Live Free or Die Hard

Review by Loc

Midnight screenings are always fun. You usually get the most boisterous, enthusiastic crowds, whooping and hollering in the middle of the night as some summer blockbuster unfolds. Setting that type of atmosphere can make a decent movie fun, a fun movie very good, and a very good movie great. For the latest installment in the Die Hard series? Quick hit: the midnight audience didn’t help.

The Die Hard series is built on a very simple, basic premise. Bruce Willis is John McClane, average Joe, New York cop, asskicker. In Die Hard, Willis was the quintessential everyman, tough-love cop with a marriage on the rocks. Visiting his bi-coastal wife for an awkward Christmas party, Willis ends up fighting off a band of terrorist-thieves with little more than his gun, tanktop, and bare feet. And that was a classic action flick.

Cut to part two, something about a plane hijacking, airport chaos. was about as good as its title. Moving on to the third, Die Hard 2: Die HarderDie Hard: With a Vengeance placed the action in New York City, added Samuel L. Jackson, and brought a twisted robbery/revenge plot to light. Some hated this installment, I found it enjoyable.

Regardless of the quality of the original and the sequels, one thing remained constant: John McClane was a down-on-his luck, ordinary tough guy. Yes, he fought off more armed terrorists than most armies, but the character was basically planted in our reality. The guy bled, the guy hurt, the guy wasn’t supersmart, but he was tenacious and somehow fought to the end. Ah, the classic hero in all his Bruce Willis glory.

Which is exactly what is missing in the fourth installment of the franchise, Live Free or Die Hard. The most glaring problem with this film is John McClane’s ascension into the superhero realm. Sure, they don’t dress him up in tights or give him razor-sharp claws, but they might as well have done so. In Die Hard 4, Willis plays McClane like the old, tired tough guy he should be, with one simple exception: he can repel bullets, heal wounds, jump from jets, scale elevator shafts, and laugh manically. While the attempt to keep McClane an everyman was there, the execution was not. In the end, he came off as the old guy who was a superhero in disguise. How else would you explain the ability to escape 100%-guaranteed death a half dozen times?

What about the story? Much like McClane’s character, the plot is uneven. There’s the attempt to make the villain worthy of global terrorism, but it falls a bit flat. If someone could take over every computer in the world and end up controlling every single facet of industry, from traffic lights to gas lines to power grids, couldn’t you pull off a way better crime than trying to download some financial files? Seriously, you could basically rule the country, why waste your time creating mass hysteria and chaos only to distill your plan to an illegal download. Ugh.

But at least the comedy was decent. Justin Long, he of “I’m an Apple” commercial fame, checks in as computer hacker extraordinaire Matt Farrell. His naïve, geeky, goofy, semi-confident hacker personality is a good foil to Willis’ old, cranky badass. A little cameo by Kevin Smith was promising, but didn’t quite reach the level of funny that one might hope for.

In the end, the story just had too many holes to overlook. Seriously, how many times does a potential target stand unsuspectingly in front of a window for 10 seconds and the sniper misses the shot by 3 feet? You and I both know that we could hit that shot, how many games of Halo have been won with a simple snipe?? And the fact that this missed shot allows our characters to go on the run and begin the whole movie is a bad sign. Other things like McClane’s superman portrayal or completely unrealistic near catastrophes, like hiding in a minivan to avoid the city spanning gas line explosions, make it extremely difficult to enjoy. Summer movies are aimed as escapism, but setting a movie in our own reality and then shifting all physical laws is a jarring and uneasy experience.

Overall, Live Free or Die Hard is not a great film to watch. The visual spectacles are mostly mundane, stuff we’ve all seen before in other flicks. In today’s movie world, driving a police car into a helicopter just isn’t that impressive. The story is very blah and uninspirded. And John McClane just isn’t that average Joe he used to be. Out of 8 out-of-this-world hackers, Live Free or Die Hard only crashes 5 global systems. Go watch the original to see a real Die Hard experience.