Posts from — June 2007
Live Free or Die Hard
The legend of John McClane (mostly) lives on. It’s with a bit of relief that I can report that the fourth in the series of Die Hard movies is not nearly as bad as I feared it might be, though as far as the canon is concerned, it lands a lot closer to Die Harder than either the first (and classic) film or With a Vengeance.
Let’s start with the good stuff first: Bruce Willis is John McClane. He lives and breathes this Jersey guy and could play him in his sleep, but luckily, he’s still having fun with the flinty cop persona. When he’s on, he’s totally on, and though there aren’t any killer lines like some of the earlier features — “Glass? Who gives a shit about glass?” or “now I know what a TV dinner feels like” — he brings enough spin to some of the lines to make you laugh out loud, and his grunting giggle when he pulls off something totally inconceivable lets you know he’s in on the joke. And by the end of the feature, he does have that barbecued chicken look to him, which is really the standard by which all these movies are measured. Though I was waiting for him to at some point have to strip down to his wife beater for the truly classic McClane fashion statement…
There’s also some really good stuntwork on display here. A bit of parkour — with one of the District B13 guys even — some good car chases, some hand-to-hand action. And I have to give it up to the director, ’cause most of it is shot really well and far enough away that you can tell what’s going on. The bit where McClane screws with a helicopter by running over a fire hydrant and shooting a geyser of water at it was probably my favorite of the low-tech solutions in the movie.
As for the supporting cast, I thought Justin Long came off pretty well, while Kevin Smith wasn’t quite as horrific as has been reported in other places. Tim Olyphant wasn’t really given a whole lot to do, but he is almost as pretty as Maggie Q, so we cut him a lot of slack — he’ll always be Sheriff Bullock to me. And Maggie Q, could she be any hotter? That totally made up for her fairly flat (though mostly few and far between) line readings. Mary Elizabeth Winstead was fine as the nearly grown-up Lucy, though her conversion from Gennaro to McClane was a lot less organic than in the original… and a bit too on-the-nose as a throwback to the first feature. Though Bruce’s sly dig on yet another Agent Johnson from the FBI was fantastic.
And now for the not so good: the main problem with the movie — and yeah, I know it’s just a summer action flick, but I wanted it to be more than that, I wanted it to be a Die Hard summer action flick — is that if you think about it for more than two seconds after it’s over, then the internal logic completely falls apart. All the bad guy had to do was to stop trying to kill the Justin Long character and the movie would’ve been over and he would’ve gotten away with his billions. Hans Gruber would’ve figured out that shit in about two minutes flat.
This doesn’t even start to take into account the many major “huh?” moments throughout the movie, including the following: none of these superhacker dudes noticed the huge mound of C4 somebody cranked into their computers? I mean, when do these guys even leave the house long enough to have somebody plant that shit — and why wouldn’t the terrorist dudes (who you see checking to make sure the hackers are online to be killed) just have that C4 on remote so they can detonate it rather than waiting for the nerds to hit a “delete” button? Traffic’s brought to a standstill but all of a sudden there are wide-open streets through which McClane can go careening while being shot to shit by a helicopter? The entire cell network along the East Coast is down, but somehow OnStar still works? McClane not only knows how to drive/fly any type of vehicle known to man, but when he finds himself crouched on the wing of an F35 that’s spinning out of control, he’s able to leap 30 feet down, slide along a piece of highway while the jet explodes behind him and then dust himself off only to suddenly see that the bad guys’ van — five minutes later — has only just now turned two corners so as to still be easily followed.
The other minor gripe I had going into the movie was the rating, the dreaded PG-13, which I have to say I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I didn’t know about it beforehand; there’s plenty of violence in this, though no one seems to bleed except McClane. The big problem with the rating is really the lack of swearing: Bruce is one of the preeminent swearers in the history of cinema, right up there with Sam Jackson, and to not have him dropping the f-bomb all over the place (and not even in his signature line for this series) is a travesty of sorts– a small one, I’ll admit, but still.
All in all, it was good dumb fun, and I’ll happily see it again and probably even buy it in its unrated whatever-high-definition-format-wins-the-format-war disc version, but it’ll be more for the nostalgia factor and the Bruceness rather than for the actual content or long-term value of the movie.
June 28, 2007 No Comments
Halfway there…
June 14, 2007 4 Comments