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die Hard 4
STARRING: Bruce Willis, Timothy Olyphant, Maggie Q
DIRECTOR: Len Wiseman
130 mins
There are times when you think he really will – expire, that is, at the climax of an almighty shoot-out, with an unsightly penile engorgement like the victim of some auto-erotic strangulation fetish. The granddaddy, perhaps the great-granddaddy, of the Number One cut is back.
Before Nick Hornby, there was Bruce Willis. As Detective John McClane, he first did a complete forward-roll-plus-handgun-aim on to our screens in 1988 in the action classic Die Hard, taking on “terrorists”, which in those innocent days meant Alan Rickman with a comedy German accent. Now, paradoxically, as so often in the post 9/11 era, the “terrorist” is a cautiously chosen apolitical American, no other nationality being deemed worthy of the contest.
In that first film, Bruce was 33, receding a little, but basically playing exactly the same part as now: the worldly, old- school tough guy.
In this fourth movie (quatrequel? tetrequel?), his grown-up hottie of a daughter does the same thing. Die Hard fans know that there’s a testosterone squall on the way. Thankfully, 50-something Bruce does not strip down to his vest this time. This is action, after all, not horror.
That postmodern “4.0” alerts us to the fact that McClane is taking on some new-style terrorists.
Timothy Olyphant plays a sinister ultra-hacker who wants to bring all US computer systems to their metaphorical knees ... and then, erm, take everyone’s money out of their bank account. Or something.
McClane is going to stop this hi-tech bad guy with nothing but a beat-up automobile, a couple of guns and a pair of old-fashioned American cojones.
It’s pure action silliness, and often enjoyable, with some tremendous free-running stunts at the top of the film.
Sometimes the action mayhem has a kind of Zen quality to it, entirely detached from narrative logic.
At one stage, Bruce attacks Olyphant’s icy lieutenant Mai Lihn (Maggie Q) by driving a car into the office where she has Matt at gunpoint, and bulldozing her into ... an empty liftshaft. Huh? What? How? Where? Why? Did he drive his car along the corridors until he found the right door?
At the wheel, McClane is elsewhere threatened by a low-flying helicopter. So what does he do?
He judges the trajectory of a certain off-ramp, drives straight for it, and at the last moment jumps out of his vehicle, which is flung upwards and turns the helicopter into a fireball. Whoa! Later he will jump from an airborne truck on to the tail of an F-14 fighter plane – or perhaps he jumped from the F-14 on to the truck, I can’t be sure.
By Peter Bradshaw
