Movie I Saw: Live Free or Die Hard
The wait is over. I'm a big Die Hard fan. You internet folk can have your Chuck Norrises (Norii?) and your Jack Bauers but I'm a John McLean man - yippee ki ay, motherfucker.
I love practically everything about the Die Hard movies.
I love the increasingly-insipid titling scheme, by which the name of every sequel has used "Die Hard" as a verb, rather than properly as an adjective or noun. They nearly fumbled the ball by calling the latest movie Die Hard 4.0, but decided on the raw patriotic power of Live Free or Die Hard instead.
I love how John McLean always winds up as the only person capable of dealing with the situation at hand, no matter how unlikely that might be.
I love how John rants outloud to himself, and how he mockingly repeats the reassurances of whatever idiots got him into his current mess.
I love how John can readily use any weapon or vehicle he encounters, deftly.
I love how John never takes a moment to clean up, getting bloodier and grimier in every scene.
I love how John McLean just kicks every fucking ass that needs to be kicked, until everything is hunky-dory again.
Live Free or Die Hard earned my love by lovingly handling all those elements. The movie's plot was taken from a short story, around which the Die Hard stuff was molded, and the effect could have been disconcerting and disastrous, like in Oceans 12 - another movie which had franchise elements shoehorned into an existing story. But it plays perfectly well in this movie, with ruthless cyber-terrorists as worthy an adversary for McLean as any other dirtbag.
After all, the plot allowed the casting of Justin Long as this installment's sidekick-of-the-moment: Matt, a young, hip hacker with a heart of gold who was tricked into aiding the cyber-baddies with a crucial crack. Per the formula, it's McLean and Matt against the world for the majority of the flick, as they always-just-barely make their way through Washington D.C.'s crumbling infrastructure and a few squadrons of terror-types.
The one disappointment I had with the movie was the performance of Timothy Olyphant as Gabriel, the film's major villain. Olyphant isn't a favourite of mine, but I won't say that he did a particularly bad job; I just couldn't take him seriously as the movie presented him. Gabriel is a disenfranchised former intelligence agent, righteously bent on exposing America's weaknesses for her own good, and Olyphant doesn't convey the gravitas of the character in any way. He's just too young and pretty. Live Free or Die Hard needed its own Alan Rickman, William Sadler or Jeremy Irons - gritty, sinister actors that the audience can love to hate.
Olyphant's casting, along with that of Long, are clearly attempts to make the movie more youth-friendly and this scheme is largely successful - there's a higher and more relentless energy level to the latest installment, with a more visual choreography to the fights and set-pieces. In particular, a fight inside a cooling shaft and a freeway chase scene seem inspired more by Casino Royale than the previous Die Hard pictures.
What more can I say? Even Chelly said she dug this one, so you should probably check it out.
By Ian on June 28, 2007 at 1:24 AM
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