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July 13, 2007
Live Free or Die Hard

I was excited to see this movie after catching up with the first few. This time around, our hero cop John McClane is asked to pick up a person of interest on his way home from the job. The person of interest is Matt, a computer wiz who has unknowingly aided the launch of a fire sale (taking out transportation, financial stability, and electricity for the whole U.S.). When Matt's apartment is blown up and gunmen try to take him out, McClane has to save the kid, and because of his compulsion to see an end to whichever bad guys are bugging him, he is soon racing to save the U.S. Oh, and we're back to hostage situations, because they take his daughter.
The movie started off a little bit uneasily for my tastes. I thought the first three movies gave McClane hope for his marriage, but this one starts right off establishing that he's divorced. Well, that's depressing. Not to mention the blue tint of the movie also makes it feel like a bit of a downer. This is our hero who we've seen do so many cool things, so to see the movie start off on a down-note didn't work for me. But perhaps that was simply done to make a contrast with the rest of the movie, which instantly picks up pace at Matt's apartment.
Matt, played by Justin Long, takes a little while to warm up to, but his rambling and scared personality soon works its way into being enjoyable. Since McClane is an analog cop in a digital world, he needs a little sidekick like this to help him out, since the terrorist assault on the U.S. in this case is completely digital. Even so, there are plenty of instances for Bruce Willis to shoot things up and cause explosions. Heck, he even faces off with a jet.
Timothy Olyphant lacks a threatening presence for 90% of the movie, but that's why he's got Maggie Q to run around and kick butt for him for a while. Olyphant finally kicks into gear and is able to be menacing for the climactic end.
Bruce Willis is awesome as always, and I like seeing that he's older in this movie, and I like seeing his character improvise with what he's got. Add to that a fun bit part from Kevin Smith and a perfect performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead as McClane's daughter, and it's a good show. The action takes the cake, but the rest is pretty good too. I had a lot of fun with this one. Can't wait to see the unedited version, where we finally get to hear how the movie was meant to sound (without all of the curse-edits that were extremely obvious).
Definitely worth a watch on the big screen, so don't let all the other movies out there make you forget about it! I liked it better than Transformers.
Posted by Jeri
at 02:19:37 pm | movies
3 comments
Do you mean the audio was scrubbed, like you can see someone saying something but can't hear it?
They didn't replace bad words with dumb substitutes TV-style, did they?
Regarding the edits, yes, they either cut off curse words or substituted them. I noticed it at least three different times. It was a bad edit job!Becky, yeah, lots of people have told me he's worth watching on Deadwood. I'll have to check it out sometime. :)