It's time for the first review ever in this new blog. It's the holiday season and I've missed out on a lot of movies this year. Then again somethings are better left to being experienced in your own home and such is the case with today's review of Live Free Or Die Hard, the Unrated edition.
Now let's first look at the fact that this is the 4th in the Die Hard series, but the last was quite a few years ago, Die Hard With A Vengeance. The first thought here is, why are they making a sequel to this all of a sudden after 3 movies? Is Bruce Willis just desperate for it or is there a good reason to have this movie exist? It turns out that this was a long time in development and that effort actually does show up on screen. The next thing I thought was, when it comes to Die Hard movies, the titles are a bit lacking, especially Die Hard 2: Die Harder. I mean are you kidding me? Die Harder? I kept waiting for Die Hardest to come out but it never did. Thankfully, Live Free Or Die Hard is actually a pretty darn good title. None of these besides With A Vengeance, which is cheesy anyway, seem to correlate directly to the plot though this one generally does.
Let's get right to it. This film focuses on a plot to essentially bring the US infrastructure to its knees using all the computer controlled things we hold dear, like transportation and power. Shut these things down and you can create massive chaos, which definitely makes sense in today's world. Just seeing how the Northeast power outage affected people adds weight to the film. So we've got a pretty smart bad guy to pull this stuff off and he's an American this time around, so none of that outside terrorism stuff we were expecting going in, though his henchmen may be foreign. John McClane, wily cop that he is, always in the wrong place at the wrong time, a topic the film plays on tongue-in-cheek, has to keep a hacker safe played not too badly by Justin Long who inadvertently helped the bad guy. So as things keep getting worse and eventually the bad guy takes hold of John's daughter, the action just keeps amping up.
Perhaps the best sequence involves a tunnel, where both directional gates are opened up on our heroes and then the lights turned out, scary stuff if you were the one having to survive it. But survival is McClane's middle name, you cannot kill this man. He'll jump from a semi to an F-35 all while cracking wise and walking away from an explosion to hunt the bad guys down on foot if he has to. Yet strangely enough this is all handled with wonderful aplomb and intelligence. Action sequences may sometimes be over the top, most notably one of the last scenes but it's still the best and grittiest Die Hard since the original.
As I said this was the Unrated version and as a rental, not much else existed on this version of the DVD. The purpose of the Unrated version was moreso to put the swearing back into the movie, which was not present in the theatrical PG-13 release. Frankly you don't make this movie unless it's an R, because taking away curse words from a guy who has to pull off this kind of crap all the time makes no sense. I doubt the R was used for much else, the violence isn't overly bloody or gory in any way.
The film surprisingly both lives up the name and is a great entry into the action genre. This was a late sequel worthy of creation, a trend getting more popular with the likes of Rambo, Rocky, and Indiana Jones. This series is the easiest to create new things with though, because all you need is John McClane and a wild situation he's stuck trying to solve. That's the beauty of Die Hard, our hero doesn't go looking for trouble, all the bad stuff happens to him and he has to somehow survive it and unwillingly solve it.
Live Free Or Die Hard gets the Gold Medal of Yippie Kay Yaying. Alan Rickman would be proud.
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2 comments:
So they replace Sam Jackson with Justin Long and it still is good? Never would have thunk it.
Let's be fair, Justin Long is no replacement for Samuel L. Jackson. That said, what keeps the movie afloat is the interesting premise of the film and the well handled action and character of John McClane. He may seen superheroic but he gets beaten up pretty good at least.
The story is actually taken from an article which is mentioned in the credits, about what would happen if someone took out our infrastructure. It's a fairly scary and smart concept for today. There may be a lot of quick typing and hacking but this is an action film after all, have to suspend some belief.
Also there's a cameo from Kevin Smith which is always awesome. Actually that may not be true as it did bupkis for Daredevil.
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