Live Free or Die Hard: Critic Reviews

An enjoyable pop projection of post-9/11 anxiety. That said, it also makes you nostalgic for the days when irresponsible action movies didn't have to deal with it.

[McClane] still has the same knack for trouble, the adrenaline-pumping, cheerfully anarchic kind that causes cars to ignite, bodies to fly, eardrums to pop and hearts to race and gladden.

Willis was entitled to one more kick-ass action outing. But please, let this be the last. Anything more would be dying soft.

This fourth installment in the franchise delivers when it comes to kick-butt, action-packed mayhem but bogs down focusing on key characters staring at computer screens, typing madly on keyboards or spouting techno-babble.

At a time when the action genre has come to be dominated by sleek, matte surfaces and set-'em-and-forget-'em computerized effects, Live Free or Die Hard seeks to remind viewers of the simple, nostalgic pleasures of watching stuff get blown up.

Sorry, boys. After two decades, the first film still does more with one skyscraper than Live Free or Die Hard does with an entire country.

The real intrigue has to do with whether McClane -- 'a Timex watch in a digital age,' per the lead baddie (Timothy Olyphant) -- can log in to 2007.

The action in this fast-paced, hysterically overproduced and surprisingly entertaining film is as realistic as a Road Runner cartoon.

Terrific entertainment, and startlingly shrewd in the bargain, a combination of minimalist performances -- interestingly minimalist -- and maximalist stunts that make you laugh, as you gape, at their thunderous extravagance.

Live Free or Die Hard is the most creative and exciting Die Hard film since the original, though it's hardly the original's equal.

The post-9/11 techno-terrorist stuff works, the fights are creative and funny, and Willis is in top form in his career-defining role.

The usual pyrotechnics are intact, the corpses pile up and McClane even gets to spit out his signature battle cry.

The bad guys' omnipotence at nearly every turn dilutes the film's suspense.

It's the movie equivalent of a cop on the eve of retirement: he knows what he has to do, and he gets it done. But his heart isn't really in it anymore.

If your sense of the credible isn't awfully flexible, you're the wrong audience for movies like this. The nonsense bounces along at such a breathless clip that most viewers should willingly give the improbabilities a free pass.

The most perfect protagonist is always the imperfect protagonist. Leave it to John McClane to bring back the action hero.

Director Len Wiseman never lets the movie slow down enough for us to think about what's happening. And he gives us some amusing things to keep us occupied, including one particularly fitting cameo.

Willis should not be the victim of facile stereotyping. He brings more heart and humor to apocalyptic pulp fiction than any other actor I can think of offhand.

Tone careens madly from serious peril to action camp and everything in between, but the sheer quantity of often outrageous stunts should help overcome franchise mustiness.

What's the fourth "Die Hard" called? I keep forgetting. "Die Hard: With a Pension"? "Die Hardened Arteries"? "Die Laughing"?

Mostly, the flick relies on old-school stunt work rather than computer generated effects.

It's a pulse-pounding, bad-guy-pummeling exercise in action excess, peppered with bad, bad dialogue.

Live Free or Die Hard is indeed a worthy successor to the original -- not perhaps quite as good, but close.

Movie characters like McClane are the Paul Bunyans and John Henrys and Pecos Bills of our age, the stuff of tall tales spun with the technology of an age whose campfires are found in multiplexes with stadium seating.

This paradox comes with an attendant fallacy: that the best way to solve the static problem is to make the stunts even larger, the bangs even bigger. Wrong: More action just stops the film longer.