"Is it just me, or is it depressingly ironic that, working from the simplest formula and not even starting from scratch, all the ponytails in Hollywood can't grow a decent sequel in their committee laboratories?" Live Free or Die Hard
Director: Len Wiseman. Screenplay: Mark Bomback, based on an article by John Carlin. Cinematography: Simon Duggan. Film editing: Nicolas De Toth. Production design: Patrick Tatopoulos. Music: Marco Beltrami. Producers: Michael Fottrell, John McTiernan, Arnold Rifkin, Bruce Willis. With: Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Kevin Smith, Zeljko Ivanek, Timothy Olyphant, Maggie Q, Cliff Curtis, Jonathan Sadowski, Andrew Friedman, Yorgo Constantine, Cyril Raffaelli, Chris Palermo, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Sung Kang, Christina Chang, Jake McDorman, Rosemary Knower, Chris Ellis Jr., Kurt David Anderson, Matt O’Leary, Tim Russ, Joe Gerety, Edoardo Costa, Yancey Arias, Rick Cramer. UK/USA. Languages: English, Italian, French. 130 min. 2007.
By Jeremy Sterritt
The way action movies become action movie franchises is exponential: If there's a passable second film, there's going to be a fourth; get to roman numeral V and you can bank on VIII. This is like cells subdividing, and therefore something more complicated should result--something more complex, more capable, more better. With most movies, though, and certainly with the Die Hard series, it's just more: more of the same, stretched thin--more explosions, villains, sex, subplots, and sidekicks shoveled on. This type of growth is not good, like a mustache. It's bad, like brain cancer. Is it just me, or is it depressingly ironic that, working from the simplest formula and not even starting from scratch, all the ponytails in Hollywood can't grow a decent sequel in their committee laboratories? Of course it's easy for studios to market a new movie that’s a clone of an original success, but for all the promise of cloning, aren't there like a thousand inside-out suckerfish and two-headed kittens for every Dolly the sheep? Even the House of Windsor would agree that absent fresh new material, clones, inbred progeny, and action-movie sequels aren't going to yield the best results.
I'm trying to like Live Free or Die Hard, but I'm finding it somewhat difficult. One part of me wants to give big love to this old-school action opera of fireballs and rebars, bullets and broken glass, not to mention car chases, car crashes, and car-on-car action for the even the kinkiest connoisseur. But then there's that other part of me--the part that is sleepy, the part that slogged across lower Manhattan in the rain to catch an opening-night showing of something I knew offered little grist for the RadioOpticon mill. The part of me that wouldn't make a very good action hero, or even sidekick. If somehow I were paired up with John McClane as a mild-mannered structural engineer in, say, Die Hard Down Under, my noble moment would come at the conclusion of the very first bloodbath, something to the effect of, “My legs don't work, you go on without me ... for the good of the Commonwealth.” If that didn't get me off the hook, I'd pull out the big guns: the Great Pumpkin; Hitler was misunderstood; there's no sex like prison sex ... or just go blank, let my eyes roll back in my head, and drool. Anything for a free pass from the Die Hard way of saving the day, because you know it's going to hurt. Going to the circus can be fun, but who actually wants to get shot out of a cannon?
According to John McClane, not even John McClane wants that. But as a three-time loser--um, I mean hero--with nothing else to do, I think he secretly likes being the what-are-the-odds, jam-car variable that all robber-terrorist geniuses should, but don’t, factor into their otherwise meticulously thought out and well-laid evil schemes.
The last time around, Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson, a pair that could have ratcheted up the bad-ass quotient to unprecedented levels, instead ran around the abbreviated New York of an NYU freshman, solving little puzzles, bickering like an old married couple. This time around--by way of apology?--great pains are taken in the geographic verisimilitude department, even though few will know, or take the time to care, where Rutgers is, let alone Camden. (Hint: They're in New Jersey.) This installment's sidekick, played by Justin Long, is of the dazed-and-confused, hamster-in-the-highway variety, so Willis can't bicker, he can only complain. But the presence of any sidekick ruins what made the first Die Hard’s McClane an action hero you could really get behind and root for: his indefatigable, onanistic, chatty-Cathy, inner-turned-outer monologuing. His combination of batty old Aunt Betty and cross-to-other-side-of-the-street psychopath was more than endearing--it was running commentary that kept everything moving and made sense of the icy one-line stingers and pithy one-line zingers action heroes have been compelled to deliver with each kill-shot since the bar was set by Eisenstein in the title cards for Battleship Potemkin.
Live Free or Die Hard is fleshed out by genre-spoof tactics, good old smash’n’crash action, humorless parodies of action movies, and what I think is a very personal, pointed screw-you to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Gone are the funny side-characters like pompous dickhead William Atherton (he played the pompous dickhead in Die Hard 1 and 2). Gone too are the bad guys with classy accents, posh educations, and pecking orders of sequentially creepier henchmen. Gone are the Reagan-era black guys and Mrs. Gennero's perm. Gone, all gone! All that's left for Live Free or Die Hard are the personalities of its two stars.
Bruce Willis is Bruce Willis reprising, or at least invoking, better roles, like the quiet-yet-excitable reluctant bald-guy ones from Twelve Monkeys and Pulp Fiction. Justin Long is, most famously and not that funnily, a Mac from Apple computer's TV ads. He’s also a scruffy and unthreatening Keanu Reeves--we even meet him just like we meet Neo in The Matrix, alone with his computers, not realizing his potential, which in this case is to grow a pair and shoot a guy in the face. Live Free’s mismatched buddy system is adorably hackneyed and archaic--Ferris Bueller meets Dirty Harry--and the movie knows we know how silly it is. But does it know we know it knows we know? Sadly, Live Free or Die Hard tries to force its nudge-nudge-wink-wink laughs on us by main force, which kind of defeats the purpose of them being shared laughs about a joke we're all in on. By riffing on the tired inevitability of, well, itself, the movie bites itself on the ass. So when McClane--to make sure we know he knows we know--literally shoots himself, it raises a question: Does Live Free or Die Hard have nothing but contempt for itself? And if so, is this a good way to sell a movie?
To answer the first of those questions: Live Free does not loath itself. It is a film extrapolated from the character of John McClane. He does not like the life he has outside his big-screen adventures. While hardly an egoist, he is able to recognize his value and abilities, and to do his job and not get killed. But he doesn't like it. He’s more than just a blue-collar cop putting the kibosh on the machinations of bored, well funded, usually European megalomaniacs. He is cursed with the clarity of vision most often reserved for drunken girls trying to break up their boyfriends' bar fights. In what should be a mot juste in Live Free or Die Hard, McClane is called a Timex in a digital world. That he takes a licking and keeps on ticking goes without saying, but someone should have said it anyway, because the Timex line fizzles utterly. Still, the idea is a good one. Because he wasn't upgraded to the networked, fiber-optic iLife with the rest of law enforcement, he really comes in handy when that system is hacked and crashed. He's a hefty old touchtone phone, a trusty land line. We really should keep more of them around. McClane agrees.
This said, however, McClane’s beefs with technology, and with any entertainment more complicated than Roy Rogers on the old Sylvania, get stretched too far, veering into criticism of (a) movies and culture and (b) politics and society. You might call this commentary, but the movie really does gripe like the crotchety old man Bruce Willis isn't. McClane and the movie may both be brawny, old-fashioned beings, but where McClane is charming the way a Timex can be charming, the movie is sometimes downright rude, at the expense of its genre and itself. McClane is utilitarian; he wasn't invited to save the day, he just happened to be there. But a movie should never be utilitarian, and this one tries, like Hummer asserting that its $50,000 SUV's are for hauling steel and flagpoles and courage across rugged terrain. Live Free or Die Hard forced its way into theaters to what? Save the world from other action movies? Should we be grateful that one summer blockbuster didn't use CGI, warning us in the nick of time that we shouldn’t throw out our rotoscopes, green screens, and compositing techniques? Live Free or Die Hard crashes its own party and proceeds to insult the hostess, sucker-punch the host, piss in the pool, and drink up all liquor before crashing hard on the couch. Is this really a good way to sell a movie?
Apparently it is. Critics and audiences are responding very well, but critics are not so bright, are we? Maybe the knowing references that riddle the picture like, yep, so many bullet holes work for those who "get" them; meanwhile, those who don't receive two hours and then some of highly inaccurate gunfire and a second act that comprises 99 percent of the film. And they like it. And I don't not like it. I'm like McClane from the original Die Hard, barefoot and jabbering, half funny, half dead serious, and half crazy. You do the math. But don't go to Live Free or Die Hard when it's raining and you're sleepy.
Jeremy Sterritt is proprietor and film critic of RadioOpticon, am1020whdd - robinhoodradio.com.
