I’ll have even more thoughts later and the full review tomorrow, but I thought I’d toss out another couple thoughts on Live Free and Die Hard‘s advertising campaign. First off, is it just me or does the poster not sort of look like the design folks at 20th Century Fox decided to knock off early, take a half-day and go play some golf? It’s iconic imaging by rubber stamp, really — maybe not the smartest move for a franchise whose last installment came 12 years ago, and barely crawled across the $100 million line domestically. That said, Die Hard: With a Vengeance absolutely killed overseas — where Willis remains hugely popular — so I guess they figure, perhaps somewhat rightly, they can phone that one in.

Mainly, though, I was amused by an interstitial bumper I saw for the film, after pausing late one night while making coffee to watch the last seven or eight minutes of Phone Booth on Fox-affiliated cable channel FX. (Incidentally, that movie plays awfully on television; it’s egregiously over-edited and Kiefer Sutherland’s voice work is flat-out terrible, consisting of a dozen different campy/exasperated iterations on the line, “C’mon Stu!”) Pitching Phone Booth to commercials was an awkwardly shot segment — billed, no lie, as a “McClane Moment” — with Willis and filmmaker/co-star Kevin Smith, in which the pair sat down together on a stoop (a stoop!) and talked a bit about Live Free or Die Hard. Cutting back and forth between footage from the movie and the pair, Smith lobbed genial softballs at Willis, but the actor was so down-tempo and barely audible that I sincerely thought the whole thing was a set-up for some joke or punch-line at the end. But… nope. Just strange, really. I don’t know if they’re still broadcasting this throughout the week, but it’s amusing if you happen to stumble across it. For a full review of the film, meanwhile, click here.