Posted on 06/27/2007 1:59:47 PM PDT by pabianice
SPOILERS ********************************************
.
.
.
.
.
The latest Die Hard movie is a bit of energetic nonsense that's fun to watch and as substantial as a sand castle. Bruce Willis does his John McClean again ... surviving over two hours of gunshots, broken bones, and high-speed impacts, any one of which would kill a real person. We've seen it before.
The plot -- what there is of it -- involves what hackers call a "fire sale" -- a cyber attack upon the country so complete and devastating that it would throw us back into the 17th century; i.e. 'everything must go.' Computers, transportation, utilities, finance, fire and police -- all toast. Tim Olyphant -- the wonderfully played lawman and hardware store owner from "Deadwood" -- plays the villian with some nice sneers and scenery-chewing. McLean's daughter channels the character of Jack Slater's kick-ass daughter from "Last Action Hero." And the female lead villian is fun to watch in several impossible chop-socky sequences right out of a Hong Kong low-budget flick. Even Tim Russ -- 'Tuvok' from the late "Star Trek: Voyager" -- puts in what must have been just one day's work on the set. It is almost at the film's end that we find out what the bad guys want -- revenge for being treated with lack of respect and money. Duh! They have downloaded the entire U.S. financial database on a laptop (BIG laugh here, unfortunately) and plan to live at ease on some unnamed tropical island after destroying the U.S.' economy. But by the time we learn this, we've pretty much lost interest. Josh Long, very watchable as a hacker with a heart of gold, also does some good work in the film, and is, in fact, its most watchable asset. But all is submerged in impossible action scenes, including a semi being chased through the highway system in DC by an F-35, with spectacular if aerodynamically impossible results. Perhaps one problem is that with each "Die Hard" film, the stunts have gone from merely spectacular-but-possible to just bad scicnce fiction.
Worth seeing? Sure. Like watching 4th of July fireworks. Fun flames and bursts of color. Fits the season pretty well.
Other than the MASSIVE plot hole that all of the circling airplanes could have been redirected to any one of a number of East Coast Airfields. But, then again, a movie about a bunch of irate passengers that wound up in Atlanta after being redirected, probably wouldn't sell as well.
There's likely a market for a movie like that in "Independent Cinema" however... They could have the protagonist (a young European metrosexual, with questioning tendencies) get re-routed from NYC to South Carolina. Hilarity ensues as the main character deals with Hollywood Stereotypes of Southern Culture. "HushPuppies??? What are these???" ....As there isn't a cafe latte in sight, our hero is forced to drink sweet tea. Oh the Drama.....
Coming soon to a college movie house near you.
I read a review of it yesterday in the SF chronicle which gave it a great review and pointed out that all the action was NOT CGI stuff, except for the final scene, which they say, is pretty awesome.
I could be remembering wrong, but didn't they reroute all the planes that had the fuel to make it other airports that weren't in the middle of the blizzard?
But, yeah, that was a bit of a sticky wicket.
Shows my Hollywood moxie. ;)
The second Diehard movie (I think it was the second one) where the planes couldn’t land at the airport totally sucked. I guess it didn’t occur to the screenwriter that a plane running low on fuel in bad weather would simply get diverted to another airport. Yeesh!
“This one however looks like a bunch of bad computer generated scenes.”
Actually there are less CG scenes in this film than in most like it. For instance, when they needed a high jumping car to take out a helicopter they went out and got a car, then they cot a real ‘copter,then they smashed the car into the low flying helicopter.
My favorite kind of movie...
Nah. Now, Swedish lesbians, maybe.
My hollywood moxie’s probably not much better. I generally like mindless movies & spy-thrillers ... gunfights, car chases and nudity (preferably meaningless nudity that is not plot-crucial).
So, Die Hard is right up my alley. Foreign flicks about a mother with a disease and a daughter that learns to love the mother with the disease - I generally sleep through, or watch hoping for nudity or a gunfight that mows down the mother with the disease.
H
As opposed to the revolting "A Might Heart", a screening of which I walked out of, and which basically blames Bush and Gitmo for Pearl's death.
However, one objectionable part of the film was the 10+ second lapse between the tossing of grenades into the cabin and their explosion. Must've been custom-built grenades (yah, right.).
Never happens. DC's storms either travel East from Ohio or ride up along the coast from further South.
Cheers!
I hate movies that have a political statement. I want to be entertained not confronted.
Last movie I watched, on DVD, ‘The Prestige’. Highly recommend it.
I saw it last night, highly satisfying. Not as good as the first, but the trailers made it clear the movie didn’t primarily take place in one building so we knew that it wouldn’t be as good as the first, but it was better than the second and probably even better than the third.
Good parts: everybody seems to have taken the clue from Byron Kennedy. I guess I should explain that to the non-movie nerds, Byron Kennedy was the co-creator of Mad Max who unfortunately died before Beyond Thunderdome, when it came to Mad Max 1 and 2 Byron had a simple mantra: when people are talking nothing is happening and we’re making an action movie. That mantra is generally credited with why Road Warrior has less dialog than most half hour sit-coms. The first explosion in DH4 happens almost immediately after the opening credits, the first time somebody shoots at McLane is maybe 5 minutes later, dialog primarily exists in the movie to let the audience breath.
The director moved away from the fast cut obsession that has ruled modern action movies, the benefit of this is you actually can figure out what’s happening, where people are, and other useful stuff like that during the action sequences.
For being a movie about hackers there’s actually surprisingly little techno-babble, the seem to have figured out that since McLane isn’t going to understand what’s going on the audience doesn’t have to either.
Bad stuff:
Tim Olyphant is handily the least scary bad guy in the series, he just doesn’t pose the menace of any of his predecessors. I realize that being in a series where the first bad guy was played by Alan Rickman the bar was set unattainably high but Tim falls way way short. Part of that could be because I’m a fan of Deadwood and I find Tim without facial hair kind of jarring and funny looking.
There are a few spots where the needs of PG-13 are noticeable. Most of the movie works fine, but in 3 or 4 scenes you can really tell they had to go at it with hatchets to get the rating.
The one FX scene where they used CGI was just a bad idea from the start, and definitely throw you out of the moment, what makes it really bad is it’s the second to last scene.
In the end though it’s Die Hard. Still the best action franchise.
Danny Glover was in The Shooter. Once you get past the politically correct jabs in the movie about how the Iraq war was really about oil, and there weren’t any WMD in Iraq, it was a pretty decent movie, especially getting to see the gunny hero put a bullet through the throat of the character played by Glover.
They may have, I don't really remember either.
Co-worker saw the movie last night and LOVED it. He's still raving about it.
okay, I'm ducking and sneaking off now ...
Saw it today. After hearing it was potentially the worst of the four Die Hard movies, I had my reservations. After reading the average grade by Yahoo moviegoers and not the critics, I decided to take a chance on it. I was pleasantly surprised by it. Granted, some of the action sequences were over the top, but a nice getaway movie for two hours. It had only one “F” word, but I’ll give you a hint. It’s McClane’s favorite saying in the Die Hard movies.
Shooter was a very good movie and so was this one.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.