Live Free or Die Hard

The only reason I saw this movie was because it happened to be playing at Grauman's Chinese Theater when I was in Hollywood last weekend. I've always wanted to see a movie there, so I held my nose and went in. To be fair, I had to realize that I also saw the first three Die Hard films in theaters, but I suppose I wasn't as discriminating back then.

I'm tired of action films. Watching what new ways cars, trucks and planes can be destroyed holds no interest for me. Therefore, I thought this film was aggressively dumb, but I sadly suspect this is the point. This is explosion porn, with fireballs occurring at an equivalent rate that orgasms do in regular porn films.

However, there are some saving graces. Bruce Willis displays a lot of star quality in this film. He's aware of how dumb it is, and almost winks at the audience after each stunt. Some of them are so preposterous that Chuck Jones wouldn't have included them in a Roadrunner cartoon. After pulling them off, Willis admires his handiwork, perhaps no more than when he manages to jump from a truck onto the back of a fighter jet, which is where I wanted to throw something at the screen. There are also some good supporting performances here, notably by Justin Long as the computer hacker who ends up as Willis' sidekick, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Willis' daughter.

The plot, such as it is, concerns cyber-terrorists taking command of the U.S. computer systems. I'm sure an expert on computers could enlighten me on how laughably unreal this all is, but it's in keeping with the lack of realism this film shoots for. What is tired about all this is we once again learn that hackers are social misfits who like comic books and video games. Gee, haven't we seen that cliche going back to when personal computers became ubiquitous?