I Watch Films: Live Free Or Die Hard

 

Live Free Or Die Hard

There’s a computer blackout in FBI headquarters; the Deputy Director sensing something might be up orders every hacker who might be able to do this brought in. Short on manpower, they delegate to local law enforcement. Detective John McClane of the NYPD is interrupted from stalking his daughter Lucy (to protect her from her creepy date) and goes to collect Matt Farrell in New Jersey. There the two are attacked by assassins; Farrell did some sub-contract work for Thomas Gabriel, the hacker behind the hack, thinking it was for testing security. Now Gabriel is cleaning up loose ends. McClane takes Farrell to Washington.

Gabriel and his crew take over traffic control and the stock market and send a threatening message. Farrell realises this is a mythical hack known as a fire sale – everything must go. Having hacked the local police dispatch Gabriel sends McClane and Farrell into an ambush with an armed helicopter, which McClane manages to defeat. McClane, the man of action, teams up with Farrell who figures out the next target will be the power grid, by attacking a centre in Wet Virginia. The two go there and have a complicated action sequence that ends with them defeating the team there, and killing the leader, who was Gabriel’s girlfriend (Maggie Q), making this personal.

Having got a picture of Gabriel they send it to the FBI where the deputy director recognises him as a disgraced government cyberwarfare expert. He’s targeting the very vulnerabilities that the authorities ignored when he reported on them! Gabriel, furious at the death of his girlfriend blows up the power centre, causing a massive blackout. Farrell and McClane escape in a helicopter, and go to Baltimore where Warlock, a hacker pal of Farrell’s is. (They spot his house as it’s the one with power). Warlock identifies some of the code and where it’s to be used – the Social Security centre in Maryland. This though turns out to be a secret government backup facility with all the country’s data, one designed by Gabriel.

Gabriel, learning that McClane is still alive, sends a team to abduct his daughter Lucy; when McClane and Farrell catch up with him he initially orders a USAF jet to attack McClane, then discovers Farrell has encrypted the data. He shoots Farrell in the leg and threatens Lucy but he’s got the wrong leverage; Farrell knows he’s going to kill them both anyway. John McClane arrives and there’s a final confrontation.

This is, I think, the point where Die Hard films became like other action films, as other action films had become like Die Hard. Die Hard had the action within (and around) one tower block; Die Hard 2 kept it within one airport. Recognising that the action movie genre had worked through permutations of the one guy in a separate clearly defined place relatively well, Die Hard With A Vengeance had them conceptually trapped in a game, or possibly within the city of New York. Here though they’re not trapped; if the limited area is between New York, Baltimore and West Virgina* that’s not really limited. That John McClane is capable of fighting a helicopter with a car and an F-35 with a truck makes him not one desperate man who can defeat his enemy with sheer force of will, a few quips and just enough bullets, but a superhero. By losing any distinctiveness, by turning John McClane from a single cop with determination and grit into a force of destruction who has seen all this before (and hates computers) and (with all due respect to Justin Long) giving him a regulation hacker sidekick, the film series becomes something less than it’s parts.

Watch This: John McClane shoots, fights, throws cars at helicopters and unravels a moderately clever conspiracy
Don’t Watch This: Just more explosions and computer magic

* I’m not looking at a map for this