I'll get you, John McClane
Jul. 16th, 2007 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnWhitney and I went to see the fourth Die Hard film last weekend. It's called "Live Free or Die Hard", but the title seems to mean absolutely nothing apart from being a way to tie it in to the Independence Day weekend. It is, however, slightly better than the situation they would have found themselves in if the third film had stayed with the title "Die Hardest", as they'd have to have called it "Die Even Harder than the Last Time We Made A Die Hard Film". Anyway. I imagine that Britain doesn't get it for about the next three years, so these are my thoughts.
The plot about illegal transfer of funds over the Internet seemed unusual at first, but thinking about it further, it's a natural progression of the series - the Die Hard villains have always been cyber-criminals. Hans's group were in the building at the time, Cardboard Cut-Out German Baddie #2 used the radio waves and Simon did it over the phone network while simultaneously stealing half the gold from underneath New York, but the principle was the same. The scope of the films has always increased, from a building to an airport to a whole city, and this time, the entire country is used as a weapon by the hackers - from diverting traffic two ways down a tunnel then turning the lights off, to channelling half the natural gas in the country to one refinery in their attempts to get John McClane. Which he naturally survives with only a slight nosebleed.
By the way, for the first time in a Die Hard film, the villains are not German - they're led by an American and include disposable henchmen from every nationality that they don't really like at the moment. I'm fairly certain that he had mismatched eye colours, too, which is a trend for characters that is getting well overused now (although it could have been just the way that, as another current trend dictates, the film was shot in almost complete darkness for a large part of its running time).
Naturally, a lot of the film centres around computers, and every single one in the film uses the mysterious movie-OS that no computer in the entire world looks like (nobody in the film or TV industry has ever got past this, the only exception that comes to mind at the moment being the computer that actually looks like a computer in The Manchurian Candidate). More worrying was the inability of the people who wrote it to spell either "algorthim" or "faild".
But you don't watch the film for that, you watch it to see Bruce Willis running around and alternately shooting at people and blowing things up. I have to wonder how screen writers come up with new fight scenes for action films. Each new idea becomes even more far-fetched than the last, and the possible highlight of this one is a fist/gun fight inside a van while it's nose-down halfway up a lift shaft. And at the end, the manic over-the-topness of the previous film is recreated and exaggerated further than ever before. It's difficult to imagine how anyone is going to beat John McClane driving an eighteen-wheel truck on nine wheels, around a collapsing freeway ramp, while on fire, pursued by a Harrier jumpjet.
Somehow, though, something about it didn't quite sit right - it's nowhere near as far removed from the rest of its own series as, say, Terminator 3, but it doesn't feel like the older films somehow. I think quite a lot of this is because it's the only Die Hard to not take place in near-realtime - 1 and 2 were pretty much continuous narrative, Die Hard 3 took place over the course of one day apart from the scene at the end, but in this one, there are gaps of up to half a day while the characters transport themselves from one enormous set-piece to the next. The cleverness and inventiveness of the other three seem to have replaced with making things as gigantically impressive as possible.
Overall, "With a Vengeance" remains the best Die Hard film, but having said that, I think "Die Harder" is still the worst. Considering the usual track record for adding on to an existing classic series, that's a pretty respectable result.
The plot about illegal transfer of funds over the Internet seemed unusual at first, but thinking about it further, it's a natural progression of the series - the Die Hard villains have always been cyber-criminals. Hans's group were in the building at the time, Cardboard Cut-Out German Baddie #2 used the radio waves and Simon did it over the phone network while simultaneously stealing half the gold from underneath New York, but the principle was the same. The scope of the films has always increased, from a building to an airport to a whole city, and this time, the entire country is used as a weapon by the hackers - from diverting traffic two ways down a tunnel then turning the lights off, to channelling half the natural gas in the country to one refinery in their attempts to get John McClane. Which he naturally survives with only a slight nosebleed.
By the way, for the first time in a Die Hard film, the villains are not German - they're led by an American and include disposable henchmen from every nationality that they don't really like at the moment. I'm fairly certain that he had mismatched eye colours, too, which is a trend for characters that is getting well overused now (although it could have been just the way that, as another current trend dictates, the film was shot in almost complete darkness for a large part of its running time).
Naturally, a lot of the film centres around computers, and every single one in the film uses the mysterious movie-OS that no computer in the entire world looks like (nobody in the film or TV industry has ever got past this, the only exception that comes to mind at the moment being the computer that actually looks like a computer in The Manchurian Candidate). More worrying was the inability of the people who wrote it to spell either "algorthim" or "faild".
But you don't watch the film for that, you watch it to see Bruce Willis running around and alternately shooting at people and blowing things up. I have to wonder how screen writers come up with new fight scenes for action films. Each new idea becomes even more far-fetched than the last, and the possible highlight of this one is a fist/gun fight inside a van while it's nose-down halfway up a lift shaft. And at the end, the manic over-the-topness of the previous film is recreated and exaggerated further than ever before. It's difficult to imagine how anyone is going to beat John McClane driving an eighteen-wheel truck on nine wheels, around a collapsing freeway ramp, while on fire, pursued by a Harrier jumpjet.
Somehow, though, something about it didn't quite sit right - it's nowhere near as far removed from the rest of its own series as, say, Terminator 3, but it doesn't feel like the older films somehow. I think quite a lot of this is because it's the only Die Hard to not take place in near-realtime - 1 and 2 were pretty much continuous narrative, Die Hard 3 took place over the course of one day apart from the scene at the end, but in this one, there are gaps of up to half a day while the characters transport themselves from one enormous set-piece to the next. The cleverness and inventiveness of the other three seem to have replaced with making things as gigantically impressive as possible.
Overall, "With a Vengeance" remains the best Die Hard film, but having said that, I think "Die Harder" is still the worst. Considering the usual track record for adding on to an existing classic series, that's a pretty respectable result.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-16 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-17 03:18 am (UTC)Actually, it's out already, under the title Die Hard 4.0, which was apparently the scriptwriter's original choice for the title or something.
It's a nice side effect of film piracy really taking off in the last few years that films have started coming out pretty close together on both sides of the Atlantic.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-19 04:30 pm (UTC)But I think you're right, the third one has the most intelligent plot and it almost certainly the best. I haven't seen the 4.0 yet, but I'll get round to it!
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Date: 2007-07-19 05:04 pm (UTC)John McClane himself seems pretty invincible, too - in the first and third film there are a couple of genuinely cringe-inducing moments, like when he crawls over the glass. But this time, hardly anything even seems to hurt him for very long, even when he's beaten up by the kung fu sidekick woman and the Frenchman who thinks he's in the Matrix.