Really Bad.

Rating: 2/10 (30 June 2007)

I went to see this movie with very high hopes. I loved the first three in the series - they are among my favorite action movies of all time. When I first heard they were making a fourth Die Hard movie I thought - Awesome, what a great way to introduce Die Hard to a whole new generation of fans.
What I saw was a laughable mockery of a Die Hard movie. Let me start by saying the first problem was the rating. Turning a series of R rated gory action flicks into A PG-13 imitation does not work. It was as if Fox was trying to pass it off as some type of family friendly movie. This resulted in the film being minimal in bloody action violence, minimal in language use, and the use of McClane's staple line - "Yippee Ki Yay Mo ******" was made to be slightly distorted so the last word (all Die Hard fans know what it is) was more implied than spoken. The rating also had another effect. Since the aspects listed above were downplayed so much, the movie's style didn't come anywhere close to matching the style of the first three. It didn't Feel like Die Hard.
(This is off topic, but it reminds me of another time the same company took two GREAT! R rated series - Alien - and Predator - and combined them to make the PG-13 mockery we now know as AVP)
I didn't like the villain. The whole movie it didn't seem like he himself really did anything. He didn't really torture or shoot or even severely harm McClane's daughter. He was never really a threat. It was always a henchmen up until the end of the movie. (Unless you count the Tunnel-Helicopter sequence) Which bugs me, where did all the henchmen come from? In the first and third movies they were German militants, and the second movie they were military extremists supportive of General Esperanza. It this movie - they were just kind of there. I mean, Gabriel was suppose to be a DoD government employee - and he just pulled a crap load of henchmen out of no where. Were they terrorists? Wow, nice background check on a government employee with links to terrorist organizations if they were.
The use of technology was just awful. Specifically what you saw on the computer screens was unrealistic and felt like some sort of hi tech fairy tale to me (being a networking professional). I mean, I had no idea hacking was so graphical and straightforward.
To close - if the characters weren't making some cheesy quip or not dying after smashing through multiple plains of glass and being hit with SUV at one point - they most defiantly were contributing to what should go down in history as a sorry day indeed for the Die Hard series.
My advice - pull a matrix and pretend the sequel doesn't exist.