Fly in the Ointment: A Die Hard Retrospective (Part 4)
Some thoughts on Live Free or Die Hard (2007).
Note: These movies have been around for a considerable amount of time, so assume there will be spoilers all throughout.
Hi again. Sorry for the delay and to those still following along, I am eternally grateful for your patience as each of these installments come out. There’s one more left and if things stay on track, it’ll be out in about six months1.
So far, the Die Hard journey hasn’t been as dire as I thought it would be. I was pretty down on Die Hard 2, but it still has some great moments throughout. Die Hard with a Vengeance is what the first sequel should have been. Live Free or Die Hard is slightly more fun than Die Hard 2, in my strict humble opinion—while still being pretty flawed. I’ve been waiting for a steep drop-off, and we haven’t gotten to it yet. I’ll check back in next time when John McClane goes to Russia.
Live Free or Die Hard has McClane going up against a nemesis spoken of in Die Hard 2 but never fully confronted until now: technology. It means several shots zooming in on computer hackers as they do their Hacking. I believe we get an “I’m in” once or twice after tapping some keyboard keys which is the sign of a true hacker. Casting Justin Long as the main hacker/sidekick was the 2007 shorthand for signaling this kind of character. It was directed by Len Wiseman this time around who had a hand in most of the Underworld movies. He’s closer to Renny Harlin than he is John McTiernan, which is to say he seems like the guy to hire if you need someone to tick boxes off a list. No shot seems to go on for longer than two seconds so I was impressed anytime he held the camera for longer than that2
The DVD I own has the theatrical PG-13 cut and unrated cut. I watched the unrated version the first time around so I could get the full effect of “Yippee-Ki-Yay-Mom-And-Dad-Both-Subscribe-To-My-Substack” before throwing on the PG-13 cut on rewatch. Other than having the full “Yippee-Ki-Yay”, some more arbitrary profanity, and a few more blood splats, the unrated cut is essentially the same movie. The difference being that one of them is safer for youth group movie night than the other.
Going in with lower expectations, I think the first hour or so is really fun. I dogged on him a little earlier, but I think Justin Long is at the right pitch and plays well off of Bruce Willis. This type of character—the motormouth sidekick—is generally grating but he was the best at that type. It generally works here, even if his rant about listening to news feels like being trapped with your friend who is super into Joe Rogan. It’s no Die Hard with a Vengeance but when the movie is focused on those two Die Hard’ing their way through town, it really sings.
What didn’t sing for me this time was McClane on his own. The vulnerability is completely gone and I felt it the most when he drives a car into a helicopter, a scene I think is fine if you forget that it’s happening in a Die Hard movie. On top of all that, he’s racist, misogynistic, and kills people in cold blood. He’s also the worst kind of Girl Dad, the kind that stalks his adult daughter when she’s at college. He’s a fly in the ointment for sure, just in increasingly useless ways.
Previously on Die Hard with a Vengeance, we saw Jeremy Irons as Simon Gruber. While agreed he’ll never be Alan Rickman3, he carved out his own spot as an iconic villain. Timothy Olyphant and Maggie Q are set up to fail here. For starters, I don’t buy Olyphant—the Raylan Givens—as someone who could go toe-to-toe with John McClane and at least get the edge over him for a little while before he’s taken down by hubris.
Maggie Q plays Mai Linh, Raylan—sorry, Olyphant’s—hang on, looking up the character’s name rn—Thomas Gabriel’s second-in-command who gets dispatched via SUV down an elevator shaft. It’s bad enough that she’s barely a character from the time she appears onscreen to the moment she’s taken out, what made this scene truly excruciating was listening to McClane go off on a racist, sexist jag after killing her. It’s not that I expect him to be warm and cuddly. At his best, the character of John McClane is a prickly but fundamentally decent guy. It never steered into xenophobia the way it does here and it makes John insufferable for the rest of the running time.
Saying the female characters are underserved in the film Live Free or Die Hard is like saying the ocean is big and wet. Besides Maggie Q, there’s Mary Elizabeth Winstead playing Lucy McClane whose primary functions in the story are being stalked by Dad and being kidnapped and eventually rescued by Dad and wooed by his weird little sidekick. You really miss energy of someone like Bonnie Bedelia in the first two movies. Vengeance was much more dude-heavy but at least had Sam Phillips and Colleen Camp in solid supporting roles. Have to imagine it also helped having a director who was actually interested in making the characters compelling.
I don’t want to end this on an entirely bummer note so I’ll start landing the plane by saying I think Kevin Smith might be the MVP of the movie playing a hacker named Warlock. He shows up about halfway through and up until that point, he’s a character that more than one person alludes to. So when the time for Warlock’s reveal comes, you need an actor who can really sell all that’s been said about them up until that point and Kevin Smith absolutely delivers. What I’m saying is, he’s exactly like Orson Welles in The Third Man and that’s a statement you can print on my tombstone.
I’m not sure what impression I’ve given off so far but I mostly enjoyed this. The reason I’d put it over Die Hard 2 is only because at least the first half of the movie is a lot of fun. I’ve got A Good Day to Die Hard on the horizon which looks like it has the potential to make this one look like a masterpiece4. That post will also be a general wrap-up of this months-long Die Hard journey so do stay tuned. In the meantime…
But onto the real question: how far would I make it in John McClane’s shoes in this particular Die Hard movie? I think I would make it pretty far if I hid behind the nerd and let him do all the talking because I know jack-diddly about computers. The minute there’s an actual firefight though, we’re both definitely toast.
Kidding! Working hard on the final post as we speak.
“Go off, Tarkovsky,” I would say to the TV/no one in particular observing a three-second shot.
Who could be?
Dear reader, this is Future Nathan popping in to say I have now seen A Good Day to Die Hard and (SPOILER) it makes Die Hards 2 and 4 look like Die Hard 1. There’s a reason it will only cover half of the next post.