Live Free or Die Hard movie review (2007)

The first Die Hard picture came out in 1988, when Willis was a pup of 33. He's played this character, on and off, for most of his professional career, and it still suits. McClane gives him juice; he gives McClane grit. The part lets him jump around and show off his agility. (In what may be a one-stunt-too-many scene within the movie's long climax, he hitches a ride on the wing of a fighter jet.) In turn, Willis, with his coiled poise and the compact gestures of an assured star, exudes worldly wariness and cosmic weariness, as if he'd achieved a state of Zen machismo. He's so close to a still life, his own heroic statue, that we may wonder if the McClane character is even alive. "I thought I killed you already," a bad guy says, and Willis-McClane replies, "I get that a lot."

He survives that licking to keep on kicking, notably in a hanging-by-a-car-fender-at-the-top-of-an-elevator-shaft fight scene with Gabriel's hottie henchwoman (played by Vietnamese-Polish-Irish-American stunner Maggie Q and her stunt-double, Boni Yanagisawa). "Live Free or Die Hard" has a lot of this muscular bustle, considering its the first movie in the series not rated R. To get a PG-13, Wiseman & Co. made the violence cleaner, leaving out the reaction shots you'd get in an R-rated film of, say, a thug with his face blown off. At times it plays like the airline version of the real movie. But it still packs a punch, lots of them.

The other characters are around mostly to take punches. To establish Matt's credentials as a young cyber-dweeb, Long, best known as the hip kid ("I'm a Mac") in the Apple commercials, is required to do more whining than absolutely necessary, or attractive; but he's basically here to be the audience's surrogate, to express amazement at flights of fancy and lapses into implausibility. As McClane's daughter Lucy, Mary Elizabeth Winstead -- who ornamented the year's other big car-stunt movie, Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" -- has enough resentment and resolve to suggest a familial link to our prehistoric hero. Writer-director Kevin Smith ("Clerks.") has a nice bit as the basement-dwelling Jabba the Hutt of hackers. But did no one think to fill the role with Long's partner in the Apple spots ("I'm a PC"), John Hodgman? His sedentary smarminess and air of knowing more than he does would make for a wonderful movie character. Or movie critic.