by Henry Daniels

Created on: July 17, 2009   Last Updated: September 27, 2009

"Live Free or Die Hard" works better as a comedy than as an action adventure film. The situations are so preposterous, the characters so typical, and the plot so implausible and reminiscent of every clich of this genre, that it begs to be watched around people with good senses of humor.

In this latest insult to the original "Die Hard", John McClane - still having avoided, somehow, a promotion above Detective Lieutenant - must save the world from a madman (Timothy Olyphant) who's hacked into the global computer system. This seems like a lofty task for a New York policeman, but John McClane is no stranger to these types of situations. In the magnificent first film, he only needed to save a multinational corporation, but since then the producers have upped the ante with the Die Hard franchise so much that nowadays nothing less than the fate of the entire world can be at stake for McClane and company. Rushing to save us, yet again, McClane is charged with the task of protecting the one man - computer hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long) - capable of putting an end to the villain's dastardly plot.

He does so in grand fashion by crashing cars into helicopters, dodging gunfire from fighter jets, shooting bullets through himself to kill people who are behind him (seriously), and other such fantastical methods. This begs the question: what the hell happened to John McClane? Since 1988, Bruce Willis has been steadily morphing his beloved everyman-hero cop into a full fledged superhero on par with Iron Man and The Hulk, his powers increasing exponentially with each new film. In the original, he was fairly human. Come Die Hard with a Vengeance, he survived the kind of firepower that would shred a Hummer H3T. Now, in this newest installment, any flesh and blood that remained in McClane's body has been supplanted with some sort of titanium alloy that allows him to take the kind of punishment that could demolish tanks, let alone a human being. John McClane used to be the guy next door we wanted to have a beer with. We were with him every step of the way in Nakatomi Plaza. We could relate to him, we felt for his plight. Now, he's become a kind of god. Who can relate to that?

Len Wiseman, the director of "Live Free or Die Hard" was obviously still in sci-fi mode since directing "Underworld" with Kate Beckinsale in 2004. Although this fourth Die Hard film is set primarily in Washington D.C., it might as well have been about indestructible Lycans. Bruce Willis manages to survive an entire highway crashing down on him. One could very well wonder whether John McClane is now Willis' character from "Unbreakable", because he is not phased by anything. The people in the movie take his invincibility at face value. But why should we?

Jeb Stuart, the writer of the original "Die Hard" and that other great action-adventure flick "The Fugitive", understood that the intensity of big-budget action sequences hinges on our fascination with the characters. He understood that John McClane needed to be our friend, not just our hero. Mark Bomback and David Marconi, the primary authors of "Die Hard 4", were unaware of this and their movie suffers greatly for it.

Bottom line: when the most interesting character in your Bruce Willis action-adventure film is a computer hacker played by Kevin Smith, you've gone horribly, horribly wrong.

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