Awful title aside (I prefer the working title of Die Hard 4.0), this fourth installment of the McClane saga actually delivers some hard-hitting action. You can count me as one of those that was worried about a Die Hard movie saddled with a PG-13 rating, and for those interviews where Willis said they shot the script and aimed for an R, only to get a PG-13? I do not buy that for a second. There were plenty of opportunities where this could have been made a hard R, but that was not the route they took. It doesn't matter, in the end this is a solid, explosive summer action movie that does not suffer from the lack of blood and language; it is more than made up for in the explosive action and with Bruce back in the driver's seat with the character that made him a movie star.
Live Free or Die Hard once again has John McClane facing off with some dastardly terrorists out to cause a lot of problems, but the scope has expanded. In the first film, the one that helped to revolutionize action movies, John had to deal with terrorists in a skyscraper. The second one upped the ante and had terrorists on a jetliner. The third upped it even further, targeting New York City, and you do not mess in John's backyard! This time around, we catch up with John McClane trying to reconnect with his daughter before getting pulled, unwillingly of course, into a domestic digital terror plot that would cripple the entire country, and essentially send everyone into the poorhouse.
The plot is executed in typical movie fashion. I did not find the execution to be all that believable, and the portrayal of computer usage was not all that great either. However, despite the over-the-top way that everything plays out, the concept behind the story and its implications seem rather frightening and believable within the confines of the real world. The idea of a virtual terror attack, a so-called "fire sale," is something that is not outside of the realm of reality. Even the way that parts of this plan are executed strike me as believable. The thought of a terrorist group hacking our government systems, gaining control to pretty much all of our nation's essential services is something that we should be concerned with. But, the real world implications of a fictional plot is not what we watch a Die Hard movie for.
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