An essential ingredient, in my view, to the success of a movie like Live Free or Die Hard, is the knowing wink at the audience that lets us know the movie isn’t taking itself too seriously. This is usually accomplished with the goofy sidekick, and when it works, it can transform an absurd movie (save “transform” and “absurd movie” for the next movie) into a fun romp. (An aside: one of the best wink-at-the-audience characters, though, was a main character (rather than a sidekick) in the person of Bill Murray in Ghostbusters who relentlessly made fun of the silliness around him, even as it threatened to kill him.) The sidekick in Live Free or Die Hard is played by Justin Long, famous for representing the Mac computer in Apple’s wickedly funny TV commercials, and for the most part he hits the right notes to go along with Bruce Willis’s tough-as-nails gritty New York City detective John McClane.
Once again, the so-called terrorists are actually just high-tech and deadly thieves. Somehow it is refreshing to face villains whose motive is as simple as greed, perhaps because we can relate to greed a little easier than the desire to transform the world back to the 7th century. This time around the evil mastermind conducts a “fire sale” attack on the entire country’s electronic and power grid, wreaking havoc with everything from traffic lights to the New York Stock Exchange. All of this is ultimately meant as a distraction for the big heist which McClane and Matt Farrell (Long), a hacker of sorts, are uniquely positioned to thwart. The movie has the cliche of the one supervisor smart enough to let McClane do his thing, surrounded by ignoramus higher-ups. It felt tired and was completely unnecessary. For once can’t all the law enforcers be reasonable and competent? Being so doesn’t mean they will automatically beat the bad guys, after all. For the big stunts I happily suspended disbelief until a fighter jet hovered like a helicopter and maneuvered between two levels of an interstate interchange. But for the most part I found this an enjoyable romp.