While none of the sequels to Die Hard have quite recaptured its perfect balance of heroic moxie, explosive action, and dry comic wit, a couple have come close. The fourth chapter of the John McClane saga, Live Free or Die Hard, received mixed reviews when it was released in 2007, with some critics lauding the intensity of its action sequences and others lamenting its needlessly grandiose expansion of the Die Hard formula.
Pitched somewhere between the fun spirit of Die Hard with a Vengeance and the outright lunacy of A Good Day to Die Hard, Live Free or Die Hard is a fine entry in the series.
Right: The Setup
The great thing about the Die Hard movies, barring the dreadful fifth one, is that John McClane is always reluctantly called into action. He’s never expecting to take on terrorists. In the first one, he expects to attend an office Christmas party; in the second, he’s picking up his wife at the airport; in the third, he’s been suspended from the police force and he’s got a bad hangover.
And in the fourth one, just when he’s about to call it a night, he’s sent to pick up a hacker. So, he goes to the hacker’s apartment, half-asleep, and the place is suddenly swarmed by armed mercenaries, thrusting McClane into a nationwide conspiracy.
Wrong: McClane’s Death-Defying Antics
Michael Scott gave Live Free or Die Hard a pretty sharp review in The Office episode “Money,” saying that what let it down was the fact that it turned the grizzled New York cop who cut his feet on broken glass in Nakatomi Plaza into an invincible killing machine.
In Live Free or Die Hard, John McClane jumps out of speeding cars, blows up helicopters, and runs afoul of a military jet and emerges with nary a scratch.
Right: McClane’s Wisecracks
While Live Free or Die Hard introduced the kind of insane set pieces that would drag the latter-day Die Hard franchise away from its authentic grit and into generic actioner territory, it did maintain McClane’s snappy wisecracks.
Whenever he’s up against the odds, McClane talks to himself to maintain his sanity. When a bomb explodes in Matt’s apartment, McClane quips, “That’s gonna wake the neighbors.”
Wrong: Smarmy Villain
Timothy Olyphant is a fantastic, charismatic actor, as evidenced by his performances in Justified and Santa Clarita Diet, but the villainous role he was given in Live Free or Die Hard was painfully smarmy. He was hatable, but in the wrong ways.
Thomas Gabriel never seemed like a real threat and his obnoxious personality was unbearable. He’s the exact opposite of Alan Rickman’s devilishly charming portrayal of Hans Gruber in the original movie.
Right: Giving McClane A Culture-Clashing Sidekick
Although John McClane was a lone wolf in the first two Die Hard movies, Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Die Hard with a Vengeance showed how much fun he can be when he has a culture-clashing sidekick to bounce off of.
In Live Free or Die Hard, that sidekick is Matt Farrell, a young hacker played by Justin Long, who has all kinds of ideological conflicts with McClane, all while developing an unlikely pseudo-father-son bond.
Wrong: Underwhelming Finale
Although Live Free or Die Hard continually increases the scale and stakes of its action, it fails to build to a finale that’s worth the sum of its parts. McClane’s final standoff with Hans Gruber in the original movie is tense, unpredictable, and feels like the zenith of all the action and character development that came before it.
In comparison, Live Free or Die Hard’s final showdown is the total opposite. McClane defeats the bad guy by pulling the trigger of his gun, firing through his own gunshot wound and into the villain. As the culmination of all the insanity that precedes it, that finale is pretty disappointing.
Right: Bruce Willis Cares
At the time, seeing Bruce Willis put care and effort into a performance as John McClane seemed like a prerequisite, but in this scary post-A Good Day to Die Hard world, that’s no guarantee anymore.
In Live Free or Die Hard, Willis really seemed to care about bringing the same grit, nuance, and everyman relatability to McClane that he had done in all the previous movies. Like Adam Sandler, when he really tries, Willis can be a terrific actor.
Wrong: The PG-13 Rating
The first three Die Hard movies were rated R, and that was a hard R. The violence was bloody, the tone was very adult-oriented, and McClane dropped a litany of curse words in almost every line of dialogue. But in order for Fox to get teenagers into theater seats, Live Free or Die Hard was sanitized with a PG-13 rating.
Even McClane’s catchphrase, “Yippee-ki-yay, motherf**ker,” is held back by the rating, as the word “motherf**ker” is muffled by a gunshot. Live Free or Die Hard is fine, but the freedom of the R rating might’ve been what it needed to reach the heights of its predecessors.
Right: Bold, Suspenseful Action Sequences
The sequel to Live Free or Die Hard, A Good Day to Die Hard, would use its inflated budget unwisely, filling the action scenes with crummy, weightless CGI and failing to create any suspense or stakes along the way. By contrast, Live Free or Die Hard is a riveting exercise in one-upmanship.
From the shootout at Matt’s apartment to the lights-out tunnel mayhem to the elevator shaft brawl to the air strike, each successive action sequence sets out to top the last.
Wrong: Betraying The Spirit Of Die Hard
The whole point of Die Hard was to be an antidote to the kind of ‘80s actioner starring Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger as musclebound supermen blowing up entire countries. John McClane was just a regular guy caught in a situation that was both confined to a single building and incredibly high-stakes.
Unfortunately, Live Free or Die Hard betrays the spirit of its 1988 forerunner by going all out with bigger action than Bad Boys II and a stronger protagonist than John Rambo.