As I watched Bruce Willis grind his way through the fourth film in the Die Hard series, I couldn’t help thinking of all the great moments that came before in those previous (especially the first) films and how this new one echoed that which came before. Of course, John McClane has come a long way since he walked into that office building at Nakotomi Plaza back in 1988, but so have we. That first film changed the course of the way action movies as we knew them were made, affecting so many films to come in the same way as films like Psycho and Night of the Living Dead altered the horror film genre.
Bruce is up to the challenge in Live Free or Die Hard, and now his John McClane is a grizzled, bald, but still strikingly handsome man of fifty-two who sits in parking lots waiting to check up on his college coed daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Last time we saw her in the first film, she was a little girl answering the phone and appearing on TV with the slimy news reporter (William Atherton) who was eventually clocked by a nice right hook from her mother, Holly McClane (Bonnie Bedelia). Now years later, Lucy has inherited her mother’s feistiness and her father’s cockiness, which is a surefire way of saying she has a date with the terrorists.
In this film the terrorists are led by Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant from Deadwood fame). He is rather slick with the computers, and his Chinese girlfriend (a cold martial arts expert played by the beautiful Maggie Q) is part of the gang of terrorists riding around in a large tractor trailer that is actually a hi-tech mobile headquarters. There is some sort of gobbledygook about codes and hackers who helped them set a plan in motion to stop the country in its tracks and also steal its collective wealth electronically.
If you’re still with me (yes, I know the premise sounds ridiculous) I think that the whole point of this movie is to not care about the plot. No one comes to these films wanting logic or reasoning; we’ll save that for other genres and certainly not the blockbuster summer season. Live Free or Die Harder goes from impossible to improbable in the first thirty minutes, but that didn’t stop me from going along for an enjoyable, but rather bumpy, ride.
Article comments
1 - Blank Czech
Great Movie! A breath of fresh air in the dying movie industry. Even though Bruce is getting older than dirt, he's still one hell of an actor.
2 - Victor Lana
Yes, you're absolutely right. THe key point here is how Willis can carry a film. He's a presence and I don't know many youngerr actors about whom I can say the same thing (except, perhaps, Kiefer Sutherland).