Last action hero
Although it has been more than a decade since his last tussle with criminals posing as terrorists, John McClane’s (Bruce Willis) still prone to bumping into these people whenever they’re in his vicinity, although you would tend to wonder where he was during 9/11. After dropping by Washington, D.C. to visit estranged daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), McClane gets a call to pick up hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long) for questioning, just in time to stop Farrell from being picked off by parkour-trained assassins. Apparently, Farrell unwittingly played a role in the assassins’ employer’s and cyber-criminal Thomas Gabriel’s (Timothy Olyphant) plot to cause large-scale mayhem and confusion in the United States. His plan involves disrupting communications, utilities and traffic across the country, mostly through computer-ing, and a bit of muscling too, of course, since this is an action movie after all.
Upon hearing the arrival of another Die Hard sequel, the question in most people’s minds were if the Eighties and Nineties action series, with its shoot-first-ask-questions-later machismo, still relevant in the new millennium. Surprisingly, Die Hard 4.0’s tacky-sounding cyber-terrorism plot does have an interesting point to say, pitting modern-day crises against the old-school values of one-man-anti-terrorism-unit John McClane. It’s almost parodic to see McClane sidestepping all the computer mumbo-jumbo, leaving them for his cyber-whiz sidekick to handle while he concentrates on the areas he’s best in – killing bad guys. But, in McClane’s own words, we still need “that guy”, who may not be the smartest or most technically savvy, but knows what’s right needs to be done. Here, the action hero of old does a more meaningful passing-of-the-torch than what transpired between Schwarzenegger and The Rock in The Rundown, teaching young Farrell not in the art of murdering people, but to stand up and do the right thing, because there isn’t anyone else to do it.
The same could be said of director Len Wiseman, who took over the near-hopeless task of reviving an Eighties action icon when original Die Hard director John McTiernan was charged for giving false statement to the FBI before he could sign up for the fourth installment. With a storyline interesting enough to keep an action movie afloat, all that was left for Wiseman to do was the “right thing” or three – retain the traditional stuntwork-based action sequences of the series, provide memorable villains for McClane to foil (except Olyphant’s head baddie, who is okay, but doesn’t stand a chance against Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons), and most importantly, don’t f*** around with John McClane’s character. Despite studio bosses doing the honours of said f***ing around by removing an important trademark of the Die Hard series – profanities – in order to secure a more lucrative PG-13 rating, surprisingly Wiseman’s keen eye for action and Bruce Willis’ unwavering badassness more than made up for it.
I’m still disappointed by a few things, one being the stupid movie portrayal of computer hacking as typing-really-quickly-on-the-keyboard, which implies that all office secretaries are potential hackers. Then there’s that utterly pointless and absurd McClane versus the Harrier jet sequence, where the jet loses to itself by housing the most reckless fighter pilot in the world in its cockpit.
Conclusion: the movie’s a lot of fun, Bruce Willis still has it, and Len Wiseman is a far better director than everyone thought. Bring on guilty pleasure Underworld 3! - BMF
For the record:
Die Hard > Die Hard With A Vengeance (Part 3) > Die Hard 4.0 > Die Harder (Part 2)
Justin Long = surprisingly not irritating
Under danger of being overused = The art of parkour
Maggie Q (yum) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (yum yum) = pretty badass, but = way too pretty to be taken seriously
Directed by Len Wiseman (Underworld, Underworld: Evolution) and written by Mark Bomback (Godsend) and David Marconi (Enemy of the State). Based on the article "A Farewell to Arms" by John Carlin. |
