One Big Dumb Fun Action Movie!

Rating: 8/10 (4 July 2007)

Before he starred in "Die Hard" back in 1988 as NYPD Detective John McClane, Bruce Willis' chief claim to fame was playing David Addison, Jr., opposite Cybill Shepherd 's Maddie Hayes for four seasons on the ABC-TV comedy series "Moonlighting." "Die Hard" turned Willis into a superstar, and he reprised the role in "Die Hard 2" (1990) and again in 1995 for the far grittier "Die Hard With A Vengeance." In "Underworld" director Len Wiseman's anti-terrorist thriller "Live Free or Die Hard," Willis revives the alpha male hero that made him into a celebrity, but he looks nothing like he did twelve years ago. Talk about a makeover, NYPD Detective John McClane has lost his hair, his cigarettes, and his locker room profanity. Unlike the previous "Die Hard" actioneers which carried edgy R-ratings, "Live Free or Die Hard" accommodates a wider audience demographic with a bland PG-13 rating. (Not surprisingly, an unrated "Die Hard" is available on DVD with the profanity that the studio snipped from the film.) This means that McClane cannot give the villains a lead headache with a 9mm. Moreover, it means that anything approaching realism has given way to fantasy. The earlier "Die Hard" thrillers relied on realism for their high-octane, adrenalin-laced action sequences, but "Live Free or Die Hard" shuns realism for the sake of raking in more bucks at the box office. Indeed, "Live Free or Die Hard" often resembles a theme park ride as our indestructible hero performs feats above and beyond James Bond. Bruce flies helicopters; Bruce eludes a jet fighter packing missiles that can hover and take aim under and over an array of bridges; and Bruce wields an automobile like a slingshot to demolish the bad guys in a helicopter. Altogether, Bruce pulls America by its chestnuts out of the fire from an ambitious villain that wants to meltdown the country.
Mark Bomback's moth-eaten screenplay draws its inspiration from a 1997 "Wired" magazine article inked by John Carlin about the prospect that hackers could trigger an Armageddon against Democracy by exploiting our widespread reliance on computers to run everything in America. Anybody watching movies before 1997 knew that recipe for disaster before the Carlin article. The 1995 Sandra Bullock cyberspace nail-biter "The Net" showed that a hacker could steal an individual's identity. The same year that "The Net" appeared with its cyberspace threat to privacy, the first Pierce Brosnan 007 epic "GoldenEye" boasted a villain who tried to melt down everything in the UK with his cyberspace terrornauts and steal a fortune! Sadly, then, the premise that pits McClane against a brilliant but insane computer whiz with fiendish plans for America has already been done! Worse, "Scream 2" nemesis Timothy Olyphant presents only a minor physical threat to McClane. He is nowhere near as lethal as either Alan Rickman in "Die Hard" or Jeremy Irons in "Die Hard With A Vengeance." Indeed, the surprise ending relies on the villain's woeful ignorance.
The saving grace of "Live Free and Die Hard" is its refusal to take itself seriously. Director Len Wiseman has created the ultimate 'big, dumb action movie.' In big, dumb action movies, forty-seven bad guys with automatic weapons can pin the hero in a phone booth and put a hole through everything except him! Not only does Wiseman appropriate these clichés, but also he exaggerates them to such preposterous proportions that you want to howl at his audacity. "Live Free and Die Hard" is the kind of movie where the hero has to beat the living daylights out of a villain because it would be too violent for him to just shoot them. For example, when McClane tangles with the villain's girlfriend, Mai Lihn (Maggie Q of "Rush Hour 2"), a seductive doll with a Ph.D. in cyberspace terrorism and martial arts, he has no more luck knocking her off than the teens did Jason in the "Friday the 13th" chillers. When McClane isn't dealing with this dame, he contends with an acrobatic fiend who caroms off walls like Jackie Chan and run circles around our hero. The secondary villains more than the chief villain give "Live Free and Die Hard" half of its best moments. Meanwhile, the chief villain, Thomas Gabriel, is more loquacious than lethal. Ironically, he spends most of his time telling us how dangerous that he is. "Clerks" writer/director Kevin Smithnearly bloated beyond recognition--makes a more interesting impression as a hacker who lives with his mom, rather like the Vince Vaughn character in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith." When McClane isn't swapping words, fists, or lead with his adversaries, he barrels a semi-tractor trailer rig over bridges toppling like dominos behind him while a jet pilot cannot hit him with either missiles or bullets any more than the forty-seven machine gun wielding thugs. Watching Willis recreate the feisty McClane, McClane's bouts with the second-string villains, and the most outlandish feats ever staged compensate for the absence of a memorable villain, the encore use of a hacker plot to destroy a world power, and Bruce Willis's missing hairpiece. Enjoy "Live Free and Die Hard" for the PG-13 rated big, dumb action movie that it is.