the best no-brainer action flick of the year?

Rating: 7/10 (5 August 2007)

How much more world weary can Bruce Willis get in his role as super-cop John Maclean? How many more times can he survive car crashes, bullets, strafing, falls off tall buildings, kung-fu killers and explosions that demolish entire apartments yet leave him with only a slight, short-lived limp? This Die Hard has thrown caution, reason, logic, human physiology and budgetary restraint to the winds - and is so much better for it! It's like the producers and Willis have given up any semblance of reality and just gone for some of the most staggering stunts and action sequences I've ever seen - and lots of them look non-CGI enough to make you really grip the armrests. The direction of all the action is fantastic, the script is just this side of laughable and the characters are just about human enough to make you give a damn.
The first half of the movie is really something, with good old fashioned stunts dominating, but the whole thing takes a turn for the dumb after that with Willis the target of various killers (who always leave him alive just a second longer than they should have), and even more various death machines, big trucks and faulty infrastructure. The stunts then become so over the top that they lose any credibility and the last 20 minutes of the film are ho-hum. But loud ho-hum.
My biggest criticism of this and similar franchises is that characters go through stuff that would leave them crippled in a heartbeat and yet somehow manage to defy death or even hangnails. It severs any illusion of reality and makes what could have been an exciting sequence merely laughable. I certainly laughed more at Die Hard 4.0 than I did at The Simpsons movie. It is truly ludicrous in places.
The hi-tech computer-controlled premise of the film is interesting but, presumably for reasons of billing, had to give way to the low-tech Willis machismo. Still, it made for a different and original backdrop for an above-average action flick.