McClane's foil, Jeremy Irons' Simon Grüber, was a bit of a classic too but best of all was the ball-breaking back and forth between Bruce Willis' NYPD wise guy and Samuel L Jackson's stylishly bespectacled and quite pissed Zeus Carver. The New York humidity added all kinds of stress to proceedings and, in the Fort Knox heist, Vengeance boasted one of the series' best set pieces.