John McClane is BAAAAck

Rating: 8/10 (30 June 2007)

It's been so long since I've seen a good action movie outside the comic book stories and Harry Potter, and here is one of the first action movies which brings back and old hero that we all loved. It's been a long time since we saw John McClane (Bruce Willis) in his most famous role, but even after 20 years since his debut in the first Die Hard, the character still works. He may be older, and he may have taken on different roles since Die Hard With A Vengeance, but he hasn't lost his touch as everybody's beloved hero in one of the most famous action series ever.
It's July 4th, and suddenly there is an attack on the United States infrastructure through computers which begins shutting the entire country down. The person behind it is a man by the name of Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant). He is working with a group of people which also includes his Kung-Fu kicking girlfriend (Maggie Q). They are so certain they have control of the country, but they didn't count on our scruffy hero (McClane) who with the assistance of a young computer hacker, will stop at nothing to bring them to justice. That's the plot in simple terms.
Like all the Die Hard films, this film is loaded with extraordinary stunts and explosions as well as almost non-stop action which keeps the film moving at a brisk pace. The director Len Wiseman never seems to let up for long, and though some scenes make McClane look like an indestructible machine that keeps coming, they work because of the dialoque and Willis himself. Justin Long, who plays the young computer hacker helping McClane, even has a few of his own snappy lines which never sound lame and seem to mix well with McClane's.
Live Free or Die Hard has helped me to once again embrace all the old action films that starred Swarzenegger, Gibson, and Willis himself as well as others which became so popular in the eighties and on into the nineties. It's good to see that Hollywood is still capable of giving us real action films that aren't all CGI like todays action films are. I gladly recommend it even if some of the scenes are way over the top and are borderline impossible for a human being to survive. After all, it is fiction.