Die with Increasingly Implausible Difficulty

The Times' new movie gal Caryn James reviews Live Free or Die Hard and thinks that, much like Michael Douglas and the national id, Bruce Willis has an unerring finger on the latest mode of terrorism:

Grafting media manipulation onto techno-terror, the latest “Die Hard” expertly captures a current fear: What if we’re disconnected from our information overload? The clogged traffic contributes to the film’s explosive action, but that idea carries the musty whiff of a Y2K meltdown (been there; we’re over it). The loss of our information fix, though, hits a very raw nerve. It evokes the disoriented feeling from April when all the BlackBerrys went out, or the isolation we experience when an Internet connection is lost. Cellphones and television may still work, but if one part of the information package disappears, it’s like sensory deprivation.

I took this wonderfully ridiculous action flick last night with my dad and brother. The best scene — where a car is launched into a helicopter — was in the trailer, but there are others worth the price of admission if you like that kind of spectacle, and I like it fine.

My problem with John McClane's own personal World War IV (Norman Podhoretz has got nothing on the Yippie Ki Ay franchise) is this. He's so visibly exhausted from the first three go-rounds that he dials in his heroic slob at a baud rate shaming to the wifi glamor of his mission. Unlike Stallone's autumnal Rocky Balboa, there's no arc with this elder statesman of pain. McClane's in his fifties and well past too old for this shit.

He's also stuck in a ridiculously modest paygrade as an NYPD detective after — let's see now — displays of lone derring-do in Nakatomi Towers, Dulles Airport, and Gotham's Summer of Gruber. Can't we get a book deal or Medal of Freedom for this guy already?

All the baddies expire without too much trouble in Live Free, unless you count driving an SUV into a hot Asian hacker and then plunging her, self and vehicle down an elevator shaft "trouble." ("Disbelief" is McClane's middle name.) Even the acrobatic French Jackie Chan who, in the more formulaic days of the shoot-em-up genre, would have accounted for at least a good 5-minute carnival of pain. Fan blades make fast and easy bouillon of him here. And the head villain — the drug dealer from Go with Christian Slater's hairline and talent — is the type of computer geek Harry Knowles would write into existence. Speaking of which, Kevin Smith plays his own biggest fan in a scene that had every reason to be better than it was.