Any Excuse to Die Hard

Rating: 2/10 (23 April 2017)

It seems as if the movies are starting to get further and further apart, but then again even though number three basically started off really good and progressively went downhill after that first explosion, this latest installment, 12 years after the previous one, doesn't even seem to get off the ground. In a sense it seems as if a producer was reading a script for a completely unrelated film and realised that they hadn't done a Die Hard for a while, and gave Bruce Willis a call. Discovering that Bruce was more than happy to bring McLane back onto the big screen, completely rewrote the characters to centre the film around the hero of Nakatomi plaza.
Mind you, a lot has changed since we last met with John McLane – everything has gone digital, and everything is connected by computers. Also, this is post September 11, so suddenly terrorists are more on our mind. Anyway, we have this young computer hotshot (and the fact that he seemed so young really annoyed me in a way) who had worked for the US Government. However when we pointed out all of the security flaws and how vulnerable they were to a cyberattack, they took it on advisement. So, he decided to go public, but the government wasn't all that impressed and basically made sure that he had a really bad rest of his life. Well, being somewhat upset at being dumped like that, he somehow got together heaps of money, and a team of crack soldiers, and then pretty much took down the system.
The way I see it, Die Hard one has terrorists taking a building hostage, number two an airport, number three a city, and number four the United States of America. Mind you, as well as getting progressively lame, they also become progressively unrealistic. For instance I am always astounded at the resources that these criminals have at their disposal, though we must accept that at least in number two we were dealing with a South American Drug-lord (and number one and three did suggest that the thieves were actually pretty well resourced). However, come number four, I am still scratching my head and wondering where on Earth this computer geek managed to get his hands on enough money to pull this off, and also make the connections that he did (as well as acquiring FBI uniforms and a helicopter).
The film begins with a group of computer hackers progressively being assassinated, and in a way this sort of suggests that maybe, just maybe, including it into the Die Hard franchise is not really a good idea. However, it could just have been the case that they felt that if it was a stand alone movie then maybe it wouldn't have worked as well as it did. However, adding it to the Die Hard franchise really doesn't do all that much as well. Okay, while the film does address issues with how interconnected our society has become, and how reliant we are now on computers, in the end I sort of look at it and think, well, The Net dealt with this issue so much better, and while I didn't think all that much of that film, it was certainly superior to this one.