Not bad but not Die Hard

Rating: 1/10 (13 July 2007)

As a stand-alone film it was far better than I initially feared, and the action was very well handled with occasional flashes of Die Hard-quality genius - inventive setups with ultra-tense close-shaves (the lift shaft being the best). They were nothing like the over-stylised MTV mush sequences I feared, so I apologise to Wiseman for my nasty words about his action choreography over the last year.
Unfortunately, the same can't be said for his story and character work. The plot was riddled with holes and the 'characters' rarely behaved like human beings. That's fine in itself but this film carried the 'Die Hard' tag and that means it needs to respect an intelligent, mature audience.
McClane was uneven, one minute he's a cuddly wisdom-dispensing Dad and the next he's brutalising a woman to death then repeatedly teasing her boyfriend for his loss who, despite being a psychopath, doesn't immediately kill McClane's daughter out of revenge.
Ironically, the chain smoking alcoholic drenched in blood from With A Vengeance was far more humane and, despite his potty mouth, a much better role model for the PG-13 kids this film was clearly targeting from the get-go.
Bruce, however, does what he can with the material and, between the corny dialogue which tried to probe the hero's psychology in the same cack-handed way that the Brosnan Bond scripts did, there were real McClane moments (his chuckles after killing difficult terrorists, his thuggish fighting techniques), but he was far more fascinating in the earlier films where we watched his genius rather than listen to him talk about it.
Justin Long was surprisingly good and non-annoying despite his presence reeking of the studio's insistence on a heavy teen presence for maximum market appeal. He cracked me up a few times, especially his comment when the bad-guys brought him out of the lift. Mary Elizabeth Winstead was also good as Lucy but was clearly shoehorned into the script at the last minute and was underused. She also suffered from Wiseman and Bomback's insensitivity for internal human logic - she's clearly feisty and punchy yet doesn't make a sound when Gabriel orders the jet to target her dad in the truck.
Which brings me to Timothy Olyphant. The guy's a good actor and was superb as the villains in Go, Scream 2 and The Girl Next Door but here he's totally nonthreatening. One almost feels sorry for him as McClane, now a terminator relishing the capacity for murder his total invulnerability affords him, marches unstoppably to kill Gabriel while, as mentioned before, teasing him about his dead partner.
The climax was pumped and tense and I quite liked McClane shooting through himself but the censoring of 'mother *beep* with a gunshot was as insulting as all the obvious re-dubbing I noticed throughout the film. There'll be an unrated DVD with the original language and GCI blood but you can't polish a turd.
A hollow collection of 'good-bits', some of them good enough to be worthy of Die Hard but ultimately there were too many jumps in logic, internal and external, for me to suspend disbelief. As I said before, I don't have problems with such films and this was an undeniably enjoyable 2 hours, but the Die Hard banner is reserved for superior quality adult entertainment and this fell short. Congratulations to Wiseman for upgrading from a Paul W S Anderson to a Jonathan Mostow but please hone your craft somewhere other than on the Die Hard pitch. Get McTiernan out of prison, get a good screenwriter (eg Shane Black) and give McClane his brain and balls back for Die Hard 5.