It's not summer until you've paid your hard-earned cash on a really bad Hollywood blockbuster which, after watching, makes you want to go back and slap the ticket lady until she gives you your money back. Tonight, Olly and I saw the stupidity that is "Die Hard 4.0," so despite the fact that it is late July and only 50-60 degrees in England, I guess summertime is here!
You often hear about "gratuitous" violence and/or sex in movies, but this movie boasts gratuitous....action. It's a 2.5 hour armageddon that very badly ties together car crashes, massive explosions, SUVs crashing down fiery elevator shafts, nation-wide blackouts, a fake exploding U.S. capitol, endless shootouts, the token hot Asian chick kung-fu fighting and killing her way through an ocean of men, an airborne police car (containing Bruce Willis) that crashes mid-air into the bad guy's helocopter (that's the best stunt of the film), a wild tractor trailer chase, computer hacking at gunpoint, and finally, some madness that culminates with an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet hovering and weaving its way through a maze of urban highway overpasses as they crumble like a mile of toppling dominoes. And LOTS of blood all the while. And I'm sure I've left a whole lot out.
And now a word about the horrific acting. I am serious when I say there were kids in my neice's 3rd grade play that could have out-acted the stone-faced and monotone-voiced mokeys in this movie. And the writing...I don't think mass cringing after one-liners like, "John, you're a Timex watch in a digital age" was the desired response.
There were many questions in the "storyline" that really threw me. Especially at the end: Bruce Willis kills the bad guy and the world is safe from a complete computer-programmed infrastructure shut down. But last I had heard, the bad guy was the only person on earth who could undo the damage. I wonder what happened to the world after the credits rolled...
Finally, I beleive a hallmark of the Die Hard franchise must be geographical idiocy and bad editing. The first movie was supposed to take place in the Washington, DC area...a detail that was foiled by the frequent calls Bruce Willis made from pay phones clearly labeled "Pac Bell" -- the California phone system. Though this film is again supposed to be set in the DC area, I could not identify any streets that remotely resembled DC, even with the super-imposed Washington Monument and Old Post Office Building in almost every car chase scene. Oh, and DC does NOT have yellow cabs or skyscrapers. And there was a very dubious toll tunnel that I had never encountered in my 6+ years in DC. But it's clearly the tunnel that connects DC to New Jersey and Baltimore in a matter of minutes. My favorite geo detail, however, was at the end when the helocopter, car explosion and firearm spectacular spectacular ended in a sunny blue harbor surrounded by mountains. Um, where is THAT in the DC area? (It sure looked a lot like southern CA to me.)
By the end of the film, I could only smack my forhead and groan. I didn't quite recover until afterwards when Olly and I had a pint at the pub and talked about something else.
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Having spent the best part of two hours having my brain turned into jelly by the BT “customer service help desk” to see if an engineer will turn up and charge me £125 for connecting my phone line I would happily have watched paint dry with a smile on my face. So DH4 was, in those circumstances, a good movie.
In the winter we want meaningful films which we can analyse on the long, cold, wet journey home from the cinema. In the summer we want exactly what DH4 serves-up: lots of bad/under/over/ham acting and a minimum of one explosion every three minutes. That way we have something to grin about on the long, cold, wet journey home from the cinema instead of bleating that the weather is awful and since we work so hard in the UK we deserve a blistering summer instead of those southern Mediterranean layabouts roasting away and getting all our Vitamin D.
One point about the car-into-helicopter scene is that the car does not contain la Willis when it’s airborne. He dives out of it, (at about 80mph, rolling safely to a halt) before sending it skyward. Our hero walks away from the bail-out – don’t try this in the Hyde Park tunnel, kids – with nothing more than a minor limp which wears off quickly enough for him to sprint down the street later to see if the IT geek villain has really blown up Capitol Hill…
Speaking of the IT geek villain, it’s strange that they couldn’t get a British actor to be the bad guy. Rickman and Irons have done the franchise proud in the past. Surely the producers could have signed-up Ian McDiarmid or Ralph Fiennes. Tim Olyphant was too young, too clean-cut and unconvincing in his sadism. His previous credits should have served as a warning of what was to come; from 2004-2006 he did 36 episodes of the ‘Deadwood’ series… How apt that his skills in front of the camera should be described so accurately by the title of his previous job.
Can’t wait for Transformers to hit the screens next week…
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