Fun but forgettable action sequel

Rating: Null/10 (5 July 2007)

Live Free or Die Hard is pure action movie fluff, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's not much of a good thing either. After all these years the franchise feels a bit played out and generic. High-tech gadgets, over-the-top stunt sequences, CGI cars flipping around like tiddly-winks, henchmen dying elaborate deaths--some of this stuff is pretty cool, but none of it is terribly original. Action fans have witnessed these same scenes innumerable times since the first Die Hard kicked out collective asses with its genre-bending awesomeness. Unfortunately, the genre is watered down to the point where this fourth iteration is indiscernible from the hundreds of films that copied and expanded the first Die Hard's template.
LFoDH is not terrible by any means...Willis is still cool at 52 and Justin Long makes for an amusingly snarky sidekick. It's just that the movie feels strangely "safe." The action sequences are fun but you probably won't remember much about them once you leave the theater. The lead villain is a bit bland as is his plot to disrupt America through cyber-f@ckery. The strongest epithet our profane hero gets to use is "jerk-off." And as for McClane's famously vulgar catchphrase? Forget about it, cuz this is the land of PG-13.
By the end, there's no defining moment that separates this film from others of its kind. That's more a reflection of a dying genre than a bad movie. We've seen it all before.