AT THE MOVIES WITH HALEY ZIMMERMAN
Live Free or Die Hard
3*’s
Yippee Ki Yay. That’s all I could think after seeing the action-packed Live Free or Die Hard. In this fourth installment of the Die Hard series, the aging yet indestructible New York police officer John McClane, portrayed by Bruce Willis, well, brings it. Hard.
With incredibly faced-paced action sequences that just keep on coming, you’ll be nervously biting your fingernails throughout wondering what’s going to blow up next: apartments, helicopters, fighter jets, the occasional car; it just keeps coming. McClane constantly displays his habit of making things go “boom.”
McClane’s fondness of explosions is countered by his tech-savvy sidekick, played by the “Mac Dude,” you know, that scruffy looking guy from the Apple commercials, (his name is Justin Long, by the way). The sidekick, Matt Farrell, does his part in trying to bring in those gadget-oriented youngsters of today into the theaters by explaining the constant barrage of computer-related events to the technologically ignorant McClane. They’ve got pretty good chemistry together, I was surprised to find their witty banter funny enough to laugh-out-loud.
The typical Die Hard baddie tends to be some Eastern European after a bunch of money. However, in this film they took it in a bit of a new direction and chose Timothy Olyphant to play a disgruntled former government employee who decided to take advantage of his knowledge. While employed by the government, he wrote a program that takes all the money in the country and puts it in one place in the event of an economic crisis. I’m not exactly sure in what situation this could be GOOD in, but hey this is Hollywood so we’ll let that one slide.
To steal the money that would be put into this account, essentially all currency in the United States, Gabriel executes what they call a “Fire-Sale.” This is a three-part wave of destruction in which everything must go. First taking out transportation, then the economy, and finally cutting off all utilities like water and power. Not an entirely implausible attack plan, but I’d like to hope it would be more difficult to actually pull this off than how Olyphant makes it seem.
Hoping to bring in a younger more family-oriented audience, director Len Wiseman did an excellent job bringing this movie down from the R ratings of all three previous films. With the sacrifice of a little blood and a lot of profanity, the film maintains the action quality you would typically see in an R rated film.
This is quite simply a great popcorn movie. Don’t look for any Oscar-worthy performances, but other than that there shouldn’t be much stopping you from seeing it.
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