Live Free or Die Hard - Monkey Preview

Yippee-Ki-Yay, Movie Goer!

Look, I’m going to try to go into this with an open mind, but how can I? The first Die Hard, while good, didn’t win any Oscars for a reason. And every installment since then has been worse. So you’ll have to excuse my pessimism.



Live Free or Die Hard – Monkey Preview

Just let me go on record as saying that we need another Die Hard movie like we need to reintroduce the Slinky. It’s quaint and nostalgic, but after it slinks down a few stairs, we’ll be done with it.

Similarly, after we get into Live Free or Die Hard for a bit, I think we’ll see why there hasn’t been one of these films since 1995 (Die Hard with a Vengeance).

As with most sequels that occur after a long layoff, there’s a mutual need. The studio wants to cash in on the brand name. No surprise there – studios are willing to do anything to profit off of a preexisting brand. It reduces marketing expenses or gains automatic viewership, or both.

So what better way to leverage that brand name – and the Brinks truck that comes with it – than to trot out 52 year old Bruce Willis, who hasn’t been on the greatest run recently, and a bunch of stiffs? Timothy Olyphant is the second billed star here. Unless you watch Deadwood, you probably don’t know who he is. What does that tell you? It tells you that this is a money grab, that’s what. Hell, the second star is actually the special effects, if the budget would tell you anything.

Willis has made some good films: 12 Monkeys, The Sixth Sense, Pulp Fiction, Unbreakable. He’s also made some clunkers: Hudson Hawk, Tears of the Sun, and Hart’s War, to name a few. It’s just that more of those clunkers have come recently. So it probably shouldn’t be surprising that this recent run, plus the tens of millions offered by the studio (since they don’t have to pay a lot to anyone else) made this project an easy, if not artistic, choice.

Live Free or Die Hard is directed by Len Wiseman, who directed Citizen Kane, Annie Hall and The Godfather. Just kidding. But his resume is almost that impressive. To wit: Stargate, Godzilla, Independence Day, Men in Black and Underworld. What does it say when Underworld is the best film he’s directed? It says that we’re in trouble. Still, Wiseman knows how to make a mindless blockbuster, so the studio seems to have hired the right guy – for their purposes.

Let me heap some more salt in the wounds: Mark Bomback wrote this movie – his only significant credit is Godsend, the forgettable 2004 film starring Robert DeNiro and Greg Kinnear. I assume that he’s responsible for this masterful exchange that we’re seeing in the Live Free or Die Hard trailers:

Matt: “You just killed that helicopter with a car!”
McClain: “I ran out of bullets.”

Witty. Very witty.

Look, I’m going to try to go into this with an open mind, but how can I? The first Die Hard, while good, didn’t win any Oscars for a reason. And every installment since then has been worse. So you’ll have to excuse my pessimism.