Extraordinarily silly, but pretty fun

Rating: 8/10 (15 July 2007)

This afterthought, coming a full 12 years after the third Die Hard movie and 19 years after the original, was destined to be not as good as its predecessors. I mean, after the first one, the people responsible for the sequels were obsessed with packing them more and more full of action. In the new one, the strategy of its filmmakers is to make a movie about 100 times as action-packed as the original. With this much augmentation, the action sequences cross the line from gripping to just plain ridiculous. In this one, guys shooting automatic weapons at John MacLane are just a joke. Easy stuff, really. The only challenge there is to keep the computer hacker (Justin Long) he's protecting alive, and even that's not much of a challenge. It only gets decently difficult when a jet fighter is chasing him, firing missiles and super-duper machine guns at him while he drives along crumbling elevated highways in a lumbering semi. Yeah, it's silly. But that doesn't make it bad. It's at least amusingly silly. Bruce Willis hasn't lost any of the charisma he brought into the first three movies. Justin Long is the comic relief, and at first I thought he would be really annoying. But he's fairly funny most of the time. I absolutely loved the main henchman and lover of the villain, played by icy half-Asian Maggie Q, last seen in Mission: Impossible III. There's also an amusing cameo by Kevin Smith. I'm not sure what to think about the villain, played by Timothy Olyphant. At first, he bugged me, but as the film went on, I started to like his demeanor and shiny white teeth. I think he was suitably creepy. However, I think they missed a golden opportunity to make a better movie: since Justin Long is probably best known as the hip kid playing the Mac guy in a series of entertaining television commercials, they really should have cast the PC guy as the villain. Sure, it would have been ultra-jokey, but the film is already so silly, I think it would have been especially awesome.