Live Free or Die Hard - Review

Slight spoiler warning: the ending isn't blown, but a secondary character's demise is talked about. Still, if you've seen more than one movie in your life, you'll know it's coming a mile away.

Director: Len Wiseman
Writer: Mark Bomback
Starring: Bruce Willis
Runtime: 2 hr 10 minutes

Die Hard in its first version changed the landscape for action movies in Hollywood. It still remains the quintessential film of the genre. Live Free or Die Hard undermines all of the work the franchise has done since, and comes out as a regular ho-hum actioner, complete with terrible clichés, bad dialogue, and a cowardly plot.

One line from the latest instalment completely sums up how tired the Die Hard franchise has become: “They’ve got my daughter.”

And that is all you need to hear from the film to know that it is a complete waste of time. They’ve got my daughter? You can’t get more tired than that, unless you use such lines as, “They killed my partner.” Or perhaps, “This time it’s personal.”

Though it appears a good 70 minutes into the film, I don’t think I’m giving much away with the “They’ve got my daughter” line. We meet John McClane’s daughter in the first five minutes. Surprise, surprise, she hates her father. He catches her making out with a teenage boy, there’s a father/daughter argument, and she walks off in a huff, disappearing from the movie. Any thinking audience member has got to be groaning at this point, because we know that we’ll see her again, only it won’t be at a birthday party. It will be in the hands of some maniac, whom McClane will kill, saving the world and his familial relationship with one quick bullet.

I was hoping that Live Free would be the first movie to take on Al Queda. Hollywood is so politically correct that not one film has been made where the hero is specifically trying to outwit and outfight America’s arch enemy: militant Islam. Hollywood’s aversion to calling Al Queda and militant Islam an ‘enemy’ is beginning to border on the pathological, if not the downright obscene.

Since the 90’s, Islamic terrorists have bombed the World Trade Center, blown up two US embassies in Africa, killed American sailors aboard the USS Cole, knocked down the World Trade Center, flown a plane into the Pentagon, crashed another in Pennsylvania, killed scores of civilians in Madrid and London, and most recently tried to detonate another couple of carbombs in Piccadilly Circus. Nevermind the havoc they’ve played in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Far East.

What does Hollywood have to show for it? A play-by-play of Flight 93 with no moral judgement in it whatsoever. A film about two firefighters trapped under the rubble of the Trade Center and keeping each other company until help arrives. A movie about the bad boy history of the CIA which ends in the 60’s. One movie about Iraq where the soldiers delight in masturbation, sit around in the desert, but don’t shoot anyone. A story about a US sniper who is framed by a US Senator for trying to kill the President. A release coming out later this month about a pilot shot down and taken prisoner in Vietnam.

Gutsy stuff.

The amount of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam movies prove that Hollywood could talk about America and its enemies at length. So why does militant Islam get a free pass, especially when they are the only enemy to have ever specifically targeted and killed US civilians, the same civilians that buy movie tickets? Vietnam movies and history lessons about the 1950’s CIA are not exactly ripped-from-the-headlines stories that we should expect from filmmakers.

With a title like Live Free or Die Hard, one would think that it would be a story about defeating today’s enemy that is opposed to freedom. Instead, the title is merely a pun taken from a New Hampshire license plate.

In the first Die Hard, the robbers posed as terrorists. In Live Free, the robbers…pose as terrorists. But these terrorists are not Islamic. The head honcho, Thomas Gabriel (played Timothy Olyphant), is as WASP as the character's name suggests, and guess what? He has a beef with the US because he used to work for the Pentagon. They fired him for saying that their security was lax. Now he’s out to prove it. In other words, it’s all America’s fault. Again. If they had only listened to him, they wouldn’t be in this fix right now (he messes up the communications systems, gas pipelines, and generally throws a monkey wrench into the infrastructure of the country, all with a few handy laptops and some computer-geek American cronies).

Not once in the film are the words Al Queda, Islamic terror, or bin Laden mentioned, if only to lead the audience down the wrong track. The words are ridiculously conspicuous by their absence, since you have to believe that at least one person working for the FBI might casually say, “Hmmm. Maybe this is an Al Queda attack.” In the world of Live Free, as in the world of Hollywood, Al Queda and Islamic terrorists do not exist.

The robber/terrorist’s girlfriend is an Asian woman. Willis as McClane reminds us of this on several occasions, by calling her an “Asian bitch.” Indeed, one of the biggest fight scenes in the movie is where Willis and the woman beat the crap out of each other, and Willis delights in telling her boyfriend that his “Asian” girlfriend is dead.

Well. What are we to make of all this? It would seem Hollywood is afraid of being called racist by showing terrorists as they are today (Islamic fundamentalists), but they aren’t afraid to be racist against Asian people. Imagine “black bitch” or “Mexican bitch.” Even “black girlfriend.” The hue and cry from the media would be appropriately loud, yet Asians can take it on the chin.

This is not new. I was in an LA comedy club some years back, where three comics in a row had all kinds of jokes about Asians. One talked about what bad drivers they were, and made slant-eye gags and jokes about how Asian people can’t see properly. The audience chortled and giggled, while a friend and I blanched. I am not surprised to see that the LA anti-Asian culture has seeped it’s way into a summer release with nary a whisper from the Hollywood media.

The filming of Live Free as a high flying actioner is so-so at best. You don’t need the credits to tell you that John McTiernan didn’t direct it, as he did two of the others. The effects are fairly lame, especially a sequence involving a fighter plane that is pure fantasy (a cross between a Harrier jet and an F-15). The banter between McClane and his sidekick buddy doesn’t remotely come close to the dialogue and chemistry between Willis and Samuel L. Jackson in Die Hard: With A Vengeance.

The Die Hard franchise has indeed died hard, and not with a bang, but a whimper.