It all depends...

Rating: 6/10 (9 November 2007)

See, I'm easily pleased. The old suspension of disbelief thing - I'll suspend mine at the drop of a hat. I'll go more than halfway to meet the filmmakers, they must love people like me.
I enjoyed Die Hard 4.0. Quite a bit. Watched the UK DVD version with my wife, expanded to include more action and bad language.
It's only afterwards that I started to think, "Hang on a bit..." I guess there are some spoilery bits in what follows.
You expect some action sequences which step gingerly over the line of plausibility - the lift shaft in DH1, the 747 wing fight in DH2, the cable slide, outracing the flood etc. in DH3. So I could deal with launching a police car at a helicopter (although I, too, wondered whey none of the cars in the tunnel put their lights on - no Volvos?). But outracing the collapsing overpass in the articulated lorry, and dancing about on the Harrier, took such flying leaps over that line of implausibility that my wife and I sat there howling with laughter.
And I've got to say, I don't need swathes of foul language in order to enjoy a film. It doesn't upset or offend me especially, I just find it irritating that filmmakers think it's necessary when it isn't.
Good bits - I really liked Justin Long. Played nicely away from his customary nerd persona, had some edge, hit a note of credibility throughout. Good job. The attack on Justin Long's apartment was a good sequence. I liked the young Miss McClane, too, and I could envisage a Die Hard spin off franchise with these two in it. I thought the cyberplot was credible (and I recall the traffic chaos taking place in Turin in the original Italian Job many years ago, so I was quite prepared to believe that) although I too would have liked to know what the end purpose was - that kind of got overlooked. And I liked Maggie Q - I thought her fight scenes were very good, and she had an element of hard-faced relentlessness to her which was a strong plus.
Not-so-good bits? Maybe the character Willis played in Unbreakable was John McClane in disguise - you can bruise him, cut him, make his vest dirty, but you can't kill him. This is OK up to a point, but there were some ordeals he went through which were so outrageous that they didn't convince. And when he fired that shot - through his collarbone, it appeared to me - which then killed Timothy Olyphant, I was a little surprised to find him up and quipping about 10 minutes later.
Why did the gas in the gaspipes explode? I can understand Timothy Olyphant killing the hackers who'd freelanced the work which hacked into the national infrastructure - stops the powers that be tracing him - but why did he kill the ones who were still working for him? Lots of plot holes which needed filling.
So it's a romp if you're not terribly demanding, but it shortchanges you fairly comprehensively if you're at all inclined towards being critical.