Just say Noah to 'Evan Almighty' Most of the vacancy at this hotel is in the minds of the writers Wily director's 'Golden Door' puts filmgoers on threshold of cinematic poetry Kingsley kills in "You Kill Me" Like a frothy Broadway tune, 'Show Business' is big on style, small on substance "A Mighty Heart" speaks softly but carries a big kick Bruce Willis is bald again and wisecracky again in "Live Free or Die Hard," but he does something with a gun I don't think I've ever seen. "Live Free" gives us what we'd expect from a "Die Hard" - with eight major explosions, it's the blow-uppiest movie of the year - and then freshens the formula. So, as John McClane puffs his chest out all over Washington, D.
C., in pursuit of computer-hacking evil geniuses, he's accompanied by a hypochondriac who freaks out at all the carnage (Justin Long plays him, amusingly uploading his sarcastic-guy act from the Apple Macintosh ads to the movies). "Live Free" is so bent on satisfying moviegoers that it practically admits it's a movie.
Say something funny," says bad guy Timothy Olyphant to Willis, apparently having seen - and grown weary of - Willis' stand-up antics in the first three "Die Hards." Another scene, in which terrorists transmit what turns out to be a fake image of them destroying a D.C.
landmark, plays on unsettling similarities between terrorism and movie magic (remember on 9/11 when everybody was saying it looked like a movie?). The terrorists in "Live Free" are home-grown creeps bent on shutting down the nation's power grid.
With an explosion every 15 minutes, there's plenty of action but, refreshingly, the action feels dangerous. Unlike the obviously digital "thrills" in this summer's third "Spider-Man" and "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, the stunts in "Live Free" appear to involve actual people, not animated facsimiles. I'm sure Willis was safe and sound and enjoying hot-and-cold running lattes for the entire shoot, but something is at stake in such scenes as a spectacular car pileup and an airplane/semi duel because the effects credibly insert him into the action.
Not that "Live Free" is realistic. The movie's hackers effortlessly access live video of anyone, anywhere (there's probably a government camera trained on you as you read this review. Smile!
), which makes for goofy fun. In fact, the only thing that would make "Live Free" more fun is if it had a decent villain. Previous "Die Hards" were energized by the elegant miscreancy of Jeremy Irons and Alan Rickman, but the colorless Olyphant, underplaying with all the drama and tension of a baseball player who has just struck out, is not in their league.
The "Die Hards," like 007 movies, need strong villains, but "Live Free," perhaps taking its title too literally, chintzed out by hiring an inexpensive TV dude. Someone like Kenneth Branagh or Cate Blanchett wouldn't come cheap, but it would be worth the extra dough to watch them die hard. Chris Hewitt can be reached at chewitt@pioneerpress.
com or 651-228-5552.
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