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Die Hard 4.0
Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Technophobe police detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) has some catching up to do when he is asked to escort computer hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long) up to the FBI headquarters in Washington DC. It sounds like a routine assignment, but they haven't even left the building before bad guys are putting bullet holes in their shadows. 'That'll wake the neighbours,' quips Bruce, after he's shot up a fire extinguisher and blown a would-be assassin out the window. Us too: this shoot out is the first in a string of kick-ass action sequences square in the Die Hard tradition. At the same time, that tradition is about to get rebooted for the twenty first century. Arriving in the nation's capital, McClane narrowly avoids a head-on collision with an on-coming truck. Every intersection it's the same story. All the traffic lights are signaling green. At the Stock Exchange, panic selling hits when the computers indicate prices are plummeting. Then broadcast signals are jammed with a scare-message spliced together from Presidential speeches going all the way back to Eisenhower. This is the mother of all hacks. A 'firesale,' Matt calls it, because 'everything must go.' How is John McClane going to get the best of cyber terrorists when he's still figuring out what to do with a mobile phone? 'You're a Timex watch in a digital age,' sneers the architect of all this chaos, Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant - from Deadwood). Needless to say, that's where Matt comes in: the kid may not be much use in a fist fight, but give him a keyboard and he's got the world at his command. 
It's been 12 years since the last movie in this franchise. And Bruce Willis is the long side of 50. You can understand why the producers would be keen to give the likeable twentysomething from Herbie Fully Loaded, Waiting and a series of Apple commercials the comic sidekick role, and Long mostly makes a virtue of looking like a fish out of water. I wouldn't expect to see him and Willis forming a regular double act any time soon, but they work up some passable give and take across the generation gap. The other blatantly patronising concession to youth is an unwarranted cameo from Kevin Smith as another hacker, 'Warlock'. (Unfortunately they miss the point and give him several lines, most of which he garbles.) Director Len Wiseman (Underworld) was just 15 years old when the first Die Hard came out. A leftfield choice, he keeps it crisp and crunchy and doesn't let the computer screens get in the way of the action. The fight everyone's going to be talking about is a brutal ten-minute scrap with kung fu queen Mai (Maggie Q) hanging around in an elevator shaft. If the CGI stuff goes well over the top (McClane brings down a helicopter with a runaway car in one scene, and ends up grappling on the wing of a fighter jet), well, these days, that's entertainment. I admit I'm nostalgic for the realism in the first film - the simple but bracing idea that broken glass might cut your feet, for example - but then I'm a relic from the analogue age myself. 
The problem with 'Live Free or Die Hard', as it's known in the Land of the Brave, is that having established such a scary virtual Apocalyptic scenario, it degenerates in the second half to something much more basic: The US may be on its knees, but McClane can still get from A to B without too much trouble; Gabriel's terrorists aren't politically motivated, they just want the money; And screenwriter Mark Bomback's big idea to up the ante for the climax is to have the bad guys kidnap McClane's daughter and hold a gun to her head. How old school is that? Tom Charity Titles related to this articleRelated/similar articles
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