Movie Review: DIE HARD 4.0
Growing up, and even to this day, there’s three characters that define everything I love about movies. I loved them when I first encountered them and I love them to this day. They are Indiana Jones, Rocky Balboa and Detective John McClane. They’ll eventually be joined by Captain Jack Sparrow and Jason Bourne but right now, those three are my go-to-guys when I want guaranteed cinematic brilliance.
When Stallone talked of Rocky VI, I remained sceptical and didn’t want to see one of my all time favourite movie characters you know “mangled and embarrassed” (to quote the eventual film itself!). I ended up reviewing the film (you can read that review right here!) and stated that:
“… This is an exceptional closing episode to one of my favourite franchises of all time. Judge it within the confines of the movies that preceded it and it is up there with the best of them. Hell, judge it away from it’s own franchise, and you’ll still find it to be a moving, genuine, surprise and a strong contender for the ‘sleeper’ hit of the year…”
Indiana Jones IV is currently filming and – so perfect is the original trilogy in my eyes – I just can’t bear to see it messed with in any way, shape or form so I’m still pretty opposed to that impending release.
Then there’s Bruce Willis’ John McClane and his Die Hard adventures. For me, the first is an unarguable classic not just of the action genre but in the echelons of movie history. The second was an extremely admirable attempt to overcome the hurdle of “… how can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?” and a great slice of pure escapist fun to boot. The third was much-maligned but loved by me. It’s one of the best third entries in a movie franchise and, whilst ever so slightly flawed, it handles the character of John McClane in an interesting and respectful manner.
Now there’s a fourth entry in the Die Hard franchise. You all know from the ATBs and the recent articles that this is the “big one” for me. I’ve not been reticent about seeing another Die Hard movie like I am about another Indiana Jones adventure. In fact, regular readers will know that I’ve been tracking this project as long back as when John McTiernan was on board and considering remaking Baek Woon-Hak’s The Tube into a fourth McClane outing. As far as I’m concerned, as long as they treat McClane in the manner they did with the 1995 outing then I’d be delighted to see a new Die Hard film every two years.
Well Die Hard 4.0 is finally here under a huge weight of anticipation and ‘interweb’ word-of-mouth dictating that it’s not a “Die Hard movie”, that McClane shouldn’t be “bald” and – most importantly of all – it’s too diluted (a PG-13 in the US where it’s titled release there is Live Free or Die Hard) in the action stakes. And the only thing that matters for me is whether it didn’t knock John McClane off the pedestal I’ve had him placed on for all these years!
Forget all that talk about the fact that a Die Hard movie can’t be PG-13 and that it has to be “exceptionally violent” and “brutal” in order to be worthy. Die Hard with a Vengeance was particularly neither of these things and it turned out rather well. In making a Die Hard movie there’s little visual templates that are needed to let the viewer know that they’re watching a John McClane movie and not some variation on it, starring Seagal, Van Damme or Wesley Snipes:
We’ve got to have a cold opening with no credits, the title has got to slam from either side of the screen to meet in the middle, you’ve got to have the distant yet elegant, classical yet-hugely-bombastic-when-it-needs-to-be Michael Kamen score and your final frame has got to be a slow pull-back to show the emergency services getting to the scene too late because McClane has already kicked arse, set to an old musical standard.
With Michael Kamen long dead, Marco Beltrami does an exceptional job of echoing his work in the previous three films and creating a connection, musically, between Die Hards 1, 2 and 3 and this latest entry into the franchise. That, plus executing the final frame in the way we’ve come to expect (this time round we’re played out to Creedance Clear Water Revival!), is the only visual templates retained by director Len Wiseman. Because of this, because of the fact that we open on actual credits like a “normal movie” and no ‘Die Hard’ title slamming onto the screen like we’ve come to expect, I was immediately put on edge and became immediately defensive against “just exactly what they’ve messed up” with this film.
The feeling of being ill-at-ease didn’t last. I fucking loved this film. You can argue about how watered-down McClane is because of the rating as much as you like but it just isn’t true – Take the scene in the tunnel where McClane is talking to himself as he plans his next move. It’s exactly the same self-effacing dude who chatted away to himself whilst he crawled through elevator shafts or hung out of helicopters or jumped on top of subway trains. He’s as aggressive, belligerent and cranky as he’s always been (his taunting of Timothy Olyphant’s “master villain” about his “Asian whore” is up there with pretty much any of his other politically-incorrect zingers in the previous films: “…Mai? Asian chick, likes to kick people? Yeah, last time I saw her she was at the bottom of an elevator shaft with an SUV rammed up her ass…”) and he sheds a fair old amount of blood as proceedings develop. So we don’t get to see the bullet-wounds from when guns are fired and the fight sequences are cut deliberately to avoid showing any blood/woundings. It doesn’t matter. The look and feel of the film is still there without these things because it moves so friggin’ fast you don’t have time to notice.
I got told to go into this film expecting a “great action movie” but not to expect a “Die Hard movie”. Well I got as good a “Die Hard movie” experience as I could have asked for in terms of how they treat the character of John McClane. The little touches regarding his divorce, the flash image of Bonnie Bedelia’s Holly McClane on the screen via her drivers license, his relationship with his estranged daughter, the brief expression on McClane’s face when he finds out he’s working with another “Agent Johnson” in another “terrorist” situation, and that speech between McClane and Matt Farrell (Justin Long) about the personal impact of “being a hero”… They all worked brilliantly to link John McClane back to the audience after a twelve year absence and to remind us as to why we’ve got such a soft-spot in our hearts for him that the likes of Segal’s Casey Ryback or Hasselhoff’s Jake Gorsky will never replace! 
It’s testament to just how great this film is as a slice of blockbuster entertainment that, unlike the other summer movies so far, the flaws – and yes the film does have them – don’t distract or take away from your entertainment. Yes, seeing McClane flying a helicopter (because he’s “faced his fears” from Part II) is a bit of a clunker (and smacks of the whole 24 thing when they have to get Jack Bauer from A to B and just pull a “helicopter” out of nowhere and an explanation as to how he can fly it), the entire Kevin Smith extended cameo just falls completely flat and seems very much out of place and then there’s that ‘climax’:
Len Wiseman should be commended for shooting an action movie as well as he has here considering there is nothing in those Underworld movies that indicates he is capable of pulling off something like this. Within the first ten minutes of the film, he executes perfectly a montage of events that puts us, the viewer, exactly where we need to be – we learn of the plan that is up and running to take down America’s technical infrastructure, we watch the assassination of the geeks involved that are no longer required and we land straight at the feet of ‘Senior Detective’ John McClane as he deals with the college student getting “fresh” with his estranged daughter, Lucy. From the following scene onwards, Wiseman treats us to an edge-of-the-seat, big dumb action adventure ride with as unrelenting a sense of pace as you could possibly ask for.
But then, as if he is desperately in search of a way to top himself and having front loaded acts one and two with that tunnel sequence and that elevator-shaft-fight-sequence between Willis’ McClane and the fantastic/gorgeous Maggie Q as Mai, a new breed of cinematic hench(wo)man, Wiseman treats us to the infamous ‘big truck versus fighter jet’ finale that is overblown, ridiculous and very nearly destroys all the wonderful perfectly-pitched big, dumb fun that has come before it. It turns the character of John McClane into the very sort of living cartoon that he was the antithesis of throughout the other movies (and conveniently climbing out of the rubble just next to the bad guy’s lair? This isn’t Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris territory here, people!).
From there, the actual finale itself is a deflated, rather disappointing affair (shooting someone through your own wound? Come on now?) and, regardless of how weak you thought Timothy Olyphant’s villain, Thomas Gabriel, was, we still shouldn’t be denied a better confrontation between McClane and him then what we get.
It’s proof of how good all that has gone before it that as dreadfully stupid as the climax is (not forgetting that really weak epilogue involving McClane, Matt, Lucy and the issue of “dating”) and as truly smack-in-the-face-disappointing as it is in the face of the rest of the movie and the franchise as a whole, you just can’t hate the film. There’s going to be people who are going to come out of this screaming for the heads of the Fox Marketing Department once again when they realise that – in the action stakes – every “big” sequence has already been chewed up, mulled over and spat out in the spate of trailers released over the last few months. In terms of action, there really are no surprises.
This was a real pleasant surprise in terms of how McClane was handled. It was even more of a pleasant surprise to find out how just unashamedly entertaining an experience it was. It’s the lesser of all the Die Hard movies but it’s great to say that it’s still a Die Hard movie for a good 80% of it’s running time. It’s big, loud, fast-paced, stupid, slam-bang blockbuster fun and – so far – it’s the very best of the Summer seasons offering. Hell, with only Jason Bourne really left to put up a fight, in such a Summer season crowded with sequels, this is the best of the lot!
A really great night out at the cinema!!!
This review was first published in July-07 on Filmrot.com
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