Live Free or Die Hard

Live Free or Die Hard, aka Die Hard 4.0. By now also almost 20 years old, it came out in 2007, 12 years after the third Die Hard movie. In the first 2 movies John McClane’s wife plays an important role, here it is his estranged daughter; played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Timothy Oliphant and Maggie Q play the bad guy/girl and they add spice to the movie much like in previous installments. In the first 2 Die Hard movies all the action took place in one location, a skyscraper in the first and an airport in the second. That format was abandoned in the third movie and it is also not used in Live free or Die Hard. On the action front the movie serves more of the same with bad guys ruthlessly eliminating poor souls that cross their path and at the same time failing to kill John McClane no matter how many bullets they fire at him. John McClane on the other hand never misses his mark and doesn’t stop until finally his nemisis is conquered. There is less verbal bravado compared to earlier movies and John McClane sounds more cynical in this movie although we are treated to at least one Yippee-ki-yai motherfucker and the occasional wisecrack, like in : ‘dude, you just killed a helicopter with a car => I was out of bullets’ (see the movie poster). The first Die Hard was groundbraking and became a classic, Live Free or Die Hard falls in the more of the same category. The novelty is that John McClane has to fight cyber criminals with machine guns and has to team up with a hacker to try and stop ‘digital armageddon’. An enjoyable 2 hours of fun, still much better than your average B-movie. Probably not for the true quality seeker.