Film Review: Live Free or Die Hard

An improvement over the previous mess but a good film this does not make. Let’s just say that this film, like much of what Hollywood is putting out lately, is geared towards the brain-dead crowd who wants their action loud and story nil (or gone altogether) and R-rated violence numbed to the PG-13 crowd so that everyone and their grandmother won’t feel offended to go see. I’m offended that groundbreaking Die Hard franchise has been dumbed down to a knock-off of itself with neither the creativity nor the heart of its predecessor.

Let’s just forget that in both the first two films the heart of the film was watching how far John McClane (again Bruce Willis) will go to save the woman he loves not to mention his marriage. Everything he did was geared towards McClane discovering what truly made him both an endearing and fallible hero. He was someone whom the audience felt went through hell in order to reach heaven. Although in the third film the relationship with his wife was numbed down to a couple phone calls and off remarks from secondary characters, you never felt like McClane had any personal stake in what was going on around him and therefore the film became nothing more than a cop film with no heart. Nothing we hadn’t seen before by the countless other Die Hard knock-offs of the ‘90s.

The new film Lie Free or Die Hard is nothing more than action set pieces stitched together in an action movie with little story to tie everything together. I’m not saying there isn’t one; I just saying that other knock-offs have come up with better. In Die Hard 4 McClane is having problems with his daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who looks to be in college prompting me to think has twenty years really gone by since the last film?) and to top it off he’s been put in charge of bringing a local hacker (Justin Long) to Washington D.C. for questioning by the FBI. This routine pick up turns into a blood bath of bullets as McClane soon discovers that the hacker may be responsible for helping a terrorist take over the United States via computers. The rest of the film follows McClane and the hacker from one set piece to the next as they try to overthrow the terrorists trying to overthrow the U.S. government. I commend screenwriter Mark Bomback for trying his hand at a patriotic action film similar to what Stallone did with his Rambo films, but those films had a heart and spirit left void here.

Once you get past the first fifteen minutes of set up which is atrociously paced giving the impression of a bad script with even worse acting from everyone involved because everything feels forced, the action set pieces are quite good and excellently handled by director Len Wiseman and his crew. This is not surprising since Wiseman did an excellent job on the Underworld series of films if only he had borrowed those screenwriters for a rewrite. There are several nice moments between McClane and the hacker, whose constantly asks why McClane does what he does, that question the definition of what a hero “is” and what a hero sacrifices in order to become a hero. These scenes are at the heart of the film only by the end of the film there is no payoff for McClane’s character as he never truly realizes what he has sacrificed to become this “All-American Hero” that everyone in the film claims he is.

I’m sure they tried to show this through his relationship with his daughter Lucy, who at the beginning of the film claims her mother’s maiden name, but her scenes are few and far in between and she comes off as a last minute addition to the film as her character truly has nothing to do.

The film also has no problem going against character as the mastermind behind the terrorism Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) has no problem forcing his men to kill innocents in order to kill McClane, as the scene in the tunnel plainly shows, but for no reason at all he has problems killing McClane’s daughter, McClane being the man that killed his girlfriend and constantly provokes him to no end. Gabriel should’ve had no problems killing McClane’s daughter and then taunting him to no end but because the film is hampered by so many other things these scenes in the third act are laughable at best.

The film is best played for laughs as that’s all that’s left in the franchise since McClane has now become as bad as Spider-Man with the one liners and retorts. Not once in the entire film do you ever feel McClane is any danger and not once do you find yourself taking anything seriously. We all know it is a film and meant to entertain but how far does the action film genre have to fall before we finally say enough is enough? Where are the original Die Hards or Lethal Weapons or First Blood? Has the well dried so much or does Hollywood just no longer have a backbone? Where has the heart gone?