By Matt Zoller Seitz
In the original 1988 Die Hard, Alan Rickman's bad guy, Hans Gruber, taunts stalwart hero John McClane by asking him if he's "another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he's John Wayne...Rambo...Marshal Dillon..." McClane jokes that he was always partial to Roy Rogers because "I really liked those sequined shirts," then ends the conversation with the now-iconic kiss-off, "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker." 
The repetition of that phrase in three Die Hard sequels helps explain why I never really warmed to them. They're lively smash-and-burn adventures that leaven their brutality with self-deprecating wit and something vaguely resembling a human touch; each boasts wittily choreographed action sequences, and even the worst of the lot, the sadistic and borderline-retarded Die Hard 2, pulls you in. But whatever their merits, each sequel -- including Live Free or Die Hard, which opened this week -- does more to undercut what made the original, and its hero, seem special. That's a sin that no amount of boisterious ingenuity can erase. "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" wasn't just funny because it was a blue-collar, East coast, wise-ass response to a James Bond baddie's effete condescension. It was funny because it sounded like something a real person might say if he got caught in a situation that ludicrous. McClane's comeback was a tonic, a contrast to all the other badass one-liners we'd heard up to then: James Bond's icy British witticisms; Arnold Schwarzenegger's lame, mechanical approximation of same; Sylvester Stallone's dead-eyed homicidal pledges ("I'm comin ta get yew").
But when McClane says his signature line over and over in four movies spanning nearly 20 years, and when he somehow keeps wandering into the middle of sinister situations (except for Ripley in the Alien movies, no franchise lead has worse luck) and when he magically manages to absorb ever-more punishment the older he gets (in Live Free, he survives impacts that would flatten the Terminator) he comes to embody the image that Hans mockingly ascribed to him. The delight of Die Hard was that we'd never seen an action hero like McClane: physically capable but reluctant; impulsive and petty and emotionally transparent. When the same character shows up in Live Free or Die Hard to save America from cyberterrorists -- after saving Nakatomi Plaza, Dulles Airport and New York City -- he's become John Wayne plus Rambo minus hair. Yes, I know; it had to be this way. When a movie becomes a hit -- especially a dark horse like Die Hard, which had a trashy trailer and a leading man who was famous mainly for bantering with Cybill Shepherd on Moonlighting -- there will be as many follow-ups as the market can bear. Nevertheless, as much as I enjoyed the sequels, I wish they hadn't been made. They make the extraordinary seem ordinary. 
And that's too bad, because the premise of Live Free is chilling -- so keyed into real-world fears that I wish the screenplay (credited to Mark Bomback and David Marconi) had done more than use it as a springboard for another Die Hard sequel. When high-tech hijinks wreak havoc with the nation's cyberstructure, the director of the FBI's cyberterror unit (Cliff Curtis) issues an all-points bulletin ordering local law enforcement to round up America's most gifted and notorious hackers and bring them to the capital for questioning. When McClane gets the call, he's in New Brunswick, New Jersey, creepily stalking his estranged daughter, Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and interrupting her in-car make-out session by yanking her would-be boyfriend out the vehicle and threatening to beat him to death. (If I were her, I wouldn't return Dad's phone calls either.) While picking up his assigned hacker, Camden troublemaker Matt Farrell (Justin Long), he survives an assault by a squad of machinegun wielding goons; ever the bulldog, he resolves to get the kid to Washington anyway, and arrives in time for the bad guy, Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) to unveil phase two of his diabolical plan: using his control over America's computer networks to turn life into a videogame. (In the film's most unnerving sequence, Gabriel orders his own squad of hackers to mess with traffic signals throughout D.C., turning what should have been a typical rush hour into an outtake from The Blues Brothers.) Matt explains to the FBI dunderheads -- and to McClane, a Luddite who still listens to '60s rock on his car radio -- that this is part of a three-step master plan to destroy modern life as we know it. It's called a "Fire Sale" scenario: Everything must go. 
Of course, the fact that this is a Die Hard movie means that the Fire Sale plot will be exposed as a mammoth diversion, orchestrated to let Gabriel and his henchpeople (including his gorgeous, kung fu-kicking wife, Mai Lihn, played by martial arts star Maggie Q) steal an obscene amount of money. This is a cop out, and a disappointing one; while Olyphant's Gabriel is probably the least scary of the series' villains, he's the most complex, because he's motivated by professional grievance and ideology. Originally hired after 9/11 to assess flaws in America's cyberstructure, he warned that the whole thing was vulnerable, and rather than accept the bad news (and the price tag required to fix it), Gabriel's bosses fired him and dragged his name through the mud. Until the screenplay's other shoe inevitably drops to expose him as a common thief (as McClane's wife Holly labeled Hans in Die Hard 1), Gabriel seems bears less resemblance to Hans and Simon than to Gary Oldman's Egor Korshunov in Air Force One, who is motivated by more than filthy lucre, and whose viciousness doesn't negate the fact that he often speaks the truth. (Called out as a villain by the Chief Executive, Korshunov replies that he won't be lectured by the leader of a nation that killed 100,000 Iraqis to save a nickel on a gallon of gas.) Gabriel seems to enjoy pushing America to embrace its worst caricature. He makes Wall Street soil its collective britches by driving stock prices down, and terrifies the general public by broadcasting fake atrocity footage and a bewildering montage in which U.S. Presidents appear to deliver pieces of the same incoherent monologue. He's like a lethal performance artist, destroying the invisible mechanisms that govern modern life to conjure the horror he foretold and expose the thin line between civilization and chaos. Kevin Smith's cameo appearance as a hacker named Warlock -- Matt's rival and sort-of guru -- includes a throwaway line about zombies that inadvertently suggests the richer film that might have been, if the filmmakers had followed Live Free's ideas to their logical end, and told a story about ordinary people struggling to do right while society crumbled. But a summer action picture wouldn't dare go there, so Live Free repeats the same Die Hard tropes once more for old times's sake. (Besides the thief-posing-as-terrorist bit, the movie has a recurring gag about Lucy changing her last name, and an Ayn Randian spark between Gabriel and Mai Linh that evokes the Jeremy Irons-Sam Phillips relationship in Die Hard with a Vengeance.) 
There's a strong conservative undertow throughout. Matt starts out a free radical -- a far-leftist verging on anarchist, like many outlaw hackers. He dismisses the federal government as a bunch of corrupt incompetents ("It took FEMA five days to get water to the Superdome!") and blows off mainstream news reports as fearmongering corporate media hype -- so of course he ends up a grateful surrogate son of McClane and a reborn patriot who regrets the destruction his hacking helped cause. McClane jump-starts Matt's change when he rebuts his political screed by snapping, "It's not a system, it's a country." That line exposes the script's conservative mindset. McClane forces a disengaged, bratty young dissenter to shut up, grow balls and do something constructive. The picture's such a daddy-to-the-rescue fantasy that it could be called Die Hard 4: Get With the Program. The attitude doesn't really rankle because it's consistent with Hollywood action pictures dating back to John Wayne's autumnal westerns; this is an inherently conservative genre, and McClane's Joe Sixpack sentiments are fundamentally decent. It might have been fun to see the Democracy Now!/Fox News Channel dynamic played out more pointedly, as a Socratic dialogue with bullets and explosions instead of words. But the film's political consciousness is as half-baked as Gabriel's Dark-Prince-of-Chaos routine. It's ideological shadowplay that's ultimately a cover for making money.
Director Len Wiseman (the Underworld movies) delivers the expected ratio of close-quarters gunfights, hand-to-hand ass-kicking and vehicular insanity. The film boasts two chase sequences that rank with the best I've seen -- McClane and Matt fleeing a chopper full of Gabriel's hitmen and a climactic duel between an F-35 jet and an 18-wheeled truck in and around a collapsing interstate mix-master. But these setpieces paradoxically diminish Live Free or Die Hard by reminding us that it's yet another overscaled summer action movie; they're nowhere near as heartstopping as the bit in the first film where McClane accidentally falls into an elevator shaft, bounces downward a couple of floors and barely catches himself. In Live Free, McClane fights Mai Lihn inside a vehicle that's hanging upside-down in an elevator shaft, and 50 body blows, two dead bad guys and one fireball later, emerges victorious, crowing like a barfly that just whipped his drinking buddy at pinball. When did Everyman become Superman?
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Everyman as Superman: Live Free or Die Hard
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23 comments:
I really loved the new Die Hard version 4.0 movie. Mainly because I was afraid that it would be terrible, but it turned out to be a solid popcorn summer movie.
The Firesale plot was very interesting and as you said could have been put to better use in a more ambituos movie that didn't have to follow the Die Hard formula. And I do agree that what made the original Die Hard so special was the fragile and somewhat realistic portait of a John Mclain as person in a real crisis.
I'm looking forward to your review of the Transformers movie, could it become Michael Bay's worst movie?
The new Pixar movie "Ratatouille" is really getting some great reviews, are you gonna review it on the site, would love to hear your take on it.
On Apples Trailer site there is some very interesting previews, unfortunately the first movie opens in Denmark in October it looks amazingly different from many other animated features.
I think your point is best made by the movie itself, Matt --
MILD SPOILERS BELOW!
In the climatic scene, when McClane grunts out his signature line, he doesn't even make it through the whole thing -- either for ratings concern, or because the last word is swallowed by the noise of the gunshot.
Either way, I think it demonstrates that the movie has become a neutered version of itself, worn down to suit today's blander palates. (Not to mention how disappointing it is on a level of cinematic catharsis -- imagine going to see Indy 4 with no bullwhip?)
And I certainly couldn't think of a much blander choice of a director than Wiseman -- while I enjoyed Underworld, and to a lesser extent Underworld 2, for what they were, they were exercises in sleekness before anything else.
And while as a Baltimore native I am always happy to see the home state and city getting work in films, I'm not sure a summer blockbuster really is reaching for the heavens when one of the primary locations is Woodlawn, Maryland. (And when sloppy editing/framing allows you to see the Maryland state flag in a few shots when Baltimore is playing DC.)
It really is the blander suburban Die Hard -- while some action takes place in DC, we are treated to Camden NJ, New Brunswick NJ, Wheeling, West Virginia, and Woodlawn, Maryland, as important locales. I guess once McClane has saved the cities, he saves the rest of America, also. Superman, indeed.
That being said, I thought the film showed some nice restraint in not over-quoting the previous 3. (My favorite moment, and I was the only one laughing in the theatre, was McClane running into yet another FBI Agent Johnson) and not completely delving into self-referential camp.
There were some fantastic action sequences, and in fact as soon as I got home I checked the Net to see if the F-35 is in fact a real plane (it is). And I thought Olyphant did a good job with an underwritten villian -- his bone-dry wit actually got the biggest laughs from the audience I saw it with.
I will also say that when I heard Wiseman was being hired, that the movie screamed out "Cheap" but that I was satisfied by the action, and whatever they saved on Lenny, they put up on the screen. (And doubtless, into Bruce's pocket for turn # 4.)
Anyway, enough thoughts for an early Saturday morning. Time to see if there's any Doughnut Plant at Cobblestone.
How come directors haven't been able to make the image of some guy clicking away at a keyboard more exciting? I mean, It's been almost 25 years since WarGames, but that movie has managed to hold up to repeated viewings. It is dated as hell, but the characters and situations are made so clean and simple that we somehow still bye the extraordinary plot. MOvies like The Net, Hackers, Swordfish have mistaken fast-paced tchno scenes with tension. It is the inablility of the filmmakers to make "hacking" exciting that ruined Die Hard 4.0 for me.
I've always heard about a movie being made by committee, but I never understood that until Die Hard 4. The movie has all marking of Die Hard movie but somehow manages to miss every single one. There's nothing like maximizing profit to squeeeze the life out of a movie. The saddest part is that it doesn't seem to really matter to the audience. They seem to be getting their money's worth. Poople were clapping and cheering at the showing I went to. They seem to be sastisfied with a passable product when a better product was possible. Maybe they're the same audience who flocked to Wild Hogs?
Some other points:
Why is every hacker shown to be a heavy-nu-metal listening jackass? Do all hackers listen to the same music?
The use of CCR's "Fortunate Son" was cheap. First of all the song was already used to its fullest potential in Forrest Gump. More than that, the Die Hard movies don't use source music. It's just a beat to provide a funny youth-vs-age sequence. It's sop to the father boomers who are in the theater with their sons.
The movie's politics would be offensive if they weren't so stupid. The movie seems to fear technology but it also has the Justin Long charcter use the same hacker skillz to help McClane defeat the bad guys. Being a Fox movie, it would seem Die Hard 4.0 traffics in the same old fear that is associated with media corporations. The bad guy's motives are so muddled that he remains an abstract character. The great Olyphant comes off as a whiny bithch who needs a good ass-kicking. In fact, the movie seems to think all hackers need a good ass-kicking.
Maggie Q serves no purpose other than to walk around in tight black pants. We don't even know if she is married to Olyphant or not. The commitee must've thought the young boys in the audience want to see a male-female action fight scene. Boys like seeing chicks kick ass. In the end the movie comes off as sexist, especially with Wiseman's liking to slap his actress. Lucy McClane gets slapped twice in the course of a twenty minutes. Beckinsale must be giving him shit.
The jet vs. 18 Wheeler would be a cooler sequence if Cameron's True Lies hadn't already used the jet gag to amazing effect.
I've always liked the openig car chase of Die Hard 3. It works because it uses a clock and it has some sly fun mocking New York traffic. The car chase here doesn't really have anyth8ing motivating it. It just needs to happen because we've gone five minutes without an action beat. The whole movie is about beats.
Kevin Smith serves no other pupose than to attract the geek crowd. What Fox market research didn't tell the filmmakers is that the geeks like their entertainment R. And Smith is a polarizing figure to the geeks. You either love him or hate him.
Where are the bad guys working out of? They seem to e in a warehouse located in some remote area. Why? The geography of the movie is at the mercy of the filmmakers. If they were killling hackers by computer, how did they assemble a hit squad to go after Justin Long so quickly? How did they know he didn't pust "return"? Probably because the script needed them there at that particualr moment.
Finally, a Die Hard movie rated PG-13 is not really a Die Hard movie. You can just feel McClane's balls being cut off because he's unable to use his best weapon: his mouth.
The strangest thing is that Die Hard 4.0 isn't an impossible movie to sit through. It's watchable trash. What makes it sad is that you know it could've been better. The problems could've been fixed without spending much money. You can almost see where the editied pages should go. That's what makes it a bad movie.
Bourne can't get here fast enough.
Aaron --
I thought "Summer in the City" in the opening of Die Hard W/AV was pretty good. (And I agree with you on Fortunate Sun.)
I agree with you on it's tough to make hacking look exciting or good in film...though Swordfish certainly gave it a good shot, via Halle Berry and Hugh Jackman. (I'm sure there's a good pun or joke to be made here with "shot" and Halle's attempt to distract Hugh while he hacks, but I'm too lazy. It's Saturday morning, after all...)
I forgot about the Lovin' Spoonful song from the opening of Die Hard 3. I guess it goes to show how organic the use of the song was. It didn't take you out of the movie. Also, it is one of the greatest summer somgs ever.
The CCR song probably doesn't work because its anger and unmistakable liberal leanings feel out of place with the conservativism of Die Hard 4.0. It's as if Bill O'Reilly used "Dirty Little Secrets" as the theme song to his show. (Please, tell me Fox News hasn't used that song in that manner.)
The debate over Forrest Gump's politics can go on forever. What we know for sure is that the filmmakers' intent was not to make a case for Nixon-Reaga values. That's why the use of the CCR song is so powerful. It plays as Forrest and Buba are arriving by helicopter to Vietnam. That image says more than ten scenes of Forrest's home-spun humor.
JJ Sez--
--Hate to be the wet blanket here, and I know this is off-topic, but the "Fortunate Son" bit in Forrest Gump is stolen directly from the opening credits of "Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam", where it scores some of the most intense, frightening combat footage I've ever seen.
--And 1: There never should have been sequels to Die Hard; and 2: source music is totally out of place, unless it's "Ode To Joy".
It's interesting that the arena has gotten exponentially larger with each Die Hard. I say this because at first I was surprised that the fourth film didn't take place in a relatively confined space -- it ranged all over the Eastern seaboard, and that made it feel more like a conventional action film than specifically a"Die Hard" movie. But after a while it became clear that McClane actually was operating in an enclosed space -- thanks to high technology, the whole world has become one big interior space. That's a notion that's just sort of lingering on the margins of Live Free or Die Hard -- one of many aspects that could have been investigated more intelligently, and that could have made the film more memorable.
Die Hard 3 takes place in an enclosed space: Manhattan. The movie has a somewhat good sense of life on the island. That's why I think it fits better in the series than 4.0. Some sections of Die Hard 3 even have McClane and Zeus travelling on foot. It was inevitable that a Die Hard movie would be set in New York. There's actualy a major continuity hole in the Die Hard mythology regarding McClane's employment by the NYPD> In Die Hard he was NY cop with a six-month backlog that kept him from moving to L.A. Fine. At the start of Die Hard 2 we are told he has become a L.A. cop. He tells an airport officer he only moved out there because of his wife. Die Hard 3 has a NY cop and seems to ignore that he was ever a L.A. cop. This always annoyed me. I seriously doubt McClane could just go from a major police force to another.
Die Hard 4.0 has no real sense of location. We're told where we are supposed to be. Truthfully the plot of Die Hard 4.0 wouldn't pass the idea stage of a regular season of Fox's 24. That show also has a lot of use technology and keyboard-tapping, but it knows its limitations. At this point Jack Bauer resonates more than John McClane. That's probably Bauer has lost more than McClane.
Based on the handful of reviews I've read of this film, I've still got no idea whether or not it's worth a silver screen venture. I suspect, Matt, that your review is probably more entertaining than the film itself.
To me, Bruce's bloody feet were the peak of this saga (although I oddly have never even seen DIE HARD 2).
Of course it's fashionable to say this ~every~ year...but IS this the worst movie summer in a long, long time?
Ross -- FWIW, I do think it's worth a trip to theatre. Not sure where you are based, but if you can see a matinee, I think that's your best value. (I saw it at a Friday 3pm show here in NYC, but alas, no matinee pricing...) Although to me this works better as a fun weekday or Saturday afternoon movie, seen best on a lark, than a planned Friday or Saturday night assualt on the cineplex, planning dinner, drinks after, etc. etc.
I enjoyed Live Free or Die Hard. It's ludicrous to be sure, but it moves so fast that you don't really have time to think much about the nonsense. I think it's the second best in the series, though nothing will ever come close to touching the original. While there certainly is a message of getting your act together, I don't think it necessarily implies that conservatives do since the entire disastrous scenario really is put squarely to blame on the shoulders of the blundering Bush Administration without ever mentioning him by name.
I dunno. Maybe if this had been sold as a sequel to MERCURY RISING or STRIKING DISTANCE I might not have had such a hard time with it, but it certainly never felt like a DIE HARD movie to me.
I think they were doomed when they decided to shoot for the PG-13. All those conspicuously bloodless shootouts and horrible dialogue dubbing, plus the inclusion of a Short Round sidekick - it all seemed so kiddie-friendly to me.
Watching Willis struggle to play the role without any cigarettes or F-words felt like seeing your favorite dirty uncle trying to behave himself in front of the kids at a holiday dinner.
I'll agree that DIE HARDER is too sadistic for it's own good, but the two McTiernan DIE HARDS, like those first couple LETHAL WEAPON movies, had a real vicious kick to the action sequences. Maybe it's because I grew up on these flicks, but seeing all that blood and hearing all the profanity made me feel like there was more at stake, like I was a kid sneaking into a movie made for adults (which, come to think of it...)
I guess the BOURNE movies and CASINO ROYALE have taught us that you can make PG-13 action feel like an R, but this was just so cartoony, without anything that came across as resembling actual pain, I found the scenes you cite pretty silly.
I would also list the little story details that kept distracting the shit out of me, like the massive gridlock... except for the empty streets where we need to have a car chase. Or the cell phones that don't work unless the plot needs them to...
...but then I saw TRANSFORMERS the other night, so now LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD suddenly feels like a model of coherence and logic.
Aaron:
In response to: " More than that, the Die Hard movies don't use source music."
I do agree, but let us not forget Argyle's brilliant contribution of Run DMC's "Christmas in Hollis" in "Die Hard." Further reinforcing its holiday cheer, and reminding us that "Die Hard" is one of the all time great Christmas films.
LFODH could never meet the starmaking (Willis, Rickman and McTiernan, I'd argue), genre-establishing standard set by the first movie, but it wasn't bad. I liked Willis' matured sardonicism.
The father-and-son dynamic noted above is present but comically appealing, and it isn't a bad hook to hang a movie on, particularly one that more than a few pairs of fathers and sons will see, together or separately. I prefer it to the stoner-dudes-together or prom-king-and-nerd-sidekick(s) male character structures of other movies.
Also, Maggie Q can walk around in tight black pants as much as she wants, as far as I'm concerned.
Having twice been caught in massive traffic jams caused by the filiming of Die Hard 4 (once when they were filming the freeway scenes by LAX and when they were filming the helicopter blowing up in downtown Los Angeles) I can sympathize with the hatred McClane had for Gabriel.
Finally checked this out today, and I don't have much to add to Matt's astute review except to say that Live Free or Die Hard didn't exactly quell the apprehension going in that John McClane would feel like a bit of an also-ran now that popular modern-day action heroes like, say, Jack Bauer from "24" has absorbed the McClane influence and done a lot more with it---and certainly done a lot more with addressing (or exploiting) post-9/11 fears---than this movie does. I enjoyed it as a cacophonous live-action cartoon, and some of it functioned on the level of comfort food (with certain characters, lines and even shots recalling similar moments in the three previous films; my friend and I were bouncing off lines from the other films that this one reminded us of). But this certainly isn't the McClane I remember fondly from 1988, and certainly this new film has precious little of the wonderful emotional gravity of Die Hard---the sense that these characters and this situation was actually worth taking seriously on a somewhat realistic level.
Believe it or not this was the first thing I've seen that even mentioned what I've been screaming at preview screens for months: not only does this not jibe with the original premise of Die Hard, it's pretty much the exact OPPOSITE. The first movie was about an ordinary guy, trapped in a confined space, in a strange town, with nothing. This movie is about a practically superhuman guy, out in the open, on his home turf, with freakin' jets at his disposal. Not to deny people the joys of watching Bruce Willis kick ass (I'm not immune myself), but why even call it Die Hard?
I think the notion of modern technology/the net/etc. turning the whole world into one big confined space is interesting, but I have zero faith that the filmmakers intended this. Anyway, thanks for the review.
Sean Burns: Interesting you should mention the often atrocious dubbing, particularly when the film cuts between a closeup and a long shot of a character mid-sentence. It's student-film awful. I wonder if they needed to explain the plot and re-jiggered the editing to give themselves an opportunity? At any rate, sometimes it was so amateurish that I thought maybe the soundtrack had somehow slipped out of sync.
I noticed the dubbing as well. There was additionally a shot of Maggie Q. at the utility station that was used twice. The second time she whoops John's ass, her hair is back to its immaculate glass-free pre-whooping state.
Wow. Does it speak badly of my filmwatching skills or something that I didn't notice the dubbing? Maybe the action was so relentless that I didn't notice.
Die Hard 2 as "borderline retarded" -- that's so right! I just watched it (don't ask me why) and it felt like something out of Idiocracy.
I enjoyed LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. Yes, I'm aware of the conservative undertow. But fortunately, it didn't all out wave the flag like movies such as AIR FORCE ONE, which still leaves me with an upset stomach.
You know what? After reading your article, I'm beginning to wonder if you're some kind of cultural snob. You sound like one.
I'm a liberal. And I was very much aware of the slight conservative tone of the movie. But your article really left a bad taste in my mouth. Your view of the movie is so ridiculously one-dimensional that I'm beginning to wonder if you actually saw the film. You're entitled to your opinion. But I guess I'm entitled to my opinion . . . of both the movie and your review.
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