Die Hard 4.0: Live Free or Die Hard

dir: Len Wiseman
[img_assist|nid=745|title=So old and sweaty|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=300|height=375]
Oh, Bruce. You are so old. But there’s no reason for you to stop acting. Still, please think about what it looks like when, in a flick where fighter jets blow up freeway overpasses in Baltimore or when a lunatic uses a police car to take out helicopter, the most unbelievable aspect of the film is the idea that you’re still capable of running around and beating people up.

Think of your fragile hips. I know I was for most of this movie’s duration. Not in an erotic way, oh no, but more in a “is he getting enough calcium in his diet?” kind of way.

Bruce Willis joins a list of other well-aged hams who are most recently, reluctantly coming to terms with their aging process. In a desperate attempt to remain relevant, in an even more desperate attempt to convince audiences that they’re still hard men, Willis joins Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford and Paul Hogan in reprising a character they played in some cases over twenty years ago in order to earn some beer money.

So Stallone brought back the pain with Rocky Balboa, Ford plays action hero and scourge of Nazis Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or whatever it’s called, and now Bruce brings back his signature character of John McClane who first dazzled audiences way back in the 80s, when his successful television show Moonlighting was still on the air and he still had hair.

This is how long ago it came out: the theme song to Moonlighting, sung by Al Jarreau, has a verse that ran“Charming and bright/Laughing and gay/ I’m just a stranger/ Love the Blues and the Braves”. In other words, Willis premiered his McClane character so long ago that the word gay was neither exclusively used as a term referring to gay people, nor as a pejorative to describe something that someone doesn’t like.

Do you actually remember a time when every second person you knew wasn’t saying, as if they were all Californian teenagers, “ohmygod, that is so gay?”

Good times, prehistoric good times.

Die Hard exploded onto worldwide screens and made Willis a household name, despite the fact that he looked like a vulture crossed with a beagle. Men wanted to drink with him, and women, mysteriously, wanted to sleep with him. Even Demi Moore, before she became a fake-titted joke.

Die Hard was a very popular, very successful action flick, make no mistake about it. It pitted an underdog cop against a crew of European professional criminals in a single, claustrophobic location, trying to beat the bad guys, save his wife and smoke a few cigarettes along the way. It became the template for thousands of action movies that followed, with increasingly poor returns, until instead of saying “It’s Die Hard on a boat!” as if it were a good thing, people would mutter “it’s a Die Hard crossed with Steel Magnolias” with contempt.

But the original delivered, it certainly did. The films that would follow tried the same kind of setup with increasingly more implausible situations and unbelievable resolutions, with it becoming impossible to accept that McClane could do half of the shit these stories required of him. And you just know, even having survived all the gun-totting villains of the world, that his wife would have shot him herself by now for all the stalking.

In this fourth instalment in the series, McClane is still a cop. He’s been a cop for 30 years, and despite the fact that he’s saved entire buildings, airports and cities full of people, he’s still a detective with NYPD’s finest.

If McClane actually existed, you know he would have been President by now. Just look at presidential contender Rudy ‘9/11’ Giuliani. All he did was pose on rubble, and he’s considered an action hero worthy of the highest office. You’re telling me that America in its entirety wouldn’t have made McClane President, Pope or CEO of Disneyland by now? Now that is implausible.

He looks so very old, paunchy and haggard, which is a look he has in almost every pseudo-Die Hard flick he’s in these days (16 Blocks, Hostage). He is perpetually filmed in an unflattering light, but hey, it’s not like it’s a beauty pageant.

He’s here to save the day against techno-terrorists who are trying to bring the US to its knees.

That’s right: He’s not just trying to catch some bad guys causing some mischief, he’s the one man who can save the United States from the evils of government whistleblowers and technology in general.

But he’s an analogue guy in a digital world. The villain in this piece, Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) spends most of his time giving quietly spoken orders whilst standing comfortably in front of multiple computer screens. How is McClane supposed to compete in a world ruled by the person with the greatest quantity and quality of hacking skills and IT expertise?

By shooting them all in their fucking heads, I guess.

When the villains unleash their plan to destroy America from within for fun and profit, an annoying hacker (Justin Long) that McClane has to protect for some reason, is all the help he’s going to get. Their cross-country chases to get the bad guys, and, alternately to hang out with a nerd character played by Kevin Smith, swollen to Marlon Brando proportions, are punctuated with action scenes so implausible that, true to the plot, the real heroes here are the programmers.

With the rise in CGI taking away the need for messy physically filmed special effects, screenwriters have been free to write up all sorts of idiotic action sequences that don’t have to take physics or gravity into consideration, and there’s no danger to human life preventing them from doing stunts that are otherwise undoable. Now it’s just electrons and polygons at risk, and they write anything they think sounds cool, even if it looks more fake than Demi Moore’s implants.

Still, I’m having a hard time deciding whether Willis getting up after an explosion, a beating or being shot multiple times is harder to believe than the other CGI extravaganzas unfolding all over the place.

Sure, McClane is back, with the trademark acerbic wit, constant profanity (at least in the DVD version, the cinematic version was trimmed down to a PG-13) and violent propensities. But he doesn’t have a formidable enemy to fight. For all of Timothy Olyphant’s ability as an actor (best displayed in the excellent cable series Deadwood), he is blank and boring here. He’s no Alan Rickman, and that’s what this flick needed.

Justin Long as the hacker is irritating from beginning to end, but not in the ‘animal trapped in a trap gnaws off own leg to get away’ sense of the word, but in the ‘geez, that mosquito occasionally buzzing around my head is irritating’ kind of way. I guess the character works as a bridge for the dinosaur McClane to be able to compete in a digital world, but there’s nothing more than perfunctory character dynamics going on here.

The action is all right, I guess, if you invest not a single thought in how none of what happens seems to make the remotest kind of sense. The plot is beyond ludicrous, and inaccurate on almost any technological level you care to think of, but the real message in this scenario is that a committed and crude heroic type will win out over slick and technical villains in the end. Because, I guess Jesus and Allah are on their side?

Only two occasions really warrant a bit of excitement on the part of those hoping for some fisticuffs. Maggie Q plays some generic evil woman who kicks the shit out of McClane, who, thusly humiliated, resorts to the kinds of remarks Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are starting to say about Hillary Clinton. It’s all ‘evil bitch’ this and ‘smack my bitch up’ that. Of course he has to resort to cheating to beat her.

Some other guy with the provocative name of Rand (Cyril Rafaelli) is an exponent of that wonderful French urban martial art known as parkour, or free running, with all the crazy jumping between walls and acrobating through narrow spaces. He makes McClane look oh so old as well, but he’s just wonderful to watch jumping all over the place.

Overall, it is formulaically directed by a director who hasn’t done much of anything in his life thus far. Len Wiseman has only two worthwhile achievements that I can think of: he rendered boring and unwatchable (for me) the two Underworld vampire flicks, and he manages to satisfactorily drill Kate Beckinsale on a regular basis. Based on his work here, he stamps his imprint on movies the way that thrown tofu leaves an impression on brick walls.

Still, drilling Kate Beckinsale has to count for something in this life.

The editing in this flick is also all over the place, with more clumsy edits and choppy sections than any flick not directed by Tony Scott or Oliver Stone has any right to be.

In the wash up, it isn’t that wonderful, but it’s hardly the worst thing I watched this week. It’s a standard, unbelievable and disposable action flick that’s probably not any more horrible than Die Hards 2 or 3. But it pales, it dwindles and it trembles weakly by comparison with the original. I’m not saying for a second that Willis should hang up his spurs, because he’s still great in some of the other flicks he’s been doing recently (Sin City especially comes to mind). But this franchise is definitely past its use-by date. Let it die.

6 times Bruce Willis should be in a flick where Ashton Kutcher is the villain out of 10

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‘You just killed a helicopter with a car! ‘
- ‘A hundred thousand people die from car accidents every year. That was just like four more.’ Die Hard 4.

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