The action sequences are stunning, with blistering and flat-out flawless special effects almost the entire way through. Simply put, you will never see a fighter jet miss such a massive target so blatantly again with results like this. It’s unquestionably something to see in terms of film visuals. This just doesn’t fit in with the Die Hard series and doesn’t even remotely make an effort to stay in the same mildly believable realm of the first three. This is all about overdoing it for the sake overdoing it.
It’s jarring to see McClane take a massive fall, limp away with blood pouring from his head, and a few short minutes later start running down a street like the previous injuries have never occurred. It takes away from the enjoyable script work on the American attack. At the least, you can laugh all the way through, as the witty one-liners are constant. Kevin Smith’s small role as a fellow hacker leads to some of the most enjoyable sequences to be had here.
Other characters, particularly McClane’s daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) are simply lost for a significant part of the film. After the opening scene, she disappears until a few minutes before the finale is set off. Her presence is wasted, in terms of her performance and usefulness to the plot. Timothy Olyphant leads the villains, though he never quite reaches the cold hearted status of Alan Rickman in the original even though the scale of his insanity is unparalleled for this series.
It’s odd to see how far the series has come. The original’s closed office building scenario was contained, the second opened things up to an airport, the third took most of New York with it, while this fourth entry tackles the entire country. We’re only one step away from Willis becoming an astronaut to save the world from some giant asteroid… err, we’ve done that. Of course, given the amount of logic in Live Free, that wouldn’t be much of a stretch.
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