MOVIE REVIEW: ‘Live Free or Die Hard’

The action is great (until the end), everything blows up great (until the end) -- but "Live Free or Die Hard" is also unsurpassingly stupid at times. Like the end.

Sometimes disbelief can be successfully suspended, and sometimes it just can't.

The fourth "Die Hard" movie, but the first in 12 years, "Live Free or Die Hard" is disconcertingly bipolar. At times it soars to new heights in the action-film genre. At other times it crashes with a sickening splash, like a jet missing an aircraft carrier.

Let's look at the good points first.

The rugged character of police detective John McClane is still relentlessly compelling. A template for all action heroes of the last 20 years, McClane is an all-American maverick hero.

He is cool under pressure, cracks jokes (though they aren't funny this time) and is a deadly shot. But he also feels the pain, the true pain, of his injuries, at least for a few scenes.

And no one could play McClane better than Bruce Willis, who still attacks this role with untempered enthusiasm and energy. It's the fourth time Willis has played the role, and he is still highly focused while granting his character a much-needed sense of fun.

The film also raises the bar in the use of stuntmen, showing us things we have never seen before. One villain-playing stuntman is deftly acrobatic, adding a cool new dimension to a fight scene. A couple fall from great heights, bouncing off objects on the way down harder than we have seen in the past.

And in one extraordinary sequence, we are right with the stuntman as he falls and bounces, indicating that another stuntman may be holding the camera (although it could probably be shot with a rigging of some sort).

If those are the arguments in the film's favor, the ones against it are just as persuasive. Chief among these are its pathological avoidance of logic and its creepy disregard of physics. Time and time again, things happen in the movie that just can't happen.

Cars fly through the air in precisely the way that cars don't, helicopters are knocked out of the sky through any number of unusual and unbelievable means, certain main characters are inexplicably immortal and a guy jumps on the top of a Harrier jet that is spinning out of control. That comes at the end. That's the part that is so idiotic.

This time, the terrorist threat that only McClane can stop is a computer-assisted takeover of the entire country's infrastructure and yes, that means we get endless scenes of people typing and computer screens helpfully reporting that they are "uploading virus."

Since he knows nothing about computers, McClane is paired with one of those movie hackers who can do anything on a computer, instantaneously. Justin Long makes a great comic foil for Willis and has the additional expertise that comes from playing a Mac computer in those commercials.

For their part, the computer-savvy terrorists are ruthless and seemingly unstoppable. With a flick of a computer key or two, they shut down a number of nonexistent agencies (the National Traffic Center-) in a city that is manifestly not Washington. Seriously, would it hurt to try to look plausibly like Washington, or even to spend a minute with a map to learn the names of Washington streets-

Director Len Wiseman previously made "Underworld" and "Underworld: Evolution," so this is a huge step up for him. He still breaks more glass than is healthy, films it with a video camera that is particularly poor and is more fond of close-ups than he needs to be. But aided by the crisp editing of Nicholas De Toth, he keeps the pace rolling until we tire of the cycle of running, hiding, shooting and fighting.

That cycle is why the two-hour running time eventually feels closer to three.

"Live Free or Die Hard" ends with a rousing rendition of Creedence Clearwater Revival's classic hit "Fortunate Son." You'd think that after spending all that time and money to make the movie, someone would have thought to listen to the lyrics.

Movie review

½

Cast: Bruce Willis, Justin Long

At: Carmike, Chester, Commonwealth, Short Pump, Southpark, Virginia Center

FYI: Running time: 2:05. Rated PG-13 (much violence)