Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. You know, when I sat down to watch DIE HARD 4 tonight I expected a fun movie that had little to no similarity to the series I love. And I do love the DIE HARD series. I have always been baffled by the hatred for DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE. DIE HARD 2 is goofy, no doubt. But it’s still a DIE HARD movie. So, I expected to see a movie that wasn’t really a DIE HARD movie, with a cleaner McClane (a Mr. Clean-er McClane if you’ll allow me a rather obvious and ill-executed bald joke), but that was big and fun in its own way. What I got was a movie that didn’t resemble DIE HARD, but was a horrible action movie on top of all that. Listen, I love Bruce Willis and he tries. He really does try to bring McClane to the movie, but they make a few key mistakes that even Willis doing his best can’t overcome. In previous movies, they’ve surrounded McClane with interesting characters. In DIE HARD you had Reginald VelJohnson as Sgt. Al Powell, the dude that played yuppie scum Ellis, the awesome limo driver, Argyle, Bonnie Bedelia, William Atherton, Paul Gleason and Robert Davi. That’s before you get to the awesome villains. Hans Gruber’s whole team is great, but specifically Alexander Godunov as the bottle of nitroglycerin Karl and Alan Rickman’s iconic turn as Hans Gruber. In DIE HARD 2 you had a lot of those guys back, including Bedelia and Atherton, but you also had the great casting of John Amos, Franco Nero, William Sadler and Dennis Franz In DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE you team John McClane with Samuel L. Jackson and the bad guy is played with such great scene-chewing intensity by Jeremy Irons. So in DIE HARD 4, they pair Willis with Justin Long instead of Sam Jackson. The villain is a meek, unthreatening Timothy Olyphant, Cliff Curtis is the FBI dude that spends the movie going, “Oh, my God! No!” and overacting, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as McClane’s daughter. As a villain Maggie Q is given almost nothing to work with, but still manages to make herself the most interesting foe for McClane. Now, I’m not going to shit on Justin Long. I know a lot of people will want to do that with all that “I’m a Mac” stuff, but it’s not really his fault. His character made more sense in an earlier draft of the script I read, when he was John McClane’s son. You understood the drive McClane has to protect him then, but now he’s really just kind of an annoying sidekick. Long is a funny guy and he succeeds a few times in making you laugh, but he’s fighting an up hill battle and doesn’t really win that fight. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is actually much better in this than I expected. She is McClane’s daughter through and through. I could buy her playing Lucy McClane in another movie that isn’t as fucking ridiculous as this one is and I wish I could get the chance to see that movie. I didn’t like her at all in FINAL DESTINATION 3, dug her in DEATH PROOF and really like her here, so I guess she’s getting better or my tastes are getting worse. Cliff Curtis is really awful in this movie. It’s like they plucked some guy off the street and told him to read lines in front of a camera. That’s really sad because I know he’s a good actor. I’ve seen him do well before, but in this movie he has some of the worst line deliveries of the summer… and yes, that even includes Alba’s turn in FANTASTIC FOUR 2. Strangely enough, as distracting as he is, Kevin Smith's scene turned out to be one of my favorite pieces of the movie. The action… It’s big, it’s crazy, it’s masturbatory, it’s hollow. You don’t feel a connection with it like in the previous movies because it’s too big. Yeah, it’s cool to see that car flip over McClane, yeah it’s cool to blow up a helicopter with a cop cruiser, yeah, it’s fun to watch a freeway collapse on top of McClane. But it was so extravagant that I never connected with it. It got cartoony. As cartoony as the ejector seat explosion from DIE HARD 2, the one that was on all the trailers, it felt a million times more real than anything in this one. Also, every single huge moment in the movie... is in the trailers. Everything. Maybe that added to me not being wowed by anything, because I've seen it before, but really guys... bad move putting every huge scene in the trailer, Fox marketing dudes. Might make for a good opening weekend, but the drop-off's going to be huge once people realize they've seen it all before. Did I mention that Olyphant is a terrible villain? Maybe it was the ratings scenario… maybe he was a tougher, more intense guy in the movie they originally shot. Here he’s a guy that gets angry and throws his computer and talks threateningly into a webcam. Speaking about the rating… yes. You feel the PG-13. The action’s there, but the harshness isn’t. That also adds to the cartoon aspect. But even worse is that they shot for the R and when the PG-13 got slapped onto it, they had to creatively edit and ADR the flick. It’s so obvious. So painfully obvious. Every time Willis has more than one sentence of dialogue, the camera starts radically quick cutting, jumping around to random reaction shots and different angles. Obviously they were trying to hide the PG-13 dialogue not matching with the R-rated lip movements. Len Wiseman… Oh, Len Wiseman. I’ve heard nothing but good things about Wiseman from people who have worked with him. He’s apparently a super nice guy. I’ve heard the same thing about another director, with the middle initials WS. They don’t just share the same personality, it seems. There are so many plotholes I lost count. So, the script is lazy on top of everything. There’s even a bad guy they tried to make the Karl of this movie, but he just came across as ridiculous. The man literally jumps from an exploding helicopter, maybe 15-20 feet in the air, the thing explodes behind him sending him crashing to the ground and he stands right up and walks away like nothing happened. I didn’t know McClane fought Superman in this movie… It's shaping up to be a really, really lousy summer so far. Damnit… I was really hoping to like this one. Maybe I’m crazy or maybe I’m just getting cynical. I don’t know. This movie is just full of holes, clichés and is so far from what I want from a DIE HARD movie… I can’t give it a pass. Lower those expectations… even if they’re low already. Maybe then you’ll like the movie more than I did. -Quint quint@aintitcool.com
