Movie Review: "Live Free or Die Hard".....

Bruce Willis is back as John McClane after a twelve years hiatus. He has not missed a beat. It occurs to me that if John McClane lacked a sense of humor he would be Jack Bauer! That raises the question…who win a fight between John McClane and Jack Bauer? Anyway, I digress.

As we catch up with McClane he is divorced and estranged from his daughter. He gets a call to pick up a computer hacker who is being sought by the FBI is conjunction with a cyber attack on the US technological infrastructure. What follows is a classic amusement park ride of a summer movie. I think the plot while far from original does exploit our ever-increasing digital interconnectivity to good effect. I think it also picks up on a solid libertarian strain as warning against a Big Brother, someone is watching you society. Hence I think the tile “Live Free or Die Hard” a take off on the state motto of the state of Vermont “Live Free or Die”.

The stunts and action set pieces are as good as they come. However, the confrontation between McClane and an F-35 is way over the top.

Justin Long (Mac from the Mac vs. PC commercials) turns in good performance as a hacker geek (is that a redundant term?) and serves as a counterpoint to the uber-macho McClane. Long is a very likable personality and helps turn the film at times into almost a buddy comedy.

Love, love, love the cameo by Kevin Smith as Warlord the hacker of hackers. The best part is Longs description of Smith as a “Digital Jedi”. This is so appealing owing to the fact that Smith in real life is a huge fan of Star Wars.

I did not buy Timothy Olyphant as the villain in this movie. His character is a genius hacker and while all other hackers in the film are geeky stereotypes Olyphant looks like he just stepped off the pages of GQ. It would have been better were he subordinate to someone a bit more sinister. Any action movie is only as good as the villain. What made the original “Die Hard” so spectacular was the iconic performance of Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber. Olyphant had his moments but his performance does not come close to eclipsing that of Rickman. As a result his ultimate demise is a bit less than satisfying.

“Live Free or Die Hard” is rated PG-13 and under MPAA guidelines films rated PG-13 are generally allowed one F-Bomb per movie. I mention this because of Willis’ catchphrase in the Die Hard franchise, “Yippee Ki Yay MF’er”. Needless to say I was expecting Willis to utter the famous line and he did but it was but somewhat slurred and lacking a bit of gusto.

All in all “Live Free or Die Hard” lacks the claustrophobic tension of the first two installments of the franchise but his vastly superior to “Die Hard with a Vengeance”. I think it is not as good as the original but comes in a solid number 2 amongst the four films.