Nima Yousefi's Equinox of Insanity

Live Free or Die Hard

Short review

This movie is freakin’ awesome!

Long review

Big props go to Bruce Willis for kicking ass and taking names, and especially to director Len Wiseman, the guy who’s married to smoking hot Kate Beckinsale (and who directed those Underworld movies), for creating a non-stop action movie that’s a thrill to watch. I literally kept blurting our “holy crap” over and over again because the action sequences were just awesome. I’m talking “the best I’ve seen in years” awesome.

Going into this film there were two really big questions on hand: does the film work as PG-13 and how frickin’ annoying is Justin Long going to be? If you haven’t figured it out from the trailers, Justin “Hi, I’m a Mac” Long plays the zany sidekick to Willis’ John McClane. Except he’s not actually a sidekick, which is why he works. McClane is assigned to bring Long in for questioning, and then spends the next two acts of the film keeping him, the target of the film’s terrorists, from getting killed. It works, and works well. I’d go so far as to say that it works better than Sam Jackson as the sidekick in Die Hard with a Vengeance (though clearly Long is no Sam Jackson). Long’s ability to work in this film gives me some hope for Shia LaBeouf being in the next Indian Jones flick.

Now about the rating … if I didn’t know it was PG-13 I wouldn’t have guessed it. I have no idea what the MPAA considers ‘R’ these days, but this film is brutally violent. Those action sequences I told you about, well there’s a lot of people getting smashed around in them, complete with appropriate crunching sounds. Yeah, sure, there’s no running barefoot on glass, but it’s definitely not pulling any action punches. In other words, I have no idea why they’re bitching and moaning over there at Aint It Cool News.

Dear Hollywood, Maggie Q is another asian chick you can hire instead of that fugtard Sandra Oh!

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the sensational Maggie Q, who plays one of the villains in the film. I don’t know who she is or what she’s done or why she doesn’t have a normal last name but this chick kicks ass and is super freakin’ hot. Her fight scene with Willis is out of this world. It reminded me a bit of the fight scene between Danny Glover + Mel Gibson vs Jet Li in Lethal Weapon 4, except …

1. The fight choreography here was better.
2. McClane’s ability to stand up to her is more believable (because she’s a girl).
3. She’s super freakin’ hot (did I already mention that?).

So yeah, basically the only thing in common with that fighting scene in Lethal Weapon 4 is that there’s an asian person fighting an old white guy.

I feel compelled to mention that while the director hit a home run the writer(s) phoned this one in pretty hard. The story, while engaging as directed, is mindnumbingly stupid, and it’s working is predicated on the characters in the film being even more mindnumbingly stupid than the film’s villain, the horribly miscast Timothy Olyphant (which is a shame, because I think he’s a good actor). Worse, while the film bends over backwards to show that it remembers the previous Die Hard films, it breaks the only real rule of Die Hard plots: the terrorists aren’t really supposed to be terrorists. They try to pass it off like they’re not, but no, these people really are terrorists. While watching the movie I remembered the great scene in Die Hard where Hans Gruber (any relation to John Gruber?) gives the FBI a bogus list of “freedom fighters” he wants released. That scene is great because you knew he was just dicking with the Feds and that he could care less about any of those guys. Well in Live Free or Die Hard, the villains really do care, or at least they’ve convinced themselves that they do.

Also, no one in this film has any idea who John McClane is. Huh? No one’s heard of Nakatomi Plaza, or that thing that went down with the airport, or the bombings in New York? Even though at that a-hole reporter guy was there covering the first two and even interviewed his kids? Bull. Shit. If that Erin Brokovitch chick could get a movie made about her boring ass white-trash life then everyone in the world would have seen the John McClane movie.

Just a brief point, while we’re talking about suckage, Len Wiseman stole a small part of the film right from The Lost World (Jurassic Park II). That’s kind of his style, I guess, as he stole a few shots from Underworld from The Matrix, but still.

My only other real complaint about the film is that I’m sick and tired of John McClane bitching about Holly Gennero, his ex-wife. Four frickin’ movies now and we get it, your relationship is crap. I’m sick of hearing about it. Granted, it wasn’t a big part of the movie, but even mentioning her name ticks me off.

But, again, in spite of that I whole-heartedly recommend this movie to anyone who’s interested in watching ass-kicking action. No hadoukens for Live Free or Die Hard this day.