Live Free or Die Hard puts John McClane up against Thomas Gabriel, a former Defense Department analyst who is staging a massive cyber attack on the country. As in the third Die Hard movie, McClane is forced into a pairing with an unlikely partner -- this time, a young hacker named Matt Farrell.
While one could debate just how "realistic" the original Die Hard was, the sequels grew increasingly less so. By movie three, when Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson were solving riddles against the clock, it felt more like a classic Batman episode than a serious action adventure. But this fourth movie escalates to new heights of ridiculousness, in an almost "James Bond before the Daniel Craig reboot" sort of way. John McClane has gone from saving an office party to saving multiple commercial airplanes to saving the New York financial district to now, literally, saving the entire country.
If the increasing sense of scale and stakes were the only ridiculous thing about Live Free or Die Hard, you could chalk it up to run-of-the-mill sequel-itis, the urge for an ongoing movie series to constantly one-up itself. But if anything, this movie is even more ridiculous in execution than in concept. Although it's not that old a movie, made in 2007, its handling of computers (the core element of the plot) is fanciful and ignorant. There's lots of hand waving about how anything actually works. Hilariously, the hacker character even says at one point that he doesn't really know how he knows everything he knows. It's cyber stuff, audience... who cares?!
There are some fun set pieces throughout, but they hit "that's cool!" and "that's crazy!" in fairly equal measure. Car vs. helicopter, semi truck vs. fighter jet -- the action sequences are both entertaining and preposterous. Yet it might be that the over-the-top quality of it all is a perfect counterbalance to one of Bruce Willis' core strengths as an actor. He can "take a punch" as few other actors can; when he's beat up and/or beat down, he shows it well. So use John McClane's core humanity to ground the insanity.
But the script also compromises one of the best aspects of the McClane character. In the prior Die Hard films, luck was the character's curse -- bad luck. He was always in the wrong place at the wrong time, with things happening to him in the worst way... but he'd find a way to use his smarts to get out of the situation. The McClane of Live Free or Die Hard is instead incredibly lucky instead of unlucky. He just happens to avoid explosions, just happens to take out bad guys, and just happens to possess new skills he just happens to need for this particular adventure.
Even altered and compromised as John McClane is, none of the movie's new characters are as compelling as he is. Timothy Olyphant's villain is often implausibly stupid, Justin Long's hacker ally is more of a burden than an asset, Maggie Q is a personality-free ass kicker, a young Mary Elizabeth Winstead is inconsistently weak or strong as needed by the plot, and Kevin Smith is... what the hell is he doing here?
If you can switch your brain off and let this movie just wash over you, there is some fun to be had. But that's a tall order at times, a demand that the first Die Hard movie didn't make of its audience so regularly. I give Live Free or Die Hard a C. My readers were right: I probably shouldn't have bothered with it. (And yet, with just one more Die Hard movie left to go, I'm probably "pot committed" to finishing the series at some point.)
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