Live Free or Die Hard

Unfortunately there were many reasons why Live Free or Die Hard was the 4th Die Hard film in name only. The most glaring (double meaning baby) may have been Bruce Willis’s shiny baldhead. That’s not John McClane; that’s just Bruce Willis in an action movie. Still, it was a good summer action movie. Nothing will ever be Die Hard, but I can’t damn this for not being one of the best films ever. Actually I totally can but I choose not to.

It is still John McClane. Well an alternate reality John McClane where he shaved his head and has stopped using R-rated language. That reality must suck. Even with the profanity restrictions, Bruce still got off enough one-liners to put a checkmark in that column. You also got all the requisite McClane getting the hell beat out of him action scenes. There was the shootout at Justin Long’s apartment, the helicopter chase through D.C., the accident in the tunnel, Maggie Q and the elevator shaft (someone was drunk when they wrote this), 18-wheeler vs. fighter plane (that same writer then I got high for this), and finally shooting himself to kill Gabriel. I am not sure if any of these will hold up like the famous sequences previous films but they weren’t awful the first time around. Since I just mentioned him, Justin Long may have not been Sam Jack but he was a really good McClane sidekick. He got nearly as many one-liners as Bruce and got to be the audience member inside the movie who is constantly amazed at what McClane is doing. Plus they casted Kevin Smith as his hacker buddy, that was a lot funnier than expected. Although I am a big fan of Timothy Olyphant, he is freaking Seth Bullock from Deadwood; Thomas Gabriel was not in the same league as Hans and Simon Gruber. He doesn’t do anything wrong but at the same time he is not a memorable villain. It also doesn’t help that the villains are computer hackers and that just doesn’t instill that much fear. It was funny that when the climatic scene began Gabriel’s main scrawny hacker kid was holding a gun and menacing the hostages. Thankfully McClane shot him first before the kid ruined what little credibility the movie had left. This was nearly equaled by the big burly Easter European henchman whipping out his computer to hack into the secret financial information. You gotta be able to multi-task to be a modern day goon. Still, I'm not really complaining since I got a halfway decent action blockbuster.

I’ve touched on a couple of the negatives already but they need to be reiterated. The PG-13 rating is a joke. Now that enough weeks have passed it is clear that lowering the rating was not going to jump this franchise into the $200 million range. I would wager that a hard R might have even helped distinguish it from all the other watered down violence and edited profanity that most action movies contain nowadays. There were also multiple scenes that were filmed with an R rating but were clearly and obviously reedited. So that is why some scenes would have been at home in a 70s kung fu flick. The other annoyance previously mentioned was the lack of any sort of realism in many of the action scenes. The fighter plane sequence from beginning to end wouldn’t have been acceptable in a video game. A fighter plane swooping in between superhighways, an 18-wheeler driving around on a collapsing highway, and the whole surfing the crashing plane were all unbelievably ridiculous. There was also the use of a fire hydrant as a weapon against a helicopter, attacking said helicopter with a car, the whole damn elevator shaft sequence, etc. My final gripe is another worthless movie version of the FBI. It is like a standby plot that can be dropped into any movie. It wasn’t even helpful here because at no point did McClane or his hack buddy not fix things themselves. So why even bother introducing the FBI at all?

Live Fee or Die Hard benefited from my complete lack of faith in them making anything that would approach the first movie. I was willing to be satisfied by just another summer blockbuster and that is exactly what I received. Bruce Willis still has the ability to make these types of movies work and who doesn’t want to see John McClane (or something that at least resembles John McClane) in an action movie one more time?

7 out of 10