Re-posting this review from 2007, one of my favourites. Somehow, I never mentioned Timothy Olymphant once by name; but, the rest of the piece, I really like.
This goddamned horrible world
Every one of us will, at some point in our lives, rise to the very top of our game. For a few brief, glorious moments, we will be the best us that we can be in our time. For John McClane, that point came in 1988 when he was locked in Nakatomi Tower with a bunch of terrorists and, without even the aid of a pair of shoes, had to overthrow the bad guys, rescue his wife, and foil a multi-million-dollar bond heist.
The reason we knew this was the defining moment of McClane’s life is that it all looked so darned hard. And for that reason, we know that even though an admittedly astonishing amount of additional bad shit has happened to John since that night at Nakatomi (this man has had more experience with terrorists than all of the U.S. Army), none of it will ever be quite as significant as that crazy Christmas in ’88. Why? Because in spite of the fact that these latter events are proportionately more difficult (in theory)… they just look too fucking easy. How can running barefoot across a field of broken glass seem like a significantly greater challenge than base-jumping off a hovering F-16 fighter jet onto a broken section of highway, thereby outflanking a racing fireball? Easy: because a human can (barely) do the former, and only a superhuman can (easily) do the latter.
Therefore, the Die Hard movies don’t just fall under the Law of Diminishing Returns; they’re virtually a case study in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy increases, all right. First film: locked in a building with terrorists; must kill to survive and save wife. Second film: in the same airport as terrorists, but wife is on plane; must kill to save wife. Third film: in same city as terrorists; must kill to prove still man enough to maybe reconcile with wife (by phone). Fourth film: in same country as terrorists, wife gone; must kill because John McClane has become, in Mac dipshit Justin Long’s words, “that guy.” In other words, he’s been around so long, and he’s done this so many times, he can no longer reasonably be expected to do anything else.
John’s that guy all right. No sooner than you can say “Way to survive that plane crash, Die Hard!,” than McClane has bullseyed a hovering helicopter with the geyser of water from a broken-open fire hydrant, used a driverless sedan as a projectile missle, and stuffed an SUV up an asian girl’s ass. It was hard to stay alive back in Die Hard; in Live Free or Die Hard, it’s simply impossible to die. (Even the bad guys are relatively bad at it. The number of people in this film who get hit by a speeding car only to cause further trouble on the hood can’t be counted on a single hand.)
There is absolutely no physical reality to these movies any more; the gags and set pieces of Live Free or Die Hard are simply ludicrous. It is only our affection for this man, this character, that makes this movie come to life, and I must admit, that affection – and what John McClane has come to mean, regardless of the hoary surroundings in which we now encounter him – makes LFODH the most intriguing piece of American iconography on the cinema screens this year.
This world needs John McClane. In post-9/11 America, few retired fictional characters are so sorely, desperately needed. (Another good one: Fox Mulder.) And so, quite certainly accidentally, Die Hard 4 has a level of eerie canniness to it that the filmmakers could never have intended. (Painfully inept shooter Len Wiseman can’t even spell “canniness.”) Gather round, friends: if you want to guage a nation’s pain, look to her action heroes.
An “analogue man in a digital world,” John McClane – fully preserved from his 1988 inaugural appearance, minus the hair – spends the 2-hour running time of Live Free or Die Hard demonstrating in no uncertain terms just what a horrific nightmare world the United States has become in the 21st Century. LFODH might, in fact, be the first film with the stones to treat 9/11 as an all-out apocalypse, because this America – though barely distinguishable from our own – is clearly a post-apocalyptic landscape, albeit one without the trademark desert wastes and sprinting zombies. There is no greater monument to the internal image of America’s awesomeness than the ’80s action hero, and the width of the gulf between that man’s world (corporate skyscrapers, coke-sniffing yuppies, and disposable Eurotrash baddies) and the world we live in now (Homeland Security, near-fascist politcal correctness, and the ever-shifting sands of the war on terror) is so telling, it’s almost tear-inducing. How awful it is to be a man like John McClane, in Paris Hilton’s America.
McClane is put through the ringer here to a level of indignity heretofore unseen in the franchise, because the hurts are no longer physical (he survives any and all physical punishment with the nimble-limbed dexterity of Raggedy Andy). They are moral, and even (again unintentionally) metatextual. John McClane suffers through a terrible action movie that feels more like a riff on 24 than an inventive story; he gets his trademark line (and the rest of the movie) ball-chopped into PG-13 irrelevance by the post-Boobgate American morality police; he is consigned to tow the Macintosh poster idiot around with him like a moron Shnauzer pup; and he must endure all this while doing battle with the great lurking demon of modern Yankee life: the metrosexual.
Yup, the cause of all this trouble (this time around) isn’t Hans Gruber or even Hans Gruber’s gay kid brother. Each film gets the bad guy its era secretly hates most, and this time, it’s the company man, the corporate guy, the PDA-n’-bluetooth information ager who was happy to do his best to shore up America’s xenophobic defences right up until America characteristically forgot to make it all about him. (No hero is truly selfless any more.) Now he’s pissed, and without ever laying hands on the very computers in which he is reputedly preeminent (he has a support staff for that), he is going to shut down the country and wipe the financial slate clean… for everyone except himself, of course, because what Die Hard terrorist is ever really about terrorism? He’s a thief, like all three villains before him. Hello, message: terrorists aren’t in it for politics or idealism; that would imply superiority. They’re just filthy pickpockets.
And so McClane fights him. McClane’s “that guy,” remember? And as John does this, his target audience sits in movie theatres across the nation paying more attention to their incoming text messages than the movie on the screen in front of them. What they’re missing up on that big glowing rectangle in front of them but beyond their dimwitted gaze, is that John McClane is exactly what all of America so desperately wants to be: what they were before. What they were before the towers were hit, before the American president was a joke, before every single moment of every single day was spent wondering when the next attack would come.
John McClane is the standing symbol of American masculinity’s patent, pathetic desire to return to the world as it was before 2001, before entropy increased to the point where the terrorists weren’t locked in the building with us any more, before the wife was gone for good and even the daughter was refusing to comply with the glorious old tradition of patriarchal superiority (or surnaming), before the office could find you no matter where you went. Before “the grid,” before the fall of the boys’ club, before corporate governance, before steering committees. Before this intractable, 6-years-long, Osama-induced impotence.
Impotence be damned: absented the right to plead with Bonnie Bedelia to remain a good and loyal wife, and confronted with the wraith of the Maxim age – an ethnically diverse woman who gets to be hot and smart and sexually unavailable – McClane does what every rational, civilized man is supposed to consider the very dearth of acceptable behaviour: he beats the living shit out of her. John McClane wails on a half-Vietnamese girl a third his age and a quarter his size. He rips out some of her hair. And then he spends the rest of the movie taunting her boyfriend with misogynist reiterations of just how phenomenally he killed the living fuck out of her.
Oh my sweet fundamentalist Christian lord, America is pissed off.
The defining moments of their lives might well be behind them, but Rocky, Rambo, and Indiana Jones are coming to deal with Neo, Peter Parker and that fucking hobbit. Enough of these namby-pamby, lily-faced sensitive heroes. Where have they got us? It’s not too bad being the old dog. The new stuff is all shit anyway.