Bruce is back, baby. And he’s so comfortably besieged. While
a movie not without its faults, Live
Free or Die Hard is like hooking
up with an old girlfriend late one slurry night and realizing all the things
that were right about the relationship. Too rangy by half, the movie
doesn’t quite work in lockstep with the rest of the Die Hard series as a piece of ticking-clock containment, but it’s action-packed,
personality-driven, and at least achieves a certain nimbleness. While Len
Wiseman, of the Underworld series, is
a relatively anonymous director of action, he has a superlative team of
technicians with which to work here. The problem is that in scenes requiring
lots of talking, he typically shoots things too jittery and canted;
furthermore, a good handful of these scenes are quite simply awful in terms of
their coverage and editing, and the ADR overdubs covering up R-rated curse
words are derisible.

Where the film really
succeeds is as a piece of burly, cathartic, uncertain-world entertainment. “Did
you see that?” sputters Justin Long’s computer hacker at one point, to which
Willis’ battered, cynical super-cop replies reflexively, “See it? I did it!” In
the current geopolitical landscape of apathetic delegation, fuzzy-minded
operational objective and botched prosecution, there’s an escapist’s solace to be found in Live Free or Die Hard. Unlike our current leaders, John
McClane always seems to actually have the right answer at just the right
moment, with quip-laden assurance to boot. For
the full review, from FilmStew, click here.