The Netflix Diaries: Live Free or Die Hard

Since January is pretty much a wasteland in the movie theaters (except for J. J. Abrams' ripoff of The Host), I usually dedicate it to catching up on the things I missed the previous year on DVD, at least while I impatiently wait for There Will Be Blood and Persepolis to come to the midwest.

The first up was Len Wiseman's entry into the storied Die Hard trilogy. It's certainly a slick action film, and much less bogged down by exposition than his Underworld movies (although it's still all silvery-looking for some reason), but it cerainly has little to do with the first three installments in John McClane's life. This time, he has daughter issues instead of wife issues, but Live Free jumps haedlong into bullets and explosions after about five minutes.

The villain this time is Timothy Olyphant's uber-cyber-hacker terrorist, who brings nearly the entire country down by messing with the infrastructure. For some reason, this means he must kill freelance hacker Justin Long, who Willis ends up shepherding around.

Gone is any sort of gritty, human action hero sort of John McClane- instead he's a bald, shiny, indestructible force of nature that bounces between flying cars, semi-rigs, and fighter jets like a human pinball in the biggest Rube Goldberg machine of a film ever. Justin Long is mostly there to incredulously comment on the impossible things that Willis does, from "You just killed a helicopter with a car!" to "Shouldn't you go to a hospital or something?"

One part that annoyed me (beyond the sheer ridiculousness of some action set-pieces) was the Kevin Smith cameo as Justin Long's hacker friend that does other hacker things that aren't really explained. We get it. There is a computer subculture in this country that is extensive, and contains eccentric minds and colorful characters. Can we just tone it down some maybe? (Although at least Long and Smith are semi-nerdy looking white guys, though- Transformers was asking for even more crazy hackerness believability with Rachel Taylor and Anthony Anderson).

In a weird way, this film is sort of a mindless counterpoint to No Country For Old Men- both have aging law enforcement officials that are relics from an older time, doing business with grit and dignity, who are forced to confront an entirely new sort of villainy. But Tommy Lee Jones' Sherrif Bell plaintively despairs at the horrors of the new drug trade in the Coen's masterpiece, while John McClane just head-butts cyber-terror into complicity.

In the end, Live Free or Die Hard winds up right where you expect it to, and it's a pleasant enough time waster. But it won't crack my Top 30 films of the year.

Also, there wasn't anything that really had to do with living free, although plenty of people certainly died hard.