Die Hard And Die Now! Ways To Ruin A Franchise Volume 4

Rating: 4/10 (11 November 2007)

The Hollywood machine continues to churn out the sequels to films en mass, providing us with unnecessary instalments which provide little, or indeed nothing, to solid franchises as a way of making a quick buck (or in this case a quick million bucks) by praying on an audiences affinity with preset characters. This little formula means that the film in question has to pay little mind to character development or any such "frivality" and can merely concentrate on providing film goers with what have been titled "summer blockbusters" which translated for you and I means action and special effects, and little else.
Up until this point the Die Hard 'trilogy' had been a fairly successful brand. The first and third films were very clever, or at least very clever for their genre, and while the second was somewhat of a disappointment it was at least watchable if not engaging. But Die Hard 4, or Live Free And Die Hard or I Want To Die Hard After Having Seen This Movie 4.0 ends up with our protagonist John McLaine as an older man, if not necessarily wiser, who now in the modern 21st Century has to tackle the problem of not megalomaniacs in skyscrapers but the all more dangerous cyber terrorism. Where as before, especially notable in the very first film there was a sense of 'wrong place at the wrong time' here the plot feels very contrived as it forcibly sends Willis on the route to danger and is this time accompanied by a virtually versed 'sidekick', as they find themselves conjoined at the hip in an effort to stop the 'bad- guy'.
You'd have hoped this would have been inoffensive viewing, but it proves to be the most offensive of the entire 'quadrilogy'. Everything in this new modern Die Hard universe is achieved through shiny lenses, generic story lines, groan inducing quips and lots of whooshing noises...oh, and the inevitable explosions, which just get out of hand. The entire film feels like it's merely jumping from one set piece to another with little thought for plot development (although there'd have to be a plot first) and the new 'cyber terrorist' angle feels like it's merely been thrown in to justify the severely O.T.T action segments. Taking down a helicopter is one thing, but it hardly feels impressive, possibly because of the overplaying it suffered in the trailers but also because as an audience there a great number of us who are severely tired of CGI sequences. What annoys more-so is that these CGI sequences are continually being used more and more to provide a cool factor or to wow us into submission rather than anything being said or done by characters. The moment just before the heli- carnage where McLane and his companion duck to try and avoid a car twirling towards them only to be saved as it lands on two cars that happen to drive up next to them is tripe of the highest order. It's not believable, it's not cool, it's a cheap means to escape a dangerous situation, and to be frank, despite all the money pumped into it, it doesn't look real.
Reality seems to be this films major drawback, it doesn't know where it wants to position itself, it's obviously mindless entertainment and as such feels it can justifiably go around doing whatever it wants in its attempts to be cool, but then it tries concurrently to be serious. They have John McLaine going around hurling cars at flying vehicles and then overplay the cyber terrorism to make it seem grounded in the modern world as of course cyber terrorism is "the biggest threat". It doesn't quite know if it wants to be a serious action film or a summer blockbuster. There is little in the script to keep you riveted and you don't so much turn off your brain for two and a half hours (oh yes, it's far too long to) but turn off your entire body and melt motionlessly into your seat. Die Hard 4 merely follows the well trodden route of X-Men 3, Spiderman 3 and various various others into the realms of ineptitude, but most tragically into the realms of franchise destruction, and Die Hard 4 manages to do so with a bigger bang and more carnage than in the quadrilogy combined.