Live Free or Die Hard

* * * * (out of 5)

I’m all for stuff blowing up. I enjoy it. But the promise of another Die Hard flick had me hoping that the studio was willing to let them go back to the gradual tension build-up that make the original awesome. They weren’t. Nonetheless, it’s still John McClane. And he’s still pissed off. And that is ALWAYS fun.

It’s hard to give Live Free or Die Hard crap for not really feeling like a Die Hard movie when the series has such a jumbled history. Two were based on completely unrelated novels, one was adapted from a script that had been floating around Hollywood for years, and one took its main conflict from a Wired magazine article. Really, the only constant to these stories has been John McClane and Friends, and even they were added after the fact. Even still, while the other three seemed to blend fairly well stylistically, something about “Live Free” separates it, and not necessarily for the better.

This one sees McClane (an older, balder Bruce Willis) working as a senior detective in the Rutgers area in New Jersey. His daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is a student there, and it’s a nice way to keep an eye on the younger McClane. After some strange occurrences within the nation’s computerized defense and utility systems alarm the government, McClane is charged to deliver Matthew Farrell (Justin Long) to Washington, DC for questioning. Seems Farrell is one of a number of hackers under investigation for infiltrating the mainframe. When they arrive in DC, McClane and Farrell find a world almost completely shut down. Whoever is behind it all is in control of utility systems, traffic systems, defense systems, more than enough to make life hell for everyone. McClane, being John McClane, gets involved, first as Matt’s protector as they try to set things right, but after an ugly run-in with top henchmen Mai Lihn (Maggie Q) and a number of perfectly-timed Asian hooker jokes, hacking mastermind Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) decides to make his attacks more personal, kidnapping Lucy, at one point touching her and pointing a gun at her head, almost guaranteeing him a painful torture and death.

I get the premise of this movie. It’s a fun idea to take an old-school cop/action hero like McClane and drop him into a post-9/11 world, one that has technologically, morally and philosophically passed him by. And it works. It does. McClane is essentially a dinosaur who is way out of his element. Naturally, being John McClane, he fights through it.

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