Well, after the recent spate of sequels I suppose it was only a matter of time before they got around to making another Die Hard movie. This time with Underworld’s Len Wiseman at the helm after John McTiernan got himself chucked in the slammer for perjury. So, John McClane’s back and he’s balder than ever. The plot involves some random shady organisation getting computer hackers to write some code and then using that code to switch off America’s infrastructure. All the hackers are then killed off except one whose skinny pallid ass is saved by John McClane. That sets the geek vs tough as nails cop dynamic for the remainder of the movie; something which never ceases to be painful right from the start. There’s a sub plot involving his mildly pissing off daughter but thankfully she doesn’t get too much screen time.

The action starts off on a decent note but becomes progressively unrealistic as the movie goes on. And I’m talking borderline matrix unrealistic. Which winds up being a pretty big dampener on things. I think the film would’ve been a lot more tolerable if they just stuck to the guns, cars and occasional helicopter formula. Instead we get Bruce Willis facing off against a hovering fighter jet. And dodging missiles. While in a huge slow moving semi. And then jumping on the jet. And then jumping off. Wait, is this True Lies?  I realise the movie is called “Die Hard” (a point reinforced with the villain screaming “I thought I killed you” every 10 minutes) but the way they set this up it seemed that in the event of a nuclear holocaust only cockroaches and Bruce Willis would survive.

And just for the record, I hate this parakour free running crap. It looked cool in Casino Royale but what the fuck happened to taking a gun out and shooting someone in the head? Now bad guys spend 10 minutes doing back flips, front flips, assorted other acrobatics, then jump off a two storey building, climb up the same two storeys after which they pull their guns out and miss the shot. Give me something new, I can get all this in a Rajnikanth or a Mithun feature. .

After the ridiculously over the top action bits we have the extremely unconvincing bad guy. At this point in time everyone needs to take a step back and remember the performance of Alan Rickman as the completely awesome Hans Gruber. Now that is how you play a bad guy. Instead we get random dude who looks like he got kicked off the sets of a teen sitcom for being too old. The only points in the movie when he comes across as convincing are when he’s mimicking telephone operators. Missed your calling there dude.

In between we have these brief moments of seriousness where McClane goes all introspective. I suspect halfway through they realised they had a stinker on their hands and stuck these in just to make the ridiculous action bits look good by comparison.

Apart from all this I think one thing which hurt the movie a lot (along with the pointless emoting and other vague crap) was the PG13 rating. Seriously, when I see some Asian chick being hit by an SUV and then driven through five walls I want a resounding “SQUISH” not “moments of incredible kung fu”. This was in play throughout the movie where both good and bad guys kept surviving fairly fatal accidents. Most of the deaths took place off screen or employed clever editing to ensure we didn’t have to sit through gruesome shots of precious human life being snuffed out. Remember, the scene in the first movie where the guy fell down metal steps and broke his neck? Well, one guy does the exact same thing, lands worse, is shot and is still alive when John McClane fucks off to dispatch the boss. The worst part – we even got cheated out of “Yippee-ki-yay Motherfucker”.

I’m a huge fan of the Die Hard movies. The first movie is probably one of the best action movies ever made. In Die Hard 4.0 they took the original, took away everything which made it great and we got another mindless action flick. About par with movies like Shooter and SWAT.