Live Free or Die Hard
(PG-13; 128 minutes)
As John McClane is told early in this slam-bang, tongue-in-cheek action thriller, he’s an analog Timex stuck in a digital age. He dislikes today’s music and he’s not too crazy about all the high-tech computer geekery that surrounds him — especially when a well-wired arch-villain (Timothy Olyphant, the star of HBO’s “Deadwood”) uses computers to make a mess of a modern urban center.
The generational jokes are icing on a fiery, car-crashing cake. The fourth “Die Hard” adventure — the first in 12 years — finds Bruce Willis in top tough-cop form.
A simple premise explodes into a nonstop two-hour rush of fights, chases, collapsed buildings and massive pileups. McClane, who’s off his beat while visiting his estranged daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), gets an apparently easy assignment: Escort a young hacker (Justin Long) from New Jersey to Washington, D.C., for questioning about a rash of cyber-attacks that are wrecking the economy — not to mention big-city traffic patterns.
But the bad guys want the kid dead, and so McClane becomes a moving target who can’t escape their computer-assisted omniscience.
The story’s sort of silly if you analyze it, but director Len Wiseman (”Underworld” and its sequel) doesn’t slow down long enough for any such thought. The story is about computer power but the action is achieved the old-fashioned way, with stuntmen and conventional (albeit quite fancy) effects.
Like the Timex watch he’s compared to, McClane takes a licking — quite a few of them — and keeps on ticking, talking and finding nifty ways to foil his remarkably well-equipped enemies.
Because it’s never dull and always escapist fun, “Live Free or Die Hard” earns a solid B.
More movie stuff at BobRossMovies.com
John
2 years ago
Bob, question:
There’s a standard in the Die Hard franchise that I think is shown at it’s best in the original and the third film (With a Vengeance) — both directed by John Mctiernan. How does the movie compare to those two films directly? That’s the way I am judging the film right now and from the trailers — I’ve been led to feel like I shouldn’t see this film. It’s very 24-ish in it’s presentation in the trailers.
Yet between you and Steve Perrault at the the Times, you’ve both given the film a B…
The Stonegauge » Die Already
2 years ago
[...] would give aloof answers to: Does this film live up to the Die Hard franchise standard? I’ve posed this question directly to professional movie critics without an [...]