Worst of the four.

Rating: 5/10 (9 December 2007)

I got the DVD-box which contains all four Die Hard-movies. I watched them all again, leaving this one for the last.
There aren't many successful franchises around with 3rd and 4th movie being better than the second. Die Hard has made the exception.
I was entertained by the three other movies, being able to forgive some silliness and just enjoy the action and the characters. Die Hard 2 just made me uncomfortable several times.
The whole idea is good enough, and the settings aren't that bad. Some plot twists are decent. Some action scenes don't suck. That's it.
Main character McClane is handled poorly. He's too serious when he should crack some jokes, and tries to be funny at wrong times. It feels cheap after the first movie. At least the third one, "Die Hard with a Vengeance", took McClane back on track with a sense of self-irony. Dennis Franz probably hated his role, being a cliché-filled anti-McClane officer.
The plot holes and other stupid scenes don't help much. I'm not expecting a reality-fest from a Die Hard-movie, but come on. I didn't know crap about radio communication or grenades when I was twelve when I first saw this movie, but even then I managed to hang my head against a wall in shame for my fellow countryman Renny Harlin.
But who cares when you got action, right? Umm, yeah. You get explosions, frequent slo-mo deaths, bad fist-fights, dull chase scenes and McClane shooting as bad as the bad guys, just to break some lamps and decorate the walls. I didn't get the "evil grin" on my face, not once. In the first movie, that grin was on my face all the time.
But, when you got a character like McClane, you can't totally screw it up. I watched this one from the beginning to the end without getting drunk and R-rated violence is always better than PG13-pudding. I would still like to pretend that this sequel never existed (like the following sequels do), but I can't. It is part of the beloved Die Hard-franchise, and that alone makes this film better than it deserves to be. And I'm glad that I watched this movie again, now I'm sure that I won't have to do it again.
edit: Die Hard 5 doesn't count. That's not a Die Hard-movie.