Film review
Directed by: Len Wiseman
Starring: Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant, Maggie Q, Cyril Raffaelli
Classification: 15
After defining an era when it was released in 1988, Die Hard not only made Bruce Willis an action hero, it also spawned two successful sequels, and provided a wisecracking antidote to the action fare of Arnold Schwarzenneger and Sylvester Stallone.
It seems hard to believe that the last Die Hard movie was released in 1995, but twelve years later, Detective John McClane is back to take on the 21st Century, and prove that he's still top dog.
Justin Long plays Matthew Farrell, a computer hacker hired by cyber-terrorist Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) to write a seemingly harmless algorithm designed to test the security of an unnamed system. Unbeknown to him, Gabriel has hired a whole team of hackers to do the same thing on different systems, and who are conveniently 'deactivated' (read: blown up) when they have served their purpose.
After a security breach at the FBI, the Feds want to bring in all the named hackers on a hot list, and it falls to Detective John McClane to bring Farrell in. When Gabriel's usual mode of deactivation fails, he sends in a crack team of assassins to finish the job. One of these is Rand, played by the delectable Cyril Raffaelli, known to French action fans as the free-running expert and stuntman behind District 13. While Gabriel continues to send men after McClane and Farrell (who McClane repeatedly dispatches himself), he also focusses on crippling America's infrastructure. First he takes over the transport system, causing confusion by closing off tunnels, only to reopen them, changing all traffic lights to green, and using the CCTV systems to track our renegade duo. Next he takes out the financial power of the country by hitting Wall Street, before he turns his attentions to the utilities sector.
His plan is ultimately simple - by controlling all of the country's information, he plans to hold it to ransom. As a former whizzkid in charge of America's computer security, he's hell-bent on revenge after being run out of town for suggesting that their systems needed a rethink in the post 9/11 chaos. It's possible he would succeed, were it not for the blind luck that sees Farrell, the only hacker directly involved in plot, paired with McClane, the only man with enough dogged determination to track Gabriel down and take him out. He's made even more determined when Gabriel makes things personal, and kidnaps his estranged daughter, Lucy.
It doesn't exactly feel like a Die Hard film. For one thing, Olyphant makes a pretty unconvincing villain compared to Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons, and his team of identikit computer geeks are offset nicely against a cameo by Kevin Smith, playing a hacker extraordinaire named 'The Warlock'. The decision to use cyber-terrorism as 'the big evil' in an age where people no longer trust information if it ISN'T stored on a computer is naturally a clever one, designed to keep Die Hard feeling fresh and modern, but it also means that John McClane seems to be entirely in the wrong world. Gabriel calls him a 'Timex in a digital world' and McClane's inability to fit into this new order somehow correlates to the anachronism of a 21st Century Die Hard movie. Still, when you can't rely on technology, you can only rely on yourself, and McClane is more used than anyone to relying on himself to getting out of a tight spot and saving the day. A Timex might be old-fashioned, but it's still reliable.
McClane is as wisecracking as ever, and he builds up a good rapport with Farrell - where one is all brawn, the other is all brains, but one can't do his job without the back up of the other. Thus Die Hard 4.0 is as much of a buddy movie as the earlier installments, with the relationship between McClane and his assistant being the key to his success. It's also nice to see that McClane's stubbornness and the fire of ex-wife Holly Gennaro (played in earlier films by Bonnie Biedela, sadly missing here) is passed on to Lucy, who antagonises Gabriel and fights back in true McClane fashion. Who knows, maybe one day we could see Lucy McClane shouting the famous 'Yip-i-kai-ay' catchphrase in the face of a henchman!
Some people have criticised the film for dropping to a '15' classification, somehow feeling that this removes some of the grittiness and rawness that characterised the original trilogy. Thankfully, there are enough explosions and fights to ensure that the language might have been toned down, but Len Wiseman certainly hasn't clipped McClane's claws. It's an enjoyable rollercoaster ride of an action film, with all the thrills and spills that you'd expect from the franchise.
Rating: 5/5 Definitely worth watching.