Live Free or Die Hard [Blu-ray]

Posted on August 31st, 2009 by Blue Ray Movie Reviews

20th Century Live Free or Die Hard (Blu-ray) Twelve years after Die Hard with a Vengeance, the third and previous film in the Die Hard franchise, Live Free or Die Hard finds John McClane (Bruce Willis) a few years older, not any happier, and just as kick-ass as ever. Right after he has a fight with his college-age daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a call comes in to pick up a hacker (Justin Long, a.k.a. the “Apple guy”) who might help the FBI learn something about a brief security blip in their systems.Now any Die Hard fan knows that this is when the assassins with foreign accents and high-powered weaponry show up, telling McClane that once again he’s stumbled into an assignment that’s anything butroutine. Once that wreckage has cleared, it is revealed that the hacker is only one of many hackerswho are being targeted for extermination after they helped set up a “fire sale,” a three-pronged cyberattack designed to bring down the entire country by crippling its transportation, finances, and utilities. That plan is now being put into action by a mysterious team (Timothy Olyphant, Deadwood, and Maggie Q, Mission: Impossible 3) that seems to be operating under the government’s noses.

Twelve years after Die Hard with a Vengeance, the third and previous film in the Die Hard franchise, Live Free or Die Hard finds John McClane (Bruce Willis) a few years older, not any happier, and just as kick-ass as ever. Right after he has a fight with his college-age daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a call comes in to pick up a hacker (Justin Long, a.k.a. the “Apple guy”) who might help the FBI learn something about a brief security blip in their systems. Now any Die Hard fan knows that this is when the assassins with foreign accents and high-powered weaponry show up, telling McClane that once again he’s stumbled into an assignment that’s anything but routine. Once that wreckage has cleared, it is revealed that the hacker is only one of many hackers who are being targeted for extermination after they helped set up a “fire sale,” a three-pronged cyberattack designed to bring down the entire country by crippling its transportation, finances, and utilities. That plan is now being put into action by a mysterious team (Timothy Olyphant, Deadwood, and Maggie Q, Mission: Impossible 3) that seems to be operating under the government’s noses.

Live Free or Die Hard uses some of the cat-and-mouse elements of Die Hard with a Vengeance along with some of the pick-’em-off-one-by-one elements of the now-classic original movie. And it’s the most consistently enjoyable installment of the franchise since the original, with eye-popping stunts (directed by Len Wiseman of the Underworld franchise), good humor, and Willis’s ability to toss off a quip while barely alive. There was some controversy over the film’s PG-13 rating–there might be less blood than usual, and McClane’s famous tag line is somewhat obscured–but there’s still has plenty of action and a high body count. Yippee-ki-ay! –David Horiuchi

Beyond Live Free or Die Hard

Live Free or Die Hard on DVD

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User Ratings and Reviews

4 Stars Great action, good movie, but where’s the music video?
HELP PLEASE. The unrated edition includes the theatrical and the unrated version of the film. On the back it says it has a music video. I have checked both menus for both versions and i cant find anything. Is it a hidden feature? an easter egg?

Anyway, its great action, sometimes exagerated but thats part of the diehard history. The unrated version is better. Good thing i bought it when it was 10.99. Enjoy it.

3 Stars Utterly moronic yet for some reason I enjoyed it
In the opening minutes of this movie there is a gun fight combined with explosions that was so loud I instinctively turned the volume down on my television so it wouldn’t bother my neighbors. This gunfight lasts for quite awhile. At the end of the gunfight our heroes go driving off. At no point in all of this does a single other policeman show up nor are there even sirens heard in the distance and the neighborhood seems to take the massive explosion that destroys an entire apartment very much in stride.

At this point I said to myself, “All righty. So this movie is going to be stupid. I’ll watch it anyway.”

And I did. And it was. But having switched off the complaining/rational part of my brain early on it actually turned out to be kind of fun. In this world everyone can survive thirty foot drops as long as they bounce off a lot of things during their fall, computer hackers are ridiculously sexy women who also know kung fu and I’m not even going to tell you what jet planes can do.

But it was somehow less awful than a lot of recent action movies.

On a final note, there was absolutely NO reason for this to be a Die Hard movie outside of marketing purposes. Except for one minor reference to the original where an FBI Agent introduces himself as Agent Johnson causing Bruce Willis to grimace, there were basically no connections to the original that weren’t forced and tacked on.

Still, for some reason I smiled more than I groaned.

3 Stars Awesome visuals with ridiculous story
I understand the good guy has to win. But when a villain mercilessly kills so many people without blinking and kills colleagues without an afterthought and then when it comes to killing the good guy, he has to prolongue it and give this whole “I’m going to kill you after I do this and this and this and I’m going to get pleasure out of watching you die, etc”, and this all comes after you’ve told countless henchmen to kill this person (which means a few minutes ago you didn’t mind somebody else doing a killing job that you wouldn’t see), I guess I’m just tired of the rehashed ridiculousness.

This villain assembles a team that has the entire United States of America by the balls, but then when it comes down to crunch time, it struggles with a cop that can’t be killed by hovering aircraft, crumbling freeway overpasses, or henchmen that managed to kill entire departments of security but can’t kill this one cop. This villain has everything planned beautifully, and then sends killer after killer, one by one just like the others, to kill this cop instead of just keeping the killers around him for protection, so when McClain does find him, he has to face several people with guns at once. Not that this would stop him, of course. But it’s a movie that tries to convince me that a brilliant villain would all of a sudden become very careless and that hired killers would turn into bumbling idiots.

The ridiculousness got to a point where I was actually rooting for the villain to win. There he is on the ground. You have a gun. Just shoot him.

But this film isn’t about believability. It’s about special effects and yippee ki-a mo fo. And if that’s your thing, than this movie’s awesome special affects doesn’t disappoint.

2 Stars Don’t buy Blu-Ray edition! NO UNRATED VERSION!
Boy did I get screwed! Having previously enjoyed this film as a rental from Netflix in standard DVD form, I took advantage of a special “buy 2 get one free” offer from Amazon on selected Blu-Ray titles. It never occurred to me that Fox would put LESS on the Blu-Ray than the standard DVD edition. SHAME ON YOU FOX!!!!!!!

3 Stars Why?
I suppose in a world where everything is enhanced CGI or Virtual Reality the Die Hard franchise ought to take its already over-the-top formula to new levels of technological “try to top this.” Thus the stage is set for the fourth installment, cleverly entitled LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. Here we find a very middle-aged John McClane (yet the years have been kind to Bruce Willis) on his way to serve a routine warrant on a cyber hacker (Justin Long, who needs to calm down) wanted by the FBI for questioning. Yet after three Die Hard death match marathons the viewer knows all too well there is never anything “routine” in McClane’s shoot-’em-up life, and soon the two characters embark on a perilous adventure that makes suspension of disbelief the next special on Comedy Central.

I know this is a Die Hard movie; I know this is Detective John McClane. But. . .come on. Plunging down a shaft, jumping from a semi on a crumbling freeway, clutching the wing of a spinning military jet–all while dodging semi-automatic gunfire or torched tons of TNT–is, perhaps, just a tad too much. But again, this is the age of mind-boggling special effects, so there’s no end to the death-defying predicaments the filmmakers gleefully subject their protagonist to. Not even Superman would survive this kind of punishment.

Willis is delightfully cranky, cantankerous, and curmudgeonly; Long needs to calm down (I think I have mentioned this); and cyber villain Timothy Olyphant definitely lacks the cold, calculated evil of his villainous predecessors. LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD deserves three stars just because of all the eye-popping visuals, which are impressive, but really: this franchise should have ended after Detective McClane rode off into the sunset after saving the Nakatomi Tower.

–D. Mikels, Author, The Reckoning

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