New action, old memories

Rating: Null/10 (7 October 2007)

There are interesting elements here.
. This film is inserted in a recent tendency for action movies, which i believe started with the first Bourne (but i may be mistaken, i'm always checking for the origins and many times i find routs in older projects i didn't know). That tendency (influence) has much to do with style, and it features usually a kind of blue toned photography, i an apparently hard way to perform action/fight scenes. It has also to do with camera work, which is most of the time hand held and chooses not to make the whole action completely clear to us, as if we were intervenients, and makes us look elsewhere even when the action is not there. This "style" has been used (with more or less similar elements) in recent features such as the Bourne series, Syriana, even Casino Royale and this fourth Die Hard.
. The funny thing here is: The original Die Hard was very original in the way the audience related to the hero (Willis is responsible for this) but also in the way he performed his (apparently) uncoreographed action scenes (though this kind of fight probably started with Harrison Ford's Indiana). So here in this one, after so many years of degeneration of action fights (badly) interpreting oriental moves, we have Willis fighting in his "clumsy" way the girl very "kung fu" oriented. This is a turn of the page. Interesting
. The theme was well chose in this logic of producing a new film starring an old hero. This computer dependent world is what changed in practical terms in the last 20 years. So, beyond the basic idea of the "old hero in a new world" we have another interesting device which is how the "bad guy" fights the good one, no physical action. Did anyone found strange that our PC physically developed geek didn't die after a hard core body fight with our McClane? This is just curious but it becomes interesting when from here we get to understand that our mind changed in the way we expect the action to develop. Oh and this paranoid about terrorist global incursions is not new, but gained new forms after September 11th, obviously, in real life and film (film not also follows life, but also helps creating the paranoid, power institutions use these mechanisms, especially among Americans, so that sequence with American presidents talking and being edited is ironic in the sense that even though we think they are being manipulated, it is in fact us, the audience, specially the American audience, who is being manipulated).
. Anyway, the film is not without flaws, and i really miss the internal dialog that the "old" McClane used to establish with the audience. This old man who calls himself MacClane is almost a cartoon of the other one. We get the flavour (that's the basic demand for most of the die hard "fans", but it's very far from the type of device that established new patterns for action actors, so fully appreciated by action flicks since then (Cage repeatedly copied this, watch the "comedy" Con Air).
My evaluation: 3/5
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