Yippee ki yay, 2007-style: Bruce Willis returns as John McClane in Live Free or Die Hard. Live Free or Die Hard , the long-delayed (and for some, long-awaited) fourth instalment in the series, has been touting itself as an old-school action movie: None of your fancy computer-generated effects here, kids, just good ol’ car crashes, fireballs and stunt doubles. It turns out the story itself is also old school.
Even though it’s set post-Sept. 11 and the plot hinges on the potential for infrastructural chaos suggested by the Katrina disaster, in all other respects it harks back to a simpler time, i.e.
, the 1990s, when terrorists were finite, their leaders were easily located and they could be taken down by one resourceful vigilante cop in a T-shirt. Given the ugly title, a play on the New Hampshire state motto (Live free or die) that smacks of the kind of rhetoric coming out of the Bush White House in the early days of the Iraq invasion, I went in expecting something jingoistic and Republican-friendly. But given the current mood of disillusion in the U.
S., the time for making that kind of action film has passed, at least temporarily, and Live Free or Die Hard is sturdily apolitical. Its chief villain, white and with the very Christian name of Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant), is a petulant computer expert, formerly employed by the U.
S. government, whose security recommendations after Sept. To prove his point, he’s orchestrated a “fire sale” — cyber-speak for a wholesale shutdown of the national infrastructure via the internet.
Once again, Bruce Willis’s dogged New York cop, John McClane, stumbles into the centre of the plot when he’s recruited by the feds to fetch a young hacker, Matt Farrell (Justin Long of the Apple computer ads — talk about typecasting), who has unwittingly aided the bad guys. And once again, McClane takes it upon himself to defeat them, with Farrell in tow to provide his computer expertise as well as some intergenerational tension. Long’s Farrell, who resembles Jimmy Fallon and is nearly as annoying, rolls his eyes with exasperation over McClane’s Luddite incomprehension of digital technology, whines about being hungry and is the target of our aging hero’s gruff “back in my day” wisecracks.
There might have been a Robert De Niro-Ben Stiller comic chemistry here if the writing was better — and if Willis didn’t give such a perfunctory performance. The smart-ass McClane of the first (and best) , with his cowboy craziness, is now a hollow husk, and the fact that his wife has left him and he’s estranged from his daughter only goes halfway to explaining his weary, laconic attitude. (Given the 12-year hiatus between this and the last Yippee ki yay, 2007-style: Bruce Willis returns as John McClane in Live Free or Die Hard.
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