Die Hard for a new, more juvenalised, generation of American action genre movie goers which offers little more than surface thrills and blunt nostalgia.

Rating: 6/10 (9 October 2010)

John McLane's calm demeanour greets us on the poster for Die Hard 4.0, as sparks fly; chaos unfolds and all Hell breaks loose around him, his pained but calmed expression is a measure of where the man's been and how far he's come since first encountering a hostile situation alÃ¡ of the above. It's a feeling that resonates in the film, we've been here and done this in films not limited to the Die Hard series; that unfortunate and frustrating sensation that the franchise has now been limited to a bankable actioner call-upon feeling ever prominent as 4.0 gradually rolls towards its inevitable conclusion. The Die Hard series, particularly the first, was always about McLane being in the wrong place-at the wrong time, with this idea gradually becoming less and less prominent as, particularly by the time of number three, we saw McLane being used more and more as an action lead ever dependant on being in the right place-at the right time. Here, we are ever-increasingly reliant on McLane as an action lead who is engineered to further plot and maintain his ability to be in the right place and the right time. If there was a time to momentarily weep for the Die Hard franchise, it's here but if ever there was a time to meekly appreciate a well enough made actioner, then it is here also.
I read that director Len Wiseman grew up on the original Die Hard films, going so far as to produce his own amateur Die Hard films as a teen with home-based cameras. He wisely refrains from attempting to go above the first Die Hard; a visual demonstration of this evident in McLane's ploughing through a Nakatomi Plaza style room whilst in a vehicle so as to defeat an enemy in what is a sequence driven more by spectacle and basic action infused thrills than what might have happened in the first, where vulnerability and fear in the lead was more omnipresent. Wiseman instills a certain sense of the building doubling up as that Nakatomi high-rise in having Mclane engage in a fight on the stairs on the way up, one of which is eerily reminiscent of his coming together with Karl's brother in the first.
Wiseman's film is littered with that unprecedented sense of nostalgia; nostalgia which almost certainly resonates within both most of the adult watching audience as much as it is the director himself. While the undeniable sense of pleasingness in observing Willis doing his thing, in a vest, charging around and thwarting terrorists in the process is an unmitigated joy, the question as to what is the point remains. Where the first Die Hard held up the proverbial mirror to both the action genre and the action lead; the fourth film is all too happy to conform to generic expectation, the shark well and truly air-bound by the time McLane is sliding down a fighter plane after having out-driven it in a large truck before picking himself up; dusting himself off and consequently ready for the next episodic fight scene.
The joy is in the nostalgia, and observing a rather basic narrative of heroes and villains duking it out amidst explosions and action; it just so happens this particular episode of good and evil having a right go of it has Willis' John McLane involved. The film revolves around McLane and a young hacker named Matthew Farrell (Long), whom he is charged with protecting, following a hacking into the U.S. government's mainframe and the suspicious eliminating of several other hackers capable of executing such a stunt. For grizzled veterans of the series, McLane is your man; that sense of juvenalisation settling in on the Die Hard franchise evident in the inclusion of Farrell whom is for those new to the series and in need of someone young enough and fresh faced enough to identify with. A minor distinction is made early on between the two of them regarding the sorts of rock music they like, with McLane more inclined towards 'classical' orientated rock whereby Farrell's tastes are that of the awful grungy, 'hard' rock we hear him listening to when first observing him.
Their plight involves a disgruntled American computer wizard named Thomas Gabriel (Olyphant), whom once worked for the American government, but now aims to work against them in holding the nation to ransom for a large sum of money - in the immortal words of McLane himself "All this for a robbery!?". Olyphant appears to channel Die Hard 2's chief antagonist Colonol Stuart in his mannerisms and behaviour, the tale of his team of technological experts holding a mass amount of people to ransom as the technologically defunct McLane gets stuck in the middle lifted straight out of said sequel. His cold, harsh blues are in stark contrast to McLane's more normalised hues when they face off over a web-cam and one point in which he will call one of his minions only to have McLane answer back serves only to remind you of the time it happens in the first Die Hard; when a sarcastic McLane asks whether Karl and Hans are lonely. With immense technological power at his fingertips and an army of, oddly, French mercenaries at his disposal, he's most certainly acts as enough of a threat. Director Wiseman's references towards the earlier entries is somewhat incessant, his referencing goes down awkwardly at times and even spills off away from its nostalgic purpose into the primary strands of the film. This is particularly evident towards the finale when McLane's prior estrangement from a family member in his daughter Lucy (Winstead), rather than wife Holly, drives the denouement thus consistently reminding us of the first film. Here, much unlike her mother, Lucy is just a pretty face that needs rescuing; something that only aids in illustrating how much the first Die Hard was actually about something. Here, a lot of that has gone and the result is somewhat frustrating.