Unfortunately, the least impressive of the series.

Rating: 5/10 (5 July 2007)

I'm a big fan of the Die Hard series, but I found this instalment to be just too soul-less and mechanical. The reason why the original Die Hard was so successful was because Bruce Willis's battered and bleeding blue collar cop John McClane was a welcome antidote to all the '80s superhuman movie heroes played by Stallone, Arnie, and Chuck Norris. But after three sequels, McClane is now portrayed as being so indestructible that even kryptonite probably couldn't stop him, and a large part of the series' appeal has been lost. One set-piece involving a fighter jet (shades of True Lies) is so unbelievably destructive that it becomes cartoonish, totally breaking the suspension of disbelief required to view films such as these (it's for exactly that reason that blockbuster action movies fell out of flavour in the late Nineties, with audiences eventually embracing the low key, back-to-basics approach of the Bourne series). And Willis's invulnerability spreads to other castmembers: on several occasions characters fall twenty or thirty feet onto solid concrete, only to get up and keep running or fighting. The low point is probably Maggie Q's villainess still being active and lethal after being hit by a 4x4 at high speed.
The previous films boasted some fine villains (Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber remains the finest criminal mastermind to appear on screen), but this time the bad guys are a particularly colourless bunch, and their grand scheme to seize control of all the computer networks on America's eastern seaboard never carries much of a sense of urgency or serious threat. As for the heroes, Willis merely goes through the motions, while Mary Elizabeth Winstead performs a minor miracle with her severely underwritten role as his daughter, who's only in the film to get kidnapped. The best performance comes from Justin Long as the nervy hacker forced into becoming McClane's sidekick, but even he struggles to register amongst all the explosions and collapsing buildings.