Worthy entry, but as expected doesn't live up to the original

Rating: 7/10 (28 June 2007)

I was excited going in to see Live Free or Die Hard. I had to sneak around my house to watch the original two without getting in trouble from my parents (I was 8 at the time). I think I might have been 12 or 13 when with a Vengeance came out, so this was my first Die Hard theater experience. The short review: It is a very good action film, but is a little too generic for a Die Hard film and falls short of the first film. The PG-13 rating isn't terrible, but there are a few times where you can tell lines are dubbed because the words don't match up with the mouths, and some hand to hand fight scenes seem like they are cut a little short.
Overall the film is good but lacks some of the things that made the original so good. While in the original Die Hard we had the great back and forth banter between Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman (as Hans Gruber), and saw McClane's wit, and how he could really get under your skin; in Live Free or Die Hard we get a number of scenes that try to mimic this, but the dialogue just isn't as good. (I.E. compare Die Hard's talk of John Wayne/Roy Rogers and McClane's first yippee ki-yay mfer to LFODH's generic "McClane you're annoying me" and "Yeah, I tend to do that.") Another problem I had was the fact that this film was not confined to one area for McClane to go berserk in. In the first we had a skyscraper, in the second we had an airport, the third NYC, but in this McClane actually jumps back and forth between states! (Albeit he stays in about a hundred mile radius after the action truly starts and the plot unfolds.
All in all, a very entertaining movie, Bruce Willis really delivers as his alter ego, although I felt he was a little short on screen time actually. A worthy entry in the Die Hard series, but just a little more generic than the rest.