Retro action

Yippee ki yay, 2007-style: Bruce Willis returns as John McClane in Live Free or Die Hard. (Twentieth Century Fox)

Live Free or Die Hard, the long-delayed (and for some, long-awaited) fourth instalment in the Die Hard series, has been touting itself as an old-school action movie: None of your fancy computer-generated effects here, kids, just good ol’ car crashes, fireballs and stunt doubles. It turns out the story itself is also old school. Even though it’s set post-Sept. 11 and the plot hinges on the potential for infrastructural chaos suggested by the Katrina disaster, in all other respects it harks back to a simpler time, i.e., the 1990s, when terrorists were finite, their leaders were easily located and they could be taken down by one resourceful vigilante cop in a T-shirt.

Given the ugly title, a play on the New Hampshire state motto (Live free or die) that smacks of the kind of rhetoric coming out of the Bush White House in the early days of the Iraq invasion, I went in expecting something jingoistic and Republican-friendly. But given the current mood of disillusion in the U.S., the time for making that kind of action film has passed, at least temporarily, and Live Free or Die Hard is sturdily apolitical. Its chief villain, white and with the very Christian name of Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant), is a petulant computer expert, formerly employed by the U.S.  government, whose security recommendations after Sept. 11 were ignored. To prove his point, he’s orchestrated a “fire sale” — cyber-speak for a wholesale shutdown of the national infrastructure via the internet.

Once again, Bruce Willis’s dogged New York cop, John McClane, stumbles into the centre of the plot when he’s recruited by the feds to fetch a young hacker, Matt Farrell (Justin Long of the Apple computer ads — talk about typecasting), who has unwittingly aided the bad guys. And once again, McClane takes it upon himself to defeat them, with Farrell in tow to provide his computer expertise as well as some intergenerational tension.

Long’s Farrell, who resembles Jimmy Fallon and is nearly as annoying, rolls his eyes with exasperation over McClane’s Luddite incomprehension of digital technology, whines about being hungry and is the target of our aging hero’s gruff “back in my day” wisecracks. There might have been a Robert De Niro-Ben Stiller comic chemistry here if the writing was better — and if Willis didn’t give such a perfunctory performance. The smart-ass McClane of the first (and best) Die Hard, with his cowboy craziness, is now a hollow husk, and the fact that his wife has left him and he’s estranged from his daughter only goes halfway to explaining his weary, laconic attitude. (Given the 12-year hiatus between this and the last Die Hard, 1995’s Die Hard with a Vengeance, you’d think he’d be rested up.)

John McClane (Bruce Willis) and tech nerd Matt Farrell (Justin Long) go after the baddies. (Twentieth Century Fox)

He’s still an awesome fighting machine, though, able to endure the kind of brutal multi-storey falls and dives from speeding vehicles that would leave most real middle-aged men (heck, anyone) curled up and whimpering in a ball of pain. I love the way Willis’s McClane builds up an accretion of scrapes and bruises as the movie goes on; that long naked face of his, topped by the now-signature shaved dome, begins to look like a baseball bat after a succession of home runs.

The Die Hard diehards, many of whom were just little kids when the franchise began in 1988, may not care that Willis is phoning it in — or that watching him now is like watching your dad save the world. Then again, maybe he’s a kind of father figure to younger fans. His motive in the early films was to protect his wife and kids, and here again he winds up having to rescue his now-grownup daughter Lucy (a surly chip-off-the-old-block played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead) when the villains kidnap her. Devotees may not even care that the secondary roles are so flat, with the main baddie, Deadwood’s Olyphant, coming off as little more than a sneering cipher, while his henchmen — Maggie Q as an Asian martial arts femme fatale and Cyril Raffaelli as a lethally acrobatic European — are barely allotted enough screen time to establish their characters.

What will be the make-or-break factor for this entry is that promised old-school action, and director Len Wiseman obviously realizes it. We’ve barely been re-introduced to McClane before the gun battles and explosions kick in, and they seldom let up. Connoisseurs of vehicular violence will savour an early scene in which McClane manages to bring down a flying helicopter with a hurtling police cruiser. “You just killed a helicopter with a car!” exclaims Farrell, prompting one of McClane’s few decent quips in a wit-bereft script (I won’t spoil it by quoting it, and it’s on the official website anyway).  This coup de grâce is topped later, when McClane plays cat-and-mouse with a fighter jet while driving a semi-trailer on the interstate.

Is there enough jam here to justify a fifth Die Hard film? The producers must realize that, in order to succeed, they have to build on its young fan base, which may be why this is the first of the movies to receive a PG-13 rating in the U.S. What that seems to entail is less graphic and overtly sadistic violence and fewer profanities. So how do they deal with McClane’s trademark “Roy Rogers” catchphrase? It’s delayed until the very end, and then the filmmakers fudge it. “Yippee ki yay, mutha…” Willis mumbles, the last syllables of the Oedipal obscenity obscured by a gunshot. For once, television networks won’t have to edit out that line for prime-time viewing — the movie’s creators have done the job for them.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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