Entertaining but flawed

Rating: 6/10 (29 June 2007)

**Minor spoilers follow**
The fourth installment in the Die Hard series follows John McClane as he battles a terrorist group who used their computer prowess, and access to government networks, to create mass confusion. These attacks on the transportation, electrical, and other networks serve as steps towards a massive heist, revealed as the movie progresses.
Bruce Willis provides a lot of entertainment as McClanewould we expect anything less? And he has a good on screen rapport with his co-star, Justin Long, who plays a computer nerd that McClane is assigned to protect. Timothy Olyphant glares ominously throughout the movie, and could be a great bad guy if given the chance. It's just too bad they didn't have better material to work with.
While entertaining, this movie has some major flaws as an action movie. Essentially it takes the plot of Die Hard 3create mass panic through terrorist attacks, which serve to steal some sort of money reserveand combines this plot with some Independence-day style action and unrealistic computer hacking.
Action movies usually require some suspension of disbelief, but this installment in the Die Hard series abandons any pretense of realism. If you've seen the scene in Die Hard with a Vengeance where McClane takes down a helicopter by shooting the power lines above itwell, this sort of scene is repeated over and over in Live Free or Die Hard. McClane falls on a jet plane, bounces off, and rolls on a collapsed freeway. He jumps of out a car before launching it into a helicopter, and so forth. While he's doing this, half the city gets blown apart, and computer hackers pull up information in seconds on great looking but fake looking screens.
The nonstop cartoon action and borderline lame computer hacker plot line take the edge off the movie. While the action is constant, it lacks somethingperhaps originalityand leaves this movie feeling too much like a generic action flick.
The characters also lack depth and are fairly boring. Compare this film's villains to its predecessor: Hans Gruber (the villain in the third movie) had charisma, several motives, and a slew of distractions hiding his true motives. Thomas Gabriel, the villain in this movie, is just mad about his job. Maggie Q, cast as the bad-guy love interest, sputters off flat lines of dialog, and is totally unbelievable as a tough villain. Compare her to Gruber's love interest in the third moviean East German, whose history is actually given in the movie, and whose loyalties are slowly revealed. There are none of these characters or plot lines in Live Free or Die Hard. Instead we get a crew who, for pulling off the most audacious crime of any of the movies,lack depth, personality, and seem (with the clear exception of Olyphant) surprisingly non-threatening.
If you like action movies, this is worth checking out, but it doesn't live up to its potential. Oh, and when the linethe one that everyone is waiting foris uttered, it is definitely worth it. Revealing how and why the line is said would ruin the movie, but it's one of the too few scenes that live up to the Die Hard tradition.