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Live Free or Die Hard Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (intense sequences of violence and action, language, and a brief sexual situation) Genre: Action Theater release: June 27, 2007 by 20th Century Fox Directed by: Len Wiseman Runtime: 2 hours 10 minutes Cast: Bruce Willis (John McClane), Timothy Olyphant (Thomas Gabriel), Justin Long (Matt Farrell), Maggie Q (Mai Lihn), Cliff Curtis (Bowman), Kevin Smith (Warlock) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Although Live Free or Die Hard is known internationally as Die Hard 4.0, the truth is that Die Hard was never really a bona fide series. As with Raiders of the Lost Ark, there was just one really great movie, followed by a host of imitators, a couple of which happened to involve some of the same characters and filmmakers. Temple of Doom and Last Crusade were just Indiana Jones flicks; there's only one Raiders.

In a similar way, call them whatever you want, the further adventures of John McClane pale beside the original no less than the Try-Hard and Fly-Hard adventures of Steven Seagal, Wesley Snipes and Keanu Reeves. (Well, okay, Speed actually holds up pretty well.)

Bruce Willis reprises his role as John McClane

What made the original Die Hard such a unique film wasn't one thing, but a perfect storm of factors. The insidious, disciplined invading force; the claustrophobic confinement; the emotional as well as physical punishment suffered by the panicky, hesitating, self-reproaching hero, so different from the impassive he-man heroes of earlier eras. The wounded emotional distance and dangerous secret solidarity between John and his estranged wife. The clever conceits of John's increasingly desperate gambits for survival. And, of course, the electrifying anonymous confrontation via walkie-talkie between John and his opponent Hans, a battle of wits and nerves.

Along with a host of other recent and coming "sequels" to 1980s–era franchises coming anywhere from a dozen to nearly twenty years after their most recent predecessors—including Terminator 3, Rocky Balboa, an Indiana Jones sequel shooting now, and of course the Star Wars prequels—Live Free or Die Hard feels not so much like the continuation of a franchise as a revisiting of a historic institution, more like the Star Trek movies in relation to the original TV series than a continuation of the series.

In the case of Live Free or Die Hard, directed by Len Wiseman (Underworld), that's probably a good thing. Like Captain Kirk putting on his spectacles in The Wrath of Khan, John McClane (Bruce Willis) can no longer pretend to be the same man he was twenty years ago, and that distance offers at least the possibility of new reasons for revisiting this character. The world, too, has changed, of course, not so much in terms of 9/11—the Die Hard films were never really interested in real terrorism, only high-tech opportunism—as in the exploding significance of cyberspace as a crucial front in all possible wars on terror.

McClane and Matt Farrell try to make sense of the chaos

Bonnie Bedelia's Holly Gennero McClane, last seen in Die Hard 2, is still out of the picture; sadly, though not alas implausibly, she and John are divorced. Yet Live Free at least partly recoups her absence by reintroducing a character who had about a minute of screen time in the original film: Lucy McClane, John and Holly's daughter, then about six or seven. Now in her twenties, she's played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Final Destination 3) with a spunk and toughness befitting both her parents. Predictably, Lucy's relationship with her father is as rocky as her mother's was, and Lucy also goes back and forth on whether she wants to be a McClane or a Gennero.

Wisely, Live Free doesn't try to replicate the paranoia or intimidation of the first film. Twenty years later, battered by life, John can no longer be that panicky, brash cop, and Live Free shrewdly uses his history to advantage, establishing him as a dogged, world-weary old warrior who may still get mad and even desperate, but can't really get all that frightened any more.

McClane knows that his opponent (Timothy Olyphant, The Girl Next Door)—an arrogant, ruthless computer security expert twenty years his junior—is smarter than he is, and has the advantage of meticulous planning and surprise. But McClane has experience on his side; he's played underdog before, and when he rattles his opponent's chain, it isn't blustering bravado, but seasoned tactical provocation. This time, it's his unflappable calm that intimidates his brash young opponent, not the other way around.

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