Saturday, July 07, 2007
Caught Die Hard 4.0
Synopsis: Bruce Willis returns to reprise his role of John McLane from the DIE HARD movies for this fourth installment in the series. This time out McClane is after a group of Internet-savvy terrorists who threaten the security of the United States.
You'd think that saving thousands of lives in the past two decades could buy a cop some respect. Not so for perennially down-trodden detective John McClane (Bruce Willis).
The one-man wrecking crew who became the template for countless other reluctant heroes faces his toughest nemesis yet as Die Hard 4.0 opens: His college-age daughter. And she's not shy about treating not-so-dear-old dad to a tongue-lashing when he stakes out her dorm and catches her smooching in a wannabe-boyfriend's car.
No, the wisecracking everyman who foiled a high-rise heist in 1988's Die Hard, airport hostage-takers in 1990's Die Hard 2, and gold bullion-coveting European mercenaries in 1995's Die Hard with a Vengeance hasn't aged gracefully. Neither, for that matter, has the roughly US$1 Billion film franchise he helped found.
Which isn't to say that McClane's latest high-octane outing isn't worth a look, just don't expect it to be all that different from the many pretenders to the Die Hard throne that have emerged over the years.
What the once decidedly mortal McClane has gained in super heroic stature since treading bare-foot over broken glass a generation ago, he has lost in humor, humanity and, well, hair - making him an easy target for Die Hard 4.0 hacker and substitute cut-up Matt Farrell (Justin Long), but a much less relatable character than he used to be.
As usual, McClane finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time when he arrives at the computer whiz kid's apartment to escort him downtown and quickly comes into the crosshairs of a team of assassins bent on rubbing him out.
It seems Farrel was one of many unwitting pawns in cyber-terrorist pair Thomas Gabriel's (Timothy Olyphant) and Mai Lihn's (Maggie Q) scheme to send the US back to the Stone Age by targeting its electronic infrastructure.
Naturally, it's McClane's job to keep him alive long enough to outhack the hackers and stop them from erasing every financial record ever committed to a computer database.
It may sound like a sufficiently workman-like task but of course, this wouldn't be a Die Hard movie if it didn't involve plenty of gun battles, car chases, explosions and erm, tractor trailer-fighter-jet clashes.
There's also a much-hyped showdown that sees McClane go toe-to-toe and fist-to-face with th high-kicking Maggie Q, the net results of which is to confirm that, yes, Maggie Q does in fact look really hot in boots - especially when kicking Willis in the throat. She's HOT!
While it's all diverting enough to hold viewer's attention for the film's slightly bloated 130-minute running time, it's hard to escape the feeling that without its star, Die Hard 4.0 could easily have been the latest offering from one-time Die Hard knock-offs specialists Wesley Snipes or Steven Seagal. The action wasn't exactly overly spectacular, but as expected from the Die-Hard series, McClane is probably made of Titanium Alloys to jump off the bridge, jump off a speeding cop cruiser to have it smash into a helicopter, jump off the truck-trailer onto a F-35 Jet and later slide down the crashing and burning bridge into the rubble. He'd probably be killed ten times over in the movie, the action was all Hollywood, nothing spectacular to the plot.
Now that he's an increasingly anachronistic divorced father both onscreen and off, perhaps Willis should finally consider having McClane join them on the obsolete pile.
I'd give it a 3/5 score.
6:22 PM
