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Live Free or Die Hard

Directed by Len Wiseman

Written by Mark Bomback

Starring Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant

Classification: 14A

Rating: **½

What better name for every movie suffering from a severe case of sequel-itis? They should call the whole damn lot of them Die Hard. Hell, they should call the entire industry Die Hard. Oops, excuse my mini-rant, and on to the serious business at hand. We're here to ponder the latest incarnation of John McClane, who is sometimes known as Bruce Willis and who hasn't been seen in these cinematic parts for 12 long years, not since the aptly titled Die Hard: With a Vengeance. So John/Bruce is back, and two things jump right out at you. First: He's older, balder, paunchier, more grizzled. Second, and just as inevitable: Even without a cape and a Lycra suit, the guy is as indestructible as ever.

Actually, in the ads and trailers, his cape-less status is being used as something of a selling point for this picture – you know, a return to the kind of gritty and believable action where the hero fends off 100 machine-gun-toting baddies unaided by anything so credibility-stretching as spidey filaments or fists of steel, the kind where real jet planes crash into real helicopters, which topple into real Mack trucks and they all blow up real good without the benefit of any sissy Computer Generated Imagery. Yeah, just like the good old days.

In fact, computers in general are the enemy here, at least our dependency on them and thus our vulnerability to villains who hack into them, threatening to collapse the whole infrastructure of the United States. The evil ones just do that Ctrl/Alt/Delete thing and, poof, out goes the power grid, down go the financial markets and ... well, that's all I can remember but that's enough. I mean, take away from your modern homo sapiens his electricity and his debit card, and it's back to the cave with the brute.

Anyway, such is the nifty-enough premise. What's more, the villain in question is a disgruntled ex-Fed determined to prove that Homeland Security is irresponsibly lax in these matters. An arrogant sort, Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) has a low opinion of his former colleagues and a timely way of making his point: “It took FEMA five days to get water to the Superdome.” There's even some humour in the fellow. When he commandeers the airways, and his broadcast warning is an artfully edited montage of presidential speeches from JFK to Little Bush, that's kinda funny. But when, on the same video, he fakes the detonation of the Capitol building, that's kinda scary, if only because this act of “virtual terrorism” seems so uncannily like the actual terrorism of 9/11, where the TV imagery looked equally unreal.

Of course, by now it's time for John/Bruce to ride to the rescue. Our retro hero is dismissed by Gabriel as “a Timex watch in a digital age,” but we know he'll keep on ticking – and quipping, while dodging bullets and fighter jets. And just to prove that not all computer geeks are nefarious, John/Bruce has an ally in Matt, the benign nerd, who steers Old Man Analogue through the electronic thickets and is pretty fast with a quip himself. He's portrayed, quite amusingly, by Justin Long, whose face you may recall from those Apple commercials, where the laid-back Apple kid is always lording it over the hapless PC gent. So Long plays on the winning side in that computer war too – think of it as a new form of typecasting.

There's also a delicious cameo from Kevin Smith as the primus inter pares of geeks, the sort of thirtysomething who still lives with his mommy in a basement filled with enough high-tech equipment to start a revolution – or, in this case, to thwart one. In the moments at his disposal, Smith almost steals the flick. He's so wittily government-phobic that I found myself hoping for a climax that would blow Bruce Willis away and promote Kevin Smith to saviour-of-the-free-world. Now that might be a sequel worth rooting for.

Yes, from the mechanics of the plot to the quirks in the characters, the movie has a bit of zip. Alas, the zip ends whenever the stunts start, whenever the choppers chatter and the Mack trucks hang perilously from some urban cliff. Immediately, the editing gets choppy, the jagged close-ups get disorienting and the effect is soporific. So all the pricey scenes that eat up the budget also devour the picture. The paradox of most action films, especially the ones with relatively inept directors like Len Wiseman, is that the action stops the film. Worse, this paradox comes with an attendant fallacy: that the best way to solve the static problem is to make the stunts even larger, the bangs even bigger. Wrong: More action just stops the film longer.

That's why, so often in this genre, all hell breaks loose, and your eyes glaze over. It's ironic, given Hollywood's penchant for blowing stuff up, how few filmmakers have the talent for it, for shooting violent destruction with kinetic flair. Most, like Wiseman, live free with the plot and die hard with the action – the killing they love is the death of them.