Die Hard is arguably one of the best action movies ever made and has one of the best villains ever. Die Hard 2 isn't that good but it's still an entertaining flick. Die Hard with a Vengeance is a tense action movie with a good villain and an incredible sidekick. Live Free or Die Hard is the point of no-return, the moment the franchise started drowning.
12 years after he stopped Simon Gruber, John McClane (Bruce Willis) joins forces with a young hacker (Justin Long) to take down Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant), the leader of an Internet-based terrorist organization who is trying to take over America from their computers.
The plot to Die Hard movies have never been the greatest out there. They were indeed full of holes and quite illogic at times. Still, they were pretty tense and had enough elements of surprise to keep you engaged throughout the whole film. Live Free or Die Hard's plot is none of those. Instead, it is a compilation of clichés and predictable and ridiculous plot points.
The characters don't get any better, starting from John McClane, a character I used to love because he was the opposite of your typical action hero. He was a real human being. Now he's some indestructible superhuman. Also, the humour that used to be one of his strengths now is very forced and unappealing. Willis himself looks bored in this.
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| 20th Century Fox |
McClane's hacker/geek sidekick is no Samuel L. Jackson's Zeus and he's also annoying. Not to mention how terrible Justin Long is. The villain is weak, dull, forgettable and not even that clever. The henchman (played by Maggie Q) is just as terrible and it takes her so much to die that her turning out to be McClane's daughter would have made such a great twist.
On the other hand, there's the action, arguably the most important element in movies of this genre. And it's quite good. It isn't as exciting and thrilling as it was in the previous movies, and most of it is explosions, but the stunts are well staged and these sequences are rather entertaining.
The problem is that the action, although there's plenty of it, isn't enough to save this overlong and boring film.
Your opening paragraph sums it all up. And Willis does indeed look bored. The worst part is that I actually paid to see this in a theater. I hated life the rest of that day.
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