Die Hard 4.0 aka Live Free or Die Hard
(incidentally – the “Live Free …” title? Worst. Title. Ever. LOL)
“You just killed a helicopter with a car!”
“I was out of bullets.”
Wow. I went into this pretty much with zero expectations, remembering more my general disinterest in the first two movies in the series than my late adolescent love of the last one, Die Hard With A Vengeance. In short (‘cos I have to be, ‘cos I’m kinda catching up here with tons of other random things to do lol), it’s great. Sadly, like a lot of things I seem to be watching recently, it kind of throws out its greatest moment too early, and the movie never quite tops its first 45 minutes (ending in the quote I started with) which are simply outstanding – but it keeps the bar impressively close to that level.
Timothy Olyphant makes a decent bad guy, though he’s capable of being scarier than this – just see The Girl Next Door – likewise, Justin Long is surprisingly tolerable as the “kid” sidekick, but it does feel a little like a video game at times, and the worst kind of video game at that, where you don’t actually get to play the hero, just hang around him lol. The Kevin Smith scene is plain surreal, I don’t know how else to describe it. Again, Bruce Willis feels almost surreal in those scenes, like he’s been cut into it all MTV Movie Awards parody style, lol.
But these are nitpicks. For those first 45 minutes alone, this is more than worth a look. It certainly beat Vengeance for me, and though it might not sound it, that’s really saying something coming from me.