Live Free or Die Hard Review

Len Wiseman makes a competent modern action film and in doing so removes the quality that made this character worth following. McClane was a man out of his depth improvising with a lighter and a fire hose. Here he throws a car into a hovering helicopter, outruns a collapsing freeway and survives a fighter jet, and at no point does he look like he might lose.

The fire sale plot is generic cyberterrorism assembled from headlines, and Timothy Olyphant, an actor who can be genuinely menacing, plays Gabriel like a man reading server specifications aloud. Justin Long is deployed as a nervous foil and the odd couple bit runs well past the joke. What does work is the physical staging.

The elevator shaft fight and the tunnel sequence are cut clearly enough to follow, and Maggie Q gets a brutal, well choreographed brawl that stands with anything in the series. The PG-13 rating is the visible wound. The blood is gone, the profanity is dubbed over, and the signature line is interrupted by a gunshot, which converts the film's one guaranteed crowd moment into an apology. Enjoyable on its own terms and unrecognizable as this series.