Live Free or Die Hard (2007) * * *

Directed by:  Len Wiseman

Starring:  Bruce Willis, Timothy Olymphant, Justin Long, Maggie Q, Kevin Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead

Maybe the reason John McClane (Willis) seems to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time (for the fourth time now), is because he is not the type of cop to let things go.    If something isn't quite right, he senses it and acts on it.    This does not bode well for the bad guys.   The villain here is cyber terrorist Thomas Gabriel (Olymphant), a clean-cut, arrogant young man who unleashes a shutdown on the entire American computer infrastructure.    McClane is accompanying a hacker named Matt (Long) to Washington, DC to meet with the FBI, and not coincidentally, Matt was once approached to Gabriel to aid him in his scheme.    Matt refused and is now a target of Gabriel's goons.    McClane is at first annoyed by Matt, mostly due to generational differences, but we all know Matt won't be harmed if McClane has anything to say about it.

Live Free or Die Hard gives you what you would expect from a Die Hard film and does it with gusto.   This is the first movie I've seen in which an unoccupied car is used as a weapon against a helicopter.    "I ran out of bullets," McClane says in the deadpan way he says mostly everything else.   Matt is not used to such violence.   For McClane, this stuff is old hat to him by now.    Olymphant gives us a nasty villain whom we can root against gleefully.    He lacks the humor and sophistication of Hans Gruber from the first film, but then again, how many villains are of that caliber?    But, we love it when McClane gets under his skin.

Willis, of course, injects McClane with the everyman quality he is famous for.    He isn't tired of the role.    That seems to come in the next installment, the forgettable A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), which broke the streak of good Die Hard films.    Willis throws himself headlong into the fray and despite his age can still deliver a can of whoop-ass to the baddies.    His fight with Gabriel's dangerous girlfriend (Maggie Q) is among the most exhausting and exhilarating of the series.    McClane keeps finding ways to stay alive, much to Gabriel's mounting frustration.    But, Gabriel has some tricks as well, including kidnapping McClane's daughter Lucy (Winstead).   

Live Free or Die Hard, like the rest of the series, isn't grounded in realism, but follows the traditions of the action genre or possibly even the western.    McClane takes a pounding, and by the end is bloodied, tired, beaten, but never bowed.    I think back to Die Hard 2, when McClane answers someone who asks why he would fly in a helicopter if he is afraid of flying.    "I don't like to lose either," he says, and that is all the explanation we need.    Not that we even needed one.