Made me want to see Die Hard 3 again

Rating: 3/10 (27 June 2007)

This is not a good movie. I liked the previous die hard movies, 1 and 3. The second one, well, Bruce is right when he says it suffers from lack of claustrophobia - but then again so do 3 and 4. The trailer looked bad, I said no to it, then it got good reviews and I was persuaded to go to a midnight showing for fun. I was looking for some good action.
Like Die Hard 3, this movie is a sprawling action adventure movie spread out over many cities. Unlike the third movie, this takes place over two days. Like the third movie, this is a buddy cop movie, where the villain is a super-genius white dude with an exotic assassin woman as his lover/bodyguard. She of course gets killed brutally, and we the audience of men, cheer when a woman gets killed because, let's be honest, we're living out our male fantasies. We can't hit women anymore, not like the good old days, so we give them a kung fu kick or a sickle and that makes them enemy combatants, so it makes them fair game.
The third movie works better because it wasn't an accident that it was John Mcclane. Therefore, we have a reason for the movie, for him being in it. This movie could have easily been an action movie where the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Bruce Willis himself even said that were other scripts that could have been Die Hard movies that were made into other movies.
The third movie involves the audiences through it's riddles, silly, but be honest, you were trying to figure it out. Also, stealing money still made sense at that point. The third movie features bad guys that mis-direct the government in order to steal money - guess what happens here? What Americans are really afraid of, now, isn't terrorists stealing money. It's terrorists killing without demands. Killing just to kill. The movie has action, but no violence. No blood, not enough cursing. We never feel emotionally involved. We never feel scared. No good guys die, the stakes are never really raised. We've seen this movie before and before it was bloodier, and harder-core. This movie was made by geeks, not by cowboys.
The technology in the movie is too sleek, too futuristic, too unreal. There's an french assassin who has superhero abilities on par with the guy from the opening of casino royale (which ruins that sequence).
The film's dialectic is between the real and unreal - the digital and the analog. A fair point - a film that boasts no CGI (or minimal) is therefore about itself. Die Hard 4 is about why Die Hard 4 is awesome. Digital movies are bad, live-action movies are awesome. Die hard is a live-action movie. Therefore, Die hard is awesome.
There are some good set pieces here, and some cheesy speeches about what being a hero is all about. There are some good moments, action without violence, by which i mean blood. Justin Long is fine, Willis is beautiful as always. There's no plot, but I know you don't care about that. But seriously, the plot doesn't make sense, okay, okay, shut up, watch the movie, enjoy it, don't think about it. Right? Cheers