DVD REVIEW: "Live Free or Die Hard"

Does "Live Free or Die Hard" defy logic? Is it wildly implausible? Of course it is, but, then, it this wasn’t true, "Live Free or Die Hard" would not be a worthy part of the franchise.

So let’s just stipulate that at the beginning and go on to say this is a fun, action-packed film complete with great stunts, an interesting plot and a bunch of characters that are defined more carefully than usual for films of this genre.

It’s interesting to note that legions of this film’s viewers would have been under the age of 5 the last time Bruce Willis appeared on the screen as John McLane in "Die Hard: With a Vengeance." I mention that only because I’m thinking teen-age males are this film’s primary audience, especially since this is the first of the four "Die Hard" films to have a PG-13 rating (probably because McLane’s language is toned down 300 notches this time around). But McLane is a character that doesn’t have to be familiar to his core audience. All he has to do is smash the driver’s side window of the parked car belonging to guy trying to grope McLane’s daughter, Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and his persona is established.

Here’s the narrative in a nutshell. Because the incident with Lucy and her "not boyfriend" happens on the campus of Rutgers University, the state university of New Jersey, McLane, a New York City policeman, is sent to Camden, New Jersey, at the behest of the FBI to pick up a computer hacker. So here’s the first implausible moment. Camden is 62 miles from the main campus of Rutgers, but only three miles — actually just across the bridge — from Philadelhia. So why wasn’t a cop summoned from Philly? I dunno, perhaps the Rutgers referenced here is the Camden campus, but let’s not quibble over geography or campuses. The reason this nerd is needed is because someone is hacking into all of the government’s computer systems causing havoc. In a brilliant casting stroke, the hacker, Matthew Farrell, is played by Justin Long, best known for playing "Mac" in those "Mac vs. PC" television commercials. Because of our familiarity with Long, we immediately accept Farrell as a computer expert. McLane is told to bring Farrell to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. All hell breaks lose as soon as McLane arrives at Farrell’s apartment and doesn’t let up for two hours, time that flies by amazingly quickly largely due to Len Wiseman’s direction.

The bad guys are led by Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant), who tried to warn U.S. officials that their computer systems could be easy targets for terrorist attacks and is banished because of it. So he decides to prove his thesis and make a lot of money in the process. He is aided by the best villainess Mai Lihn (Maggie Q) the screen has seen in an action film in a long, long time and a bunch of other computer geeks Gabriel plans to dispatch when they are no longer needed.

What makes the best of the "Die Hard" films — the first one and this one — work is because steps are taken to humanize McLane. Here is a guy who really wants to be a family man, but violence always gets in the way. What’s ironic is that the violence comes largely because of McLane’s attempts to protect his family. McLane was motivated in the first film because his wife was being held hostage by terrorists. In this one, Gabriel kidnaps and plans to kill Lucy. So for McLane, his quests seem to be far more personal than simply truth, justice and the American way and this makes them far less heroic and far more blue collar everyman. Not that everyman could drive an 18-wheeler over collapsing highway bridges or shoot down a helicopter with a police car acting as a missile, but he sure makes it seem like everyman could. McLane simply shrugs all this off and continues on his relentless pursuit.

Although the 18-wheeler vs. jet fighter and the helicopter vs. police car scenes are madly implausible, they somehow work in the context of the movie. As a matter of fact, all the action scenes deliver the goods. All except one. There’s a scene in which Gabriel directs (I suppose) Americas’s entire supply of natural gas to the center of a power grid and then asks us to believe that once it arrived, the gas would spontaneously combust. I think the gas could conceivably burst from its pipes, but I doubt it would explode. But there are a pair of other action scenes at this location that are so good — one involving McLane and a bad guy with more quick moves than Spiderman and the other in which McLane battles Mai in what seems like a bottomless elevator shaft — that I’m more than willing to forgive the gas goof.

There is a fine line that separates the time in an actor’s life when he should leave the action roles to the Matt Damons and the Mark Wahlbergs of the profession. It was obvious in films like "Firewall" and "The Sentinel" that Harrison Ford and Michael Douglas have probably crossed that line. It is equally obvious from "Live Free or Die Hard" that Bruce Willis hasn’t.

GRADE: B