Gruber?
Simon Gruber (“Simon”) is a villain from Die Hard, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. While the entire New York police force searched for a bomb in a school, a line of trucks left the Federal Reserve loaded with gold.
Why does Simon Gruber become a villain?
Cornish and Clarke described the offender who calculates with incomplete information. Simon Gruber builds a near-perfect plan in New York, and its loose end is the cop he picked as his pawn.
Which criminological theory explains Simon Gruber?
Simon Gruber's case is analysed through Bounded rational offender. The theory of the boundedly rational offender, derived from Cornish and Clarke’s rational choice and Herbert Simon’s concept of bounded rationality, holds that offenders calculate, but with incomplete information, haste and biases: they seek not the optimal decision but one that will do. Simon Gruber, of Die Hard with a Vengeance (John McTiernan, 1995), is the brother of Hans Gruber, the thief McClane killed at Nakatomi Plaza. He sows New York with bombs and forces McClane to race around the city solving riddles, while his team steals the Federal Reserve’s gold. His plan accounted for everything except McClane.
