Die Hard 4.0
By Mal Simons, Blockbuster.co.uk
“All you gotta do is go pick up a kid in New Jersey and drive him down to D.C. How hard can that be, huh?”
The world’s unluckiest action hero (apart from 24’s Jack Baer) is back in the first Die Hard movie for twelve years. A brilliant return to form for the action franchise; NYPD Detective John McClane must fight to save America from a brutal attack. There is more action in this than the other sequels, the acting’s great, the plot is no more ridiculous than the other movies… and best of all, the villain in this film is not related to the villain from the first movie.
If you are one of the two or three people in the world that have not seen a Die Hard movie, then you are missing a treat.
Die Hard, released in 1988, is without a doubt, one of the greatest action films of all time. Rather than copying other eighties action films of the decade which tended to feature a lead character with impossibly big muscles and attitude to match; Die Hard re-introduced the everyman action hero in the form of Detective John McClane.
Through the course of the first Die Hard, McClane repeatedly got beaten up as he tried to free his wife from nasty German terrorists. He lost his shoes, his shirt and pints and pints of blood. Unlike other action ‘heroes’, McClane had a thinning head of hair, a plain speaking New York attitude and wasn’t particularly muscular. McClane dispatched an entire building of terrorists and got hurt in the process. He wasn’t a superman, he was an everyman…gone were the days where ‘musclemen’ ruled the action genre and both McClane and
Bruce Willis quickly became
action legends.
The sequels to the first Die Hard were enjoyable but a little shaky…It’s been twelve years since the last of these Die Hard sequels (
With a Vengeance) first hit the big screen but John McClane is back and this time he’s taking on disgruntled IT guy called Thomas Gabriel (
Timothy Olyphant), a man determined to bring down the entire US economy.
It is not immediately clear why Gabriel wants to do this but in the fullness of time, all is revealed and it’s about as believable as the plots in the previous Die Hard movies. In the tradition of the franchise however, this film uses real stunts, very few CGI shots and therefore features some incredible action scenes. This outing also boasts not only fantastic acting from all involved but also a top notch script helped along by tweaks suggested by
Indie genius and Die Hard fan
Kevin Smith.
Still an NYPD Detective, McClane is ordered to pick up known hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long) and escort him to the FBI building in Washington DC after the FBI detects that their network has been hacked. Told that this is a simple pick up and drop off, McClane goes to collect his charge however it is not long before he is forced to return to his ‘die hard’ mode and dispatch a group of heavily armed mercenaries who have been sent to kill young and geeky Farrell.
Realising that there is more to this ‘kid’ than meets the eye (that’s not a plug for the other blockbuster of 2007 btw); McClane has to protect Farrell from Gabriel’s goons and get him safely to the FBI. Along the way, the two of them have to dodge bullets, helicopters and a rather striking kung fu woman. All in all, it’s another bad day for Detective John McClane.
If you only watch one sequel this year – make sure you watch this one. Bruce Willis and Justin Long are absolutely amazing – the perfect double act. Superior to the other Die Hard sequels and as close to the original as possible in the fact that it’s almost a perfect action movie, the franchise has returned to its roots and this is Die Hard at its best. Yippee-Ki-Yay…