Does Not Feel Like A Die Hard Movie

Rating: 7/10 (3 January 2015)

If they had stopped after "Die Hard With A Vengeance" the franchise would have been probably my favourite trilogy of all time. However just like Sylvester Stallone goes back to Rocky after a few flops, Bruce Willis had not had a hit in a while, so we got a fourth Die Hard movie. And sadly it is not up to the standard of the other three.
Plot In A Paragraph: John McClane (Bruce Willis) reluctantly teams up with a young hacker, Matt Ferrell (Justin Long) joins forces to take down master cyber-terrorist Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) in Washington D.C.
This did not feel like a Die Hard movie at all, more like yet another substandard Bruce Willis action flick. One of the things I loved about "Die Hard" was how human John McClane was, in previous movies we have seen him both hurt and scared. Here he is almost superhuman with him recovering in a matter of minutes. Another thing is John McClane should always have hair, no matter how little of it Willis has left. Justin Long was insanely annoying. He is not in the same ball park as Al Powell in the first movie, and not even the same sport as Zeus from "Die Hard With A Vengeance" and the PG-13 rating just leaves everything watered down. One of my pet hates in most movies, but even more so in this one, was how the bad guys were excellent marksmen till it actually mattered (killing Willis and Long) and the action scenes were soooo over the top and ridiculous it bordered on parody at times.
On the plus points Mary Elizabeth Winstead is OK, in what could have been a cliché role as Lucy Gennaro/McClane, Timothy Olyphant and Maggie Q are both OK as the movies main villains. And as a movie geek, I enjoyed seeing all the geek toys in various apartments.