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Thomas Gabriel threatens John's daughter Lucy

Somebody needs to be frightened, though, or the sense of emotional urgency is lost. So Live Free gives McClane a sidekick: Matt Farrell (Justin Long, Accepted), a young hacker who, in addition to providing technical support to the digitally challenged McClane, freaks out a lot—and with good reason. He's not as engaging or sympathetic as Sandra Bullock in Speed, say, but he gets the job done.

McClane needs him, too. Professedly based on a Wired article by John Carlin called "A Farewell to Arms," which speculates on the possibility of a coming "I-war" or information war, Live Free drops McClane into a Crichton-esque techno-thriller about virtual terrorism, a hacker takedown of the infrastructure. In this cyber-battle the two-fisted McClane is something of an anachronism—an "analog cop in a digital universe," the villain sneers.

That doesn't mean there isn't still lots of old-fashioned analog shooting, explosions, vehicular chases, punishing fight scenes, and general havoc. This may be a cyberthriller, but there's still enough meatspace mayhem to leave McClane battered to a bloody pulp, as usual.

Even the mayhem has been upgraded, as McClane—like James Bond in the new Casino Royale—faces opponents who make flamboyant use of parkour, an athletic, free-form mode of locomotion that involves daring and efficient traversing of obstacles in emergency fashion. There's also a kick-boxing Asian beauty (Maggie Q, Mission: Impossible III), as well as a bruising battery of large-scale set pieces: helicopter versus patrol car, SUV versus Maggie Q in an elevator shaft, even Harrier jet versus semi rig on an elevated highway.

Some of the violence is good old white-knuckle escapist action, thrillingly well-staged and wincingly visceral. Other times, as with McClane's previous adventures, it seems unnecessarily sadistic. And then there are sequences that go over the top into self-parody cartoon mode, like the most preposterous James Bond stuntwork, or like Arnold Schwarzeneggar's Last Action Hero and True Lies. The Harrier/semi duel, in particular, simultaneously recalls Schwarzeneggar's Terminator 3 and True Lies.

It wouldn't be a 'Die Hard' movie without action and explosions

Ironically, Live Free is much more effective and exciting when it keeps the action on a smaller and more believable scale. I've said before that watching Die Hard is kind of like reading those Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbooks; even if you never actually plan to leap from a burning building, say, or take on a high-rise full of gun-wielding terrorists, there's something empowering about feeling that the thing could conceivably be done, if not necessarily by you, but at least by someone with sufficient nerve, skill and luck.

Some suspension of disbelief is warranted, certainly, but push it too far, and we might as well be watching the Terminator, a semi-indestructible machine slogging through a gauntlet of punishment that would clearly rip an ordinary mortal to pieces. That can be cool too, but it's a different kind of cool. With McClane, we need to feel, at least theoretically, that he could conceivably be killed, that he's at least capable of being killed. Live Free ventures too flagrantly across that line a few times.

Despite its drawbacks, Live Freeis possibly the freshest and most enjoyable of McClane's outings since the original. The cyber-terrorism angle, though filtered through a Hollywood lens, is sufficiently grounded in reality to be genuinely unnerving, and there's real adrenaline-pumping excitement, not just expert production values, in much of the action.

For almost twenty years, the original Die Hard has been the standard by which modern action films are measured. Live Free or Die Hard doesn't rival its predecessor, but it honors the tradition.

Talk About It

1. When are the means justified or not justified by the ends? Given the gravity of the situation, are McClane's actions in the film always justified? If not, when and how does he cross the line, and why are his actions not justified?

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