LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD [PG-13]
The thought of a toned-down and more marketable PG-13 rated Die Hard movie is pretty offensive to some, and not just the blood-hungry fans of the particular brand of high octane, testo-infused ultra-violence that Bruce Willis helped engineer in the 1980s with John McTiernan’s 1987 original and clever knockoffs like The Last Boy Scout (1991). It is also not just because the defiant catchphrase, “Yippie-ki-yay, mother[humper]!” needs to be masked to be more family-friendly, muffled with a not-very-cleverly placed sound effect. Also, never mind that because of the lifting of the age restriction on admission, the fact that at least half the theatre at the Friday or Saturday night show that you attend will be filled with noisy, ill-behaved teenagers too grown-up for Ratatouille and too young to bring their gawky, hormonal selves to the drive-in so that you and your date can have a nice, grown-up night out. Really, it is the violence.

It is not the quantity of violence, though. There is not an undue amount, and enough to balance the endless expository dialogue and cracking wise by Bruce Willis, returning for this fourth outing as Det. John McClane, the New York cop whose coincidence with calamity cannot even be charted by the likes of C-3P0. This time, he has a sidekick, a computer hacker named Matt Farrell (Justin Long), who is marked for death by terrorists led by Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) for his latent knowledge of their plot to cripple the country (and profit) via its reliance on insecure computers. Really, the violence is offensive not because it is present, but because it is sanitized and without consequence.

Compared to its three R-rated predecessors, this one, packed with ridiculous and indulgent physics-defying set pieces, is virtually bloodless and free of gore. The heavily choreographed kung-fu showdowns and plentiful car crashes result in the kind of engineered-to-be-entertaining rag doll thrown-from-the-wreck shake-offs that you would see in a piece of more obvious fantasy like a Looney Tune cartoon, where The Coyote plunges off a cliff (holding a sign that reads “Yikes!”), hits the ground at terminal velocity (in a perfectly timed cloud of dust), and is alive and well in the next scene (to strap an Acme rocket to his back to again chase the Roadrunner for the four ounces of meat he has on him). Likewise, in this clumsy and militantly uninteresting action extravaganza, there are no close-ups of any bad guy’s anguished face as it goes lifeless from loss of blood and massive trauma, no screaming motorists trapped in their burning cars, no one vomiting from the shock of a bullet to the kneecap. And if that wasn’t curiously bad enough, it is, as the kids would say (by instant message to the person next to them over their very bright cell phones in the row in front of you), hella boring.

Olyphant as the grudge-bearing baddie, leads the foot-dragging snooze patrol, which is only helped slightly by Long’s comic relief. Olyphant’s brooding, mysterious schtick may have worked on “Deadwood,” but here we are left hoping for a contrived plot device, like one that will bring Alan Rickman back (from the first movie) as Hans Gruber’s vengeful brother, “Fritz.” Even Willis slouches, with Underworld director Len Wiseman’s slavish adherence to the Die Hard blueprint a tired bit of self-cannibalism. It is all diluted to the point that the formula is as simple as making ice cubes, only this franchise has chilled for so long that what should be a cool summer is flavored suspiciously like a decade’s worth of freezer-burned leftovers that should have been thrown out as soon as we forgot what they tasted like in the first place.•••

THE TOP 5 REJECTED
‘DIE HARD’ SEQUEL TITLES

5. Die! Die! Die Hard My Darling!
4. A Day No Pigs Would Die Hard
3. Never Too Young To Die Hard
2. Die Hard & Harderer
1. It’s A Die Hard-Knock Life: The Musical