Live Free or Die Hard (Len Wiseman, 2007)

This summer, get ready for one of the most heart-pounding yet subtly confusing action films of the year.

Okay, so John McLane (Bruce Willis), everybody's favorite sort of whiny but impossibly tough and at times very lucky cop is back! Only this time, he's even balder and more hard-dying. He's also got a new enemy: the Internet. That's right, it's McLane vs Internet hackers. I'm not going to lie to you, McLane is old, older than computers. He doesn't understand 'em, and frankly he doesn't trust 'em. But that's why he's got a secret weapon. He traded in Samuel L. Jackson for the Mac computer guy. That dude is always making the PC look like a fool in those commercials, and he's the best chance McLane has of CTRL + ALT + DLT-ing the nerdiest criminal masterminds of the summer.

The biggest problem of this movie is the false dichotomy in the title. As far as John McLane and I are concerned, you can both live free and die hard. In fact, dying hard is the most sure-fire means of living free (which isn't free). Not that Die Hard with a Vengeance made any sense as a title, but this one is such a blatant affront to logic. Aside from that, I was a little disappointed by the Mac guy. I was really looking forward to finding out whether he really is a computer or just pretends to be or what, and all this movie did was really obfuscate the issue even more. At first, it seems like he is just a computer genius, but then suddenly they rig him up so that every time McLane punches his head, a helicopter blows up, which was effective, but it totally destroyed the integrity of the reality of the film. (And if you don't believe me, just watch this trailer.)

In the heat of the moment, it didn't really matter, because

SPOILER ALERT!!!:

in the end, he said "Yippie-Kie-Yay, Motherfucker!" and then there was the biggest explosion of all.

SPOILERS END HERE

So if you have a high tolerance for logical fallacies and love of Internet hackers but also want to see them get their just desserts, then Live Free or Die Hard is a movie coming out on the Fourth of July.