Review: Live Free or Die Hard
Ok, I saw it. I’ve had a couple of posts on it leading up to the opening and I caught Live Free or Die Hard last night. The short review is that while it’s no Die Hard (but what could be?), it was quite good. I’ve seen complaints about how “unrealistic” it is - but for the most part, it’s no worse than almost every other gun toting action movie out there. On my scale of 0-10, I waffle between a 7.5 and an 8 - if not for one particularly egregious scene towards the end I’d probably go with an 8. Overall, it’s a good summer blockbuster, that’s tight (despite being over 2 hours) and a worthy viewing. Mild spoilers probably follow.
Click on if you don’t care for some low key spoiling.
The movie brings John McClane back into action, this time teamed up with Ed veteran (and now the Mac), Justin Long as the silly sidekick. It seems to me that all the cool directors are getting with the free running in their movies, even if just a hint. This one features Cyril Raffaelli as one of the bad ass bad guys, I first saw him in District B13, another great action movie if you’ve got the time. He gets his parkour on a little bit and it’s a small but nice touch. Super bad guy B was Maggie Q with kung-fu fighting action.
This Die Hard combines it’s over the top action with a touch of nerdiness - the main plot point centers around some hacker type bad guys. Somehow, though, hacker details are kept to a minimum and no seriously embarrassing problems arise, it’s just enough there to give it the flavour necessary. Totally worked for me. Also, the main baddie - the nerd supreme - was a regular guy, in fact he was the most excellent drug dealer from Go, which I coincidentally was watching on TV only moments before seeing the movie. Not only was he a normal guy, he had the hot and ass kicking girlfriend! Ok, all the other nerds were more stereotyped, but still, it’s nice to see that happen.
I appreciated a minor, but speaking role for Kevin Smith. His command center was perfect. There was a lot to like about the movie, even the ladies I was with were into it. The humor and the one liners were flowing, a little self-consciously so, but it largely worked for the movie. And Bruce and Justin got along great on screen.
The women in the movie (there were only two, Maggie Q and John’s daughter Lucy) were both ass kicking, giving as good as they got. The movie skirts the trap that oh so many action movies fall into by not requiring a major theme to be a love interest. It portrays the relationship between the head villains as well as John and Lucy, fairly subtly and without the need to make them front and center. Too many movies feel the need to wedge the love angle in and more often than not it both feels out of place and falls flat, not adding anything to the movie.
The movie had some problems - plot events were moved along with the expedience of everything being controlled by computers, some of it was fairly implausible, but it was never so big that it took me out of the movie (Ok, the ubiquitous anthrax alarm, seemed a bit much, but still..). Sure bad guys seem to have bad aim and life expectancy commensurate with their good looks, but no more so than every other action movie you’ve ever seen, I’m not sure why people are up in arms about that for this particular movie. It was also
much more epic than previous movies in the franchise.
Really, the one major problem I had with it was one particularly horrendously over the top scene towards finale of the movie. Unfortunately, that scene culminates in a coincidence of mind boggling and laugh out loud proportions. They should have cut that scene and it would have been a better movie for my money.
At any rate, this movie follows the new trend of really long movies, clocking in at 130 minutes, but the pacing is good, keeps you involved and it really didn’t feel like that long of a movie to me. The movie is really tight, every scene moves the movie forward and details crop up later in the movie. The movie was never going to be a 10, but for some really good summer fare? If I were you I’d go see the movie.
