Modern Action Movie under the Die Hard name...but still good

Rating: 7/10 (9 July 2007)

John McClane is back! As a big fan of the Die Hard movies I was looking forward to this and if you're looking for lots of effects, a few punchlines and daft jokes, this is for you.
His time around John McClane is divorced from Holly and his daughter Lucy won't talk to him and calls herself Genero rather than McClane (Holly did the same thing in the first movie). He's asked to go pick up a computer hacker, Matt Farrell, because someone has hacked into the US systems (I forget which one) and has taken over. The hacker is on a list of 1000 people who could possible do it, and already a few of them have been blown up. When he gets to the hacker's house he stops the assassination attempt and the hacker tells him he was sent a bit of a program to write without knowing what he was doing. He works out that the bad guys are systematically shutting down the US, going for security and banks, utilities, and anything else controlled by a computer, which is basically everything. It's up to good ol' John to save the day along with Justin, and he gets an extra reason to kill the guys when they track down his daughter and hold her captive.
This is big on explosions but, unlike several action movies I've seen, it still has a plot running through it. OK, it's a plot which sounds completely overblown, if plausible, but unrealistic story lines are the bread and butter of action movies after all.
There's nothing particularly cringeworthy in the violence of it, and there isn't really a big punch up you used to get in action movies, instead going for a few fights but lots of explosions and a chase between a transit van, a big rig and an F-15 plane!!! This is really Bruce Willis' show but the other characters get decent screen time too, although it is odd that the bad guys are pretty people but the geeks they have doing the hard work are, well, geeky. Justin Long does pretty well, being suitably freaked out but not overdone, and even the bad guys are pretty low key. There's even the inevitable FBI guy trying to take over, but only for a few minutes. What is it with John McClane and the Feds? A good action movie for modern times. I still like the old way of doing things with punch ups and car chases rather than explosions every ten minutes but that's the way action movies are going now, so I'll deal with it. Worth going to see, and I'd take anyone old enough to get into the cinema.