Live Free or Die Hard [2007]
Director: Len Wiseman
Actor: Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant, Kevin Smith, Maggie Q, Cliff Curtis
Wow, another fantastic installment of the Die Hard series. I was very disappointed with the second film, the third film picked (I know that most people don’t agree with me on that), and this one showed me that it had not only come back after an absence of…what?…12 years, but that it had also evolved. The terrorists have evolved, McClane is getting a little older, and the stories become a bit more sophisticated.
McClane is asked to go pick up a young hacker in NYC. The Feds asked for a senior detective to do so, and of course, this hacker, together with many others, was the unwitting accomplice of a bunch of terrorists preparing a firesale, an attack on a system that completely cleans it out. The system they’re attacking; The United States. They want to completely shut down the entire country. Of course, this young, unwitting accomplice gets picked up by John McClane just as some terrorists come to kill him, cleaning up any loose ties.
John manages to get him out and to the Feds HQ in DC when the first stage of the terrorists’ plan is executed; completely derailment of all infrastructure. What starts then is a race against time as John and the hacker try to throw a monkey-wrench in the terrorists’ plans.
Personally, I love John McClane. He’s bitter, he’s cynical, he’s determined to the point of stupidity, and he’s one tough hombre. I laughed my ass off as John decides to drive an SUV through a bunch of offices just to get at a woman who kept kicking his ass. I also loved Kevin Smith’s cameo as a super-hacker still living in his mother’s basement.
Some might say that Timothy Olyphant as the big bad guy had too little personality, or perhaps not enough gravitas on screen. I think he displayed all the qualities of a sociopath to perfection, and combined it with the superiority-complex of most computer-literate geeks. :)
Fantastic film. I hope they’ll make another one soon. I really do. :)