Monday, November 26, 2007
I wasn’t even 4 when Die Hard came out, and I must have been about 7 when I first saw it. John McClane is up there with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Marty McFly, Doc Brown, and Indiana Jones as an important, iconic movie character of my childhood. Die Hard is an all-time great action movie, and the series stayed pretty strong through two sequels; neither was as classic as the original, but both are top notch action movies that I can watch again and again.
So I wasn’t too thrilled when I heard that Len Wiseman was hired to direct Live Free or Die Hard. Wiseman is the director responsible for Underworld, a movie that I was about to say I hated, but that's not quite right. I don’t have any real feelings towards it, because it’s one of the most empty film going experiences of my entire life. Every idea, every moment, every image was recycled from a million other films, with no sense of fun, or energy, or vision. It was for me kinda like staring at a blank screen for two hours. There’s the movie on the screen, and here’s me sitting in the theater, and I might as well have been in the parking lot for as much as we connected.
Then it turns out they decided to release the movie, the first Die Hard film in over a decade, as PG-13. If it was any other franchise, I may not have bothered to go see it. But see it I did.
I was pretty surprised to find that I liked the movie quite a bit. It was a respectable sequel, it got the attitude correct, and it followed the series tradition of being more over top than the previous films. It took the Die Hard with a Vengeance approach of combining parts’ 1 and 2’s desire to be genuinely thrilling with a hearty dose of sublime absurdness to it.
I knew I didn’t like it as much as parts 1 and 3, and I suspected I didn’t like it as much as part 2, but I was unsure. There was one major, glaring flaw that was making it difficult to rank it against the others: the PG-13 rating.
Because you just can’t have a Die Hard movie with out blood and fucks. I mean, for shit’s sake, McClane couldn’t even say his signature line. They muffle the money-syllable with a gunshot. This kinda shit had me all bugaboo.
Suffice it to say, I had been looking forward to the unrated DVD for a long time, and finally popped in my copy tonight. Did the re-instated blood and fucks push this past part 2? My verdict?
It’s a strong action movie, but still maybe my least favorite of the series. It might tie with part 2, but I’d have to watch that one sometime soon to make a firm decision. The changes to this unrated version are a mixed bag. Let’s discuss:
First, the blood. I had originally assumed that the violence in the PG-13 movie had been toned down in post production. I thought they CG’ed out all the blood, or perhaps shot alternate takes. The point was, in my mind LFoDH Motherfucker Edition would be chock-a-block with squib hits. No such luck. In fact, it’s almost like the opposite of that. There’s a considerable amount of extra blood in this version, but it looks like it’s been CG’ed into the PG-13 bloodless scenes.
Yeah, fuck that. CG blood? It almost never looks good. It is to be used sparingly or not at all, ok Hollywood Unrated DVD maker-guys? Pretend there’s a health chart for movie violence, ok? Top-notch make-up Tom Savini-type shit is at the big part at the bottom, like grains. And CG gunshots are the point at the top, like sweets. I would rather there be no blood than this much computer-blood.
Okay, the added violence gets a thumbs down. Now, however, we come to the fucks. And here our unrated DVD does not disappoint. This movie needed its fucks, and finally it has them. Some of my favorites were “shut the fuck up” and “fuck you, bitch” and of course “Yippie ki-yay MOTHERFUCKER.” No gunshot muffling McClane’s signature line, which on a side note is the best use of the line since the original. Instead of arbitrarily blurting it out like in parts 2 and 3, it actually feels motivated by his character, as he psyches himself up to do something incredibly badass.
So all the “Fuck”ing really does add some balls back into this flick. Enough that you should watch this cut and not the theatrical one.
I guess I should expound a little bit on the movie itself. The main reason I think it ranks below the other 3 is the plot, which isn’t very interesting. The bad guys are computer hackers, and they can magically hack into anything they want at a moments notice including street lights and police radios and about a billion other things. There are countless scenes of the bad guys being all “we have to hack into the mainframe and blah blah blah” followed by scenes of the FBI being all “they’ve hacked into our mainframe and blah blah blah” and who gives a fuck, seriously? This shit is like 10 years too old to make for an interesting plot. The screenwriters do a good job of using the hacking stuff to set up some cool action scenes, like when they use traffic signs to reroute a bunch of cars into a head-on collision with McClane in the middle. But there’s so much banal exposition about the plot when we could be watching McClane kick more ass.
And the other problem is the villain, played by Timothy Olyphant. He has some pretty kick-ass henchmen, including some French acrobat motherfucker and an asian karate-lady, but it’s like the screenwriters forgot to give him anything to do. Olyphant has the right presence to make a menacing villain, and he gets a few good lines, but he is left hanging.
The other DH flicks made a point of establishing that their villains were formidable foes. Not here. Remember Hans Gruber being all businessman-like, then calmly shooting Takagi in the head when he won’t give him the info he wants? Or the guy in the second movie doing naked karate in his hotel room, and then later threatening death to his own man for messing up? Or Simon saying all those riddles then blowing shit up? Those guys all had personalities, and they were all menacing in their own way. Well, Olyphant sits at a computer for a while. Later, he gets mad and pushes his laptop off the desk. When he gets really pissed, he makes sarcastic comments to his own men. So at his worst, he’s kind of like when your dad is in a really bad mood.
But those are not really big issues in the long run. The movie is funny and energetic and even builds some genuine excitement at times. Bruce Willis has some good chemistry with his sidekick Matt, played by Justin Long, and it’s fun to watch them bicker. It’s not as good as Sam Jackson in part 3, but it gets the job done. McClane is getting older this time, so they make him a kind of mentor figure, and I think it works. McClane is also a full blown American icon, so he and Matt have a few conversations about the nature of heroism. It’s a little corny but I like it.
I have to give Wiseman credit, he makes the movie look good and move fast. His style is more energetic and less elegant than John McTiernan’s style on the first film, but I think that fits the broader canvas. He bounces the camera around a little more, and gets a lot flashier with the special effects. Unlike some directors, he uses CG to good effect, knowing that it works best when you’re trying to make a ridiculous action scene as opposed to an exciting one. And he throws in some honest to goodness, no-shit, for real stunt work into the mix that provides the real thrills.
And the movie gets the McClane mythos. I was worried, what with the PG-13ing, that they had made some dumbass, watered down McClane for general consumption. But he’s the same old prickly bastard he ever was; short-tempered, violent, sarcastic and prone to making a bad situation worse. When he drives an SUV through a building just to hit one terrorist, then accidentally crashes it into an elevator shaft and has to fight the terrorist while hanging on for dear life, you know he’s the real deal.
