Voila! In case you missed my review for Die Hard, Die Hard 2 and Die Hard with a Vengeance, its respectively HERE, HERE and HERE! After the guilt of not putting this up, I had to get around to it even if my boyfriend didn’t want to see it! I really didn’t enjoy this movie when I saw it this for the first time a few years ago. It is the marathon so I’m going to finish this marathon in style (even if its delayed) and give this flick another chance.
Director: Len Wiseman
Cast: Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant, Maggie Q, Cliff Curtis
Due to an FBI technical breach/hack, Director Bowman (Cliff Curtis) sent out senior detectives on a urgent call and this directed John McClane (Bruce Willis) to pick up a professional hacker Matthew Farrell (Justin Long) to be delivered to the FBI. During this pickup, Matthew is attacked. With McClane’s help, they both escape but end up getting stuck in downtown Washington in the crisis of a shutdown of the city performed by a team of organized terrorists lead by Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) and his team including his girlfriend Mai (Maggie Q) who is in the process of doing a fire sale (meaning transportation, financial and all utilities down) to cripple the nation. McClane has to team up with Matthew and use his knowledge to track down where Thomas and his team will attack next before the complete whatever they are trying to accomplish.
Just to clarify, I don’t really hate this movie. Its not like its really bad. Its extremely crazy action-packed and intense for most of it. There’s a lot of over the top explosions, shooting and its loud and destructive in most of the time. Its pretty much what you would expect in a Die Hard movie. Just look at THE MOST awesome scene in the whole movie: the helicopter being “killed” by a car.
Bruce Willis’s John McClane is amazing to watch on screen as always. We can tell that its not his time anymore. The technology and virtual terrorism is way past what he understands and thats why we have Justin Long’s Matthew Farrell. This is where we get McClane and Matt throwing comments about age and being old. There is a lot of sarcastic humor (at least I call it that) and I love that stuff. This is probably the first movie (when I saw it the first time) that I saw Justin Long. Honestly, I was pretty impressed. He’s a decent actor and he’s done some alright movies. I enjoy watching these types of roles on screen. It always makes me laugh. Plus, they had a good dynamic going on. It made for a lot of entertaining dialogue throughout this action flick.
Next up, I always talk about the terrorist. Timothy Olyphant plays Thomas Gabriel and to tell you the truth, he’s pretty convincing. I’ve never seen him do a downright bad-ass guy. This time, he may not be emoting a lot with his face for a majority of the movie but his eyes are crazy full of hatred. He’s convincing enough in my book. Maybe its because my computer knowledge is definitely far from hacker knowledge so I have no idea what was going to happen next. This guy is the best part of the bad guys…Its good he is the leader of them, right?
Next I go to the annoying part of this movie. The lady right up there! Maggie Q pisses me off in this one because there is no one that can survive the amount of crap she goes through. Okay, we see McClane stand up to a lot of damage but he’s lucky all the time. This girl is throwing McClane around (but thats okay, some chicks are strong and I secretly imagine that I can kick my 6 foot 3 boyfriend’s ass if needed with my 5 foot 3 physique and I strength train and do weights, etc). BUT, what I don’t get is how she can get flopped around, beat up repeatedly and then have a huge shelf fall on her and still be alive. *MINOR SPOILER*Say, she has a crazy tough bone structure, but how can she even survive an SUV hitting her at a crazy speed and still climb up a hanging vehicle*END*. I’m sorry, its just my rant on seemingly impossible to kill villains. The other bad guys were a bit on the weird side because they have assembled a team of French and Italian and they all don’t communicate in English when calling back to the central enemy base. It just doesn’t correlate.
Don’t get me wrong! I actually ended up enjoying this movie a whole lot. I actually have it playing in the background as I type this up. Its intense and fun! The cast is pretty awesome (except for Maggie Q). Its just a bigger and more modern Die Hard than the previous few. Of course, its still not the first Die Hard but I wouldn’t skip it if I had to do the marathon. I’d say its worth your time if you can just shut off your mind and just love the intensity and McClane’s crazy encounter with being at the wrong place at the wrong time 😉
Tranquil Dreams 