LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD - Movie Review

LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD
*** out of 4
Rated PG-13
Directed by Len Wiseman
Review by Dr. Royce Clemens

This is not a DIE HARD movie.

It’s a good movie that has stuff blowing up and a bizarre, Hare Krishna converted John McClane, (doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t swear too much, bald) but it’s not a DIE HARD movie. This is more like a best case scenario, were BATMAN AND ROBIN actually good. Yes, you can have a sidekick, a girl the sidekick makes googly-eyes at and complete implausibility and still have the movie work. You just have to have the courage of your convictions and LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD has that.

Bruce Willis trots his old ass out for a fourth time playing John McClane, action hero extraordinaire. He gets a call to take computer hacker Matt Ferrell (Justin Long, of those damn Mac commercials) into custody in Washington DC. McClane gets to Ferrell’s apartment to find that he is interrupting a terrorist hit.

On a somewhat related note, Ferrell uses a PC… Fuckin’ hypocrite…

Turns out that Ferrell unwittingly contributed to a widespread internet “Fire Sale,” which means that transportation, Financial and power systems are remotely shut down, throwing us all back into the Stone Age. Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant of the upcoming HITMAN) and his Karate squeeze Mai (Maggie Q of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III) are behind it all. No more shall be given away because, well, the movie’s light on plot as it is.

Reading over the last couple paragraphs, I found that in this day and age, every action hero must fight a computer nerd. James Bond did it. Harrison Ford did it last year. Schwarzenegger actually built a franchise around fighting computers. Look for RAMBO VS. AOL CUSTOMER SERVICE coming sometime in the next five or six years.

Does this depress you as much as it does me? I’m actually kinda pining for the days where the bad guys just had a load of guns and were meaner than catshit. Now any nimrod with High Speed and a grudge can apparently fight John McClane. I find it hard to be intimidated by a guy who might actually use the phrase “All Your Missile Launch Codes Are Belong To Us.” The fist fights aren’t as evenly matched anymore, I can tell you that.

But no matter. Unlike Ford, who went from “GET OFF MY PLANE!” to “GET OFF MY LAWN!” in the span of nine years, Willis at the age of fifty-two can still get the job done. Even more, he can still get the job done as John McClane, which goes a long way towards explaining way LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD works. He’s still a smart-ass (though obviously edited speech-wise, to facilitate the dreaded PG-13) and can do the physical stuff. As much as we’ve gotten used to him in the past twenty years, he still maintains an everyman aura and even has his own subgenre (at least according to me). While others appear in “Action Movies,” Willis holds the copyright on “Last-Act-Of-A-Desperate-Man Movies.” We know he pulls down a mint with every flick, but he has you believing that he’s just a Normal Joe pushed into extraordinary circumstances he didn’t ask for.

And we come to rely on that, because what keeps LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD from being in the same league as the previous DIE HARD films is the complete implausibility of the action. We know that you can’t crash through the window of a skyscraper and expect not to bleed to death (DIE HARD) or have all the time in the world to escape live and activated grenades (DIE HARD 2: DIE HARDER) or surf on a dump truck with a wall of water behind you, (DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE) but we could suspend our disbelief on the grounds of all the plausible action that came before. Everything in LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD is patently ridiculous, which I wouldn’t mind so much, were the presence of CGI not so overbearing. One of the charms of the DIE HARD films is that they weren’t particularly fake, relying on practical effects whenever they could, maintaining visceral authenticity. By the time McClane takes down a fighter plane all by his damn self near the end of the movie, cool though it was, disbelief grew heavy, and beyond suspension.

But believe it or not, this is actually a POSITIVE review of the film. Just because it doesn’t succeed by DIE HARD standards, doesn’t mean it doesn’t succeed by regular standards. I was MORE than willing to tear this flick a new asshole, but I walked out happy and I think you will too. LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD is a fun movie. It’s a thrilling movie. It’s the stuff that summers are made of.

But it ain’t no DIE HARD movie.