November 7, 2009: Live Free or Die Hard
I have been a Die Hard fan for a fairly long time, integrating the films into the family Christmas routine as far back as the early 1990s. With this franchise, Bruce Willis handily established himself as a capable action star with the indelible character of John McClane, the profane but fiercely intelligent and resourceful everyman cop who finds himself in rough situations where he’s the only one capable of saving the day. From a taut and relatively small-scale adventure in the first film in 1988, the franchise devolved into cartoonish but fun buffoonery for the second film in 1990 and then tightened up to a fascinatingly antiseptic and spare “action puzzle” for the third film in 1995. Now, over a decade later, we revisit McClane in a modern action story, and it seems like a fitting place to pick up on his current life.
In a nice little integration of previously seen characters, we have McClane’s daughter (portrayed as a cute youngster in the first film as she answered the telephone and talked to her father) all grown up now and tied up in the plot of the film. McClane’s always-strained relationship with his wife has now permanently dissolved and he seems resigned to his sworn duty as a police detective saving the world in his little way. When a psychopath unleashes a plot to shut down computer and utility systems across the eastern US, guess who is the only one who can save the day?
This was my first time seeing Live Free or Die Hard since I had seen it when it first came out a couple of summers ago. The theatrical version was a horribly butchered PG-13-rated atrocity, with obvious dubbing and hacked up scenes of gory gunplay distracting from an implausible but otherwise fun couple of hours of action and destruction. This unrated home video version is much more in line with what I was expecting, if not quite so gleefully profane as the first three solidly R-rated pictures (in the third film, we even have Samuel L. Jackson joining up with Bruce Willis for much of the action – the f-words numbered in the hundreds as you might have expected). I found the story in Live Free or Die Hard to be faster-paced on this second viewing, with some of the least believable plot elements not seeming to drag as much as the first time around. The basic story is sound, with computer systems being relatively easy to infiltrate remotely but big utilities kept offline and requiring physical attacks in order to shut them down. A startling amount of the computer technology stuff really pushes towards fantasy, though, with any imaginable data at the fingertips of the bad guys within seconds and often in full 3D models, with no consideration given to data transfer times or other such mundane details. Kevin Smith’s cameo as an over-the-top super-geek is as painful to watch as any other time he speaks on-screen. But hey, if you throw in a sequence with a military plane chasing a semi-trailer rig on a highway interchange, and another one of a police car flying into a helicopter, I’m happy.
This seems a fair addition to the Die Hard franchise in the way that the new Rambo and Indiana Jones films also updated their characters’ universes with a modern sensibility. Recommended for fans of the series, but if you’re looking for a plain old action film, you can probably find something that makes a lot more sense.
Another late franchise extension does well.
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