LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD
Reviewed by Sam Hatch
John McClane is a dinosaur – a hopelessly unhip aging male with no connection to the tech-savvy youth of today. As the script for Live Free or Die Hard posits, he's an analog man in a digital world. Yet for all of screenwriter Mark Bomback's assurances that this guy is a good ole' boy trapped in amber, in reality Bruce Willis' chrome-domed one-man-army NYPD Detective McClane is more of a ‘man of today' than he ever was. In one scene he recklessly speeds an SUV up through a spiraling parking garage, only to crash through a wall, pin a villain to the grill and continue speeding through a utility plant until plowing car, hero and villain into an elevator shaft. He fails to kill his enemy and puts his own life in more danger than it already was. If that kind of thinking doesn't fit in with our times, I don't know what does. The guy's a living, breathing embodiment of our current administration!
What is a dinosaur is the Die Hard series itself, creaking on old celluloid bones after almost twenty years and only four films under it's loosening belt. Even the source material for this cyberterrorist adventure (a Wired article by John Carlin entitled 'A Farewell To Arms') was penned a decade ago. Thankfully, Bomback's script combined with a fun cast and a fresh new director (Underworld's Len Wiseman) pulls it together to make a film that is so much more fun than it has any right to be.
After our last meeting with John in 1995's Die Hard With A Vengeance, he's continued his career in the NYPD and is now a senior detective. Though instead of thwarting villainous eurotrash, he mainly hunts horny boys who wish to shtup his estranged daughter Lucy (Death Proof's Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Early in the film he interrupts the advances of one such romeo, establishing to us that he has both an Alec Baldwin-esque strained relationship with his daughter and a surly disposition towards young males with working members.
So no surprise when he gets a call to escort one such able-membered yute into the custody of the FBI. Justin Long (Galaxy Quest, those ubiquitous Mac commercials) plays Matthew Farrell, a gifted and benevolent hacker who cracks code while he's not collecting valuable PVC figurines of science fiction movie characters. During an early auction scene (one of those annoying montages where computers make all sorts of cool sounds that no computers anywhere make), he unwittingly assists in selling dangerous intellectual material to some very bad people. Shortly thereafter, all of his colleagues begin meeting early deaths, and the feds want to know why.
The first (and best) Die Hard film was largely carried by the larger-than-life scenery chewing of Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber. These movies need delicious villains to work, and this film succeeds on that front with the tag team of Maggie Q's kung-fu brainiac Mai Linh (sharply referenced by McClane as a combination that's ‘hard to come by') and Timothy Olyphant's Thomas Gabriel (looking like the bastard child of Billy Bob Thornton and Neal McDonough). By employing Asian and Caucasian actors as the terrorists, the filmmakers also play it super safe by sidestepping usage of anyone who looks even remotely Middle Eastern.
Instead, the danger is shown as emanating from an enemy within. Gabriel plays a hi-tech Chicken Little, a government employee who grows so tired of telling the brass that their computer-controlled infrastructure is at risk that he decides to make the sky fall himself to teach them all a lesson. This culminates in a compu-coup called a ‘fire sale', as Gabriel and his mixed team of brains and brawn begin wiping the United States' collective hard drive. After they gain access to traffic systems and the stock market, Washington D.C. begins to fall into chaos during the July 4th weekend.
McClane's old cop pal Al Powell is long gone from the series, so he establishes a new ally with Cliff Curtis' FBI Assistant Director Bowman. The option to simply drop Farrell and move along dries up, and McClane is forced to reluctantly pair up with the hacker – a constant reminder of how old he is, driven home by the fact that the kid doesn't even know who Creedence Clearwater Revival is. During these early set ups, the characters sometimes feel more at ease than they should, since we know that helicopters and mercenaries with automatic weaponry are honing in on their position.
Scenes such as the ensuing tunnel cluster-eff and taxi-versus-huey showdown are where Wiseman struts his stuff, using all of the action juju he's honed over the course of his two Underworld films. And while some of the antics looked plain stupid in the trailer (which admittedly made the entire film look stupid, but more on that later), when executed within the context of the story they provide more than adequate thrills.
The previous film suffered from an overload of unbelievable stunts (in the bad sense of the word), and while McClane would still have to be insane to think he could survive most of his antics in Live Free or Die Hard (i.e. leaping from an aircraft onto a collapsed freeway overpass), at least they're presented to the audience in such a way that the possibility of surviving is still relatively plausible. Unfortunately, the horrible trailer focused too much on the outrageousness of it all and made it look to be an unwatchable mess. Thankfully, my least favorite line from that trailer (in which McClane's dialogue infers that he's headstrong and crazy enough to kill his own daughter along with the 'bad guys') was cut short in the final print. Even the traditional cry of "Yippee Ki Yay…" plays differently than we were led to believe.
The reluctant buddy team-up of McClane and Farrell also works better than one would suspect, and Willis and Long share a decent rapport throughout. If the viewer is supposed to relate to John McClane, then Farrell is the character who is ready to explain the technology-mired nuances of the plot to him (and us). He's so in love with electronic subterfuge that admits he initially thought the reality of a ‘fire sale' would be cool – kind of like the concept of listening to any given emo album, until you actually put it in your stereo and feel the pain.
Farrell has few surviving nice guy hacker friends, yet one fellow known as Warlock comes through in a pinch. Actor/Filmmaker Kevin Smith plays the overweight digi-nerd holed up in his grandmother's basement (aka his ‘command center', as revealed in a line that isn't quite as funny as it's meant to be) with a ton of leet equipment (and an ancient CB radio just in case it all goes to hell). He also hates cops, which means he's going to instantly dislike the Blueblood Luddite McClane.
Thomas Gabriel also grows to dislike McClane, who in true Die Hard fashion becomes the unknown element that threatens to derail the scheme – The Clod Machine (or Doofus Ex Machina), if you will. Once McClane and Gabriel make one another's acquaintance, the poisonous barbs they volley back and forth grow juicier and more fun to watch as the film progresses. It's the best walkie-talkie rivalry since the original Hans Gruber and his antagonistic relationship with the unpredictable supercop. As Gabriel ups the ante, the film begins to feel similar to the Arnold Schwarzenegger/James Cameron Bond sendup True Lies, complete with kidnapped daughter and a dangerous VTOL aircraft (the still unproduced F-35B Lightning II).
Gabriel's team are also fun, and apart from the previously mentioned Maggie Q, the French martial artist Cyril Raffaelli (from the awesome parkour flick Banlieue 13) portrays a lithe, indestructible henchman who has a memorable fracas with McClane in a huge supercomputer's frigid cooling tower. Once again Willis plays the scene as a traditionalist out of his element, fighting a world gone mad where ye olde simple, ski-masked subvillains have evolved into blisteringly quick-fisted monkey men.
The plot is just tangled enough to keep the film interesting, and there's more to the evildoers' ploy than just the initial havoc initiated by the ‘fire sale'. Along the way, McClane learns how to deal with his daughter (who we later learn is a chip off the old block, giving it back to the baddies just as well as her old man could) turning into a woman. He also learns how to stare down his fear of being old, gradually accepting Justin Long's character as a decent guy. But will he learn to accept the possibility of Farrell shtupping his daughter? That's another story.
And one wonders where the series can go from here, if anywhere. With so much attention paid to his offspring, one wonders if Lucy McClane doesn't have her own adventures ahead of her. There is also mention of his son, so perhaps little Jack McClane can prematurely bald and start kicking tuchus when he's not studying hard for his SATs. And if they do opt to keep trucking along with Willis, they haven't teamed him up with an ass-kicking woman yet, so perhaps Wiseman can integrate Kate Beckinsale's vampire assassin from Underworld and film Live Long and Bite Hard.
“C'mon over to Prague… we'll have a good time… bring some garlic and silver bullets.”