So it’s tilling old Earth, perhaps, but I just stumbled across Paul Davidson’s piece about the Live Free or Die Hard rating controversy, from June 8 in the Los Angeles Times, in which he talks about Bruce Willis taking to the Internet to connect directly with fans and address their concerns over the movie, etcetera. All fine and good… one big qualm, though.

The second paragraph of his piece reads, verbatim: “To know why fans are up in arms, you have to go back to how 20th Century Fox tackled this question: How does a studio take a money-making franchise such as Die Hard ($740 million worldwide to date) that’s been missing in action for more than 10 years and position it as a summer blockbuster that a new generation of moviegoers will clamor to see? If you’re Fox, you take what was once an R-rated, foul-mouthed, thrill-ride of carnage and mandate a friendlier, gentler PG-13 rating from the start.”

The problem is that Fox very clearly didn’t communicate this wish, to either Willis (who initially lashed out at the rating in a Vanity Fair interview) or director Len Wiseman. Or if they did, Wiseman is perhaps one of the worst directors working today — one who kept his actors in the dark and took a terrifically awful chance, somehow thinking he could call his bosses’ bluff. The fact is that Live Free or Die Hard‘s action is suitably “hard,” but the movie has several scenes in which characters very clearly drop F- and MF-bombs. The editorial circumvention in these scenes, both visually and aurally, is very poor; if the film truly was mandated PG-13 from the beginning, instead of being massaged down, this kind of slipshod filmmaking wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be evident.