brilliant action, few clichés

Rating: 9/10 (3 August 2008)

As an action film and a piece of story-telling it grips from first to last. As such, it is brilliantly done. It is also absurd in that the heroes seem indestructible, but that is a convention of the genre. The Bruce Willis character is practically a hospital case after about the first 10 minutes, but gets back up and survives several violent explosions and landing from a collapsing overpass onto a crashing aeroplane, and walks away again. The acting is excellent, especially the young nerd played by Justin Long, and the interaction between him and Willis is well realized, as a growing relationship. In Die Hard the bad guys were just criminals. Now they are terrorists, though disappointingly not motivated by ideology. Maybe jihadists would be too obvious. The central concept of a cyber firesale is brilliantly realized, with a bit of suspension of disbelief. How did they assemble all that equipment and hardware without anyone noticing? or is the FBI really that bad. Some clichés were irritating. How many times are they going to do the bit about Willis' gun being just out of his reach?