Movies
Live Free or Die Hard - Movie Review
by efrain gomez
You die-hard fans of… well… the “Die Hard” movie franchise are going to hate me: I haven’t seen any of the prequels to Bruce Willis’ new movie “Live Free or Die Hard”. I think I saw parts of the first one when I was younger and all I remember was Bruce Willis cutting up his feet on broken glass on the billionth floor of a skyscraper while the dad from “Urkel” was on the ground with a walkie-talkie (I think the youngsters call’em “2-way radios”).
So, maybe I’m not cut out to review “Live Free or Die Hard”? Maybe, but I did have a good time.
Bruce Willis is John McClane, an old-school New York detective who’s bringing in a local computer hacker, Matt (Justin Long, “Mac” from the Apple commercials), to the feds for questioning.
This doesn’t happen easily, as there is a squadron of bad guys trying to kill Matt. Turns out that an evil teeth-clenched, cyber-genius (Timothy Olyphant, “The Girl Next Door”) is shutting down the country’s computer systems, sending us all back to the stone age over the Fourth-of-July weekend. Happy Independence Day, America.
Actually it’s our dependence on computers that’s the focus here. We get a small glimpse of the effects of a massive attack on our computer systems, and how helpless we are without them.
McClane doesn’t know much about computers, but that won’t stop him. In fact, almost nothing can. He’s like the action-heroes Stallone and Schwarzenegger would play - unstoppable, almost invulnerable heroes who’d walk out of a nuclear holocaust with only a scratch above their left eye.
In this case, after surviving some fantastically impossible action scenes like having several cars flinged at him while dodging at least 72,083 bullets, beating up a “ninja chick”, hurled around on an F-35 fighter plane and then jumping off at the last possible second before a giant explosion, he simply walks away with a scratch above his right eye and a “Yippee Ki Yay…!”
As for heroism in the face of life-threatening danger, some see it as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but McClane suggests that it’s just being the guy that’ll do it because no one else will. To McClane it’s, “Just doing my job”.
3 stars out of 4
Grade: B-
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