Are you super-heroed out? Are you suffering from spandex fatigue? Have you seen one too many computer-generated fireball infernos filling up your cinema screen? If so, the makers of the $100 million Die Hard 4, the latest episode in the 19-year-old hard-hitting action franchise, think they have the answer. Betting on a certain ennui among a cine-ma-going public tired of synthetic comic-book heroes such as Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, the marketing hounds at 20th Century Fox have come up with a genius promotional tagline for their punchy new Die Hard movie: “No mask. No cape. No problem.”

“That tagline kind of sums up the allure of the Die Hard movies,” explains the film’s 36-year-old screenwriter, Mark Bomback. “There’s something about the everyman quality of the hero John McClane (played by Bruce Willis) that people respond to. He’s just a guy, a normal cop, who wants to have this one moment of peace with his family, but it keeps on getting disrupted.”

In episodes 1 to 3 of the series this disruption was provided by a cabal of international baddies and bank-robbers, led by the likes of those British stalwarts Jeremy Irons and Alan Rickman. In Die Hard 4, however, it’s the turn of contemporary cyber-terrorists to hatch a deadly plan that will disable the online infrastructure of the entire United States, including defence networks and military mainframes. “There was something about these villains that made them an appealing and very unusual threat for someone like John McClane (an avowed technophobe) to deal with,” Bomback explains.

And yet, Die Hard 4 was far from a quick fix. Studio bosses had been looking for a follow-up Die Hard for over a decade, since the $361 million haul of Die Hard With a Vengeance (aka Die Hard 3). They got close before, Bomback says, with a jungle adventure idea, and then an idea about McClane and his teenage daughter trapped on a tropical island holiday that goes badly awry (the idea was canned, but the daughter makes an appearance in Die Hard 4 nonetheless). But it wasn’t until a Wired magazine feature called “A Farewell to Arms” that things began slowly to take shape. That story, about a possible cyber attack on America, was transformed into a screenplay called World War Three Dot Com by David Marconi, the writer of Enemy of the State. The screenplay was ultimately shelved, but something about the cyber-villains appealed to the bosses at Fox, who duly called in Bomback (then a novice, with only the Robert De Niro cloning thriller Godsend to his name) to pitch his idea for a contemporary John McClane outing.

BACKGROUND

• Die Hard 4.0 - Sunday Times review

• Die Hard 4.0

• Holding out for a hero

• Bruce Willis comes out fighting for Iraq’s forgotten GI heroes

• Forget the cape. I’m a real action hero

On the Move: Bruce Willis

The action movie legend says that when he's not playing tough nuts on the big screen he loves to drive American muscle cars

Related Internet Links

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Even that was three years ago, says Bomback. But, he argues, the relatively long production time was not a sign of hesitation among the film-makers, but one of confidence. “It is all about how urgently a studio needs to get a film out there, or not,” he says. “Movies like the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels are going to be rushed out quickly in order to catch the mood that the original has generated. But with Die Hard you have the luxury of a brand that is never really going to fade from national, or even international, awareness. You can turn on the TV any day of the week here in America and you’ll see one of the three Die Hard movies floating around somewhere.”

Of course, floating around inside the Die Hard movies themselves is its star, Willis, now 52. He is the franchise touchstone and has the final veto for the studio bosses, the director, Len Wiseman, and Bomback alike. It was pretty intimidating at first, Bomback confesses. He was 16 when he first saw Willis demolish the Nakatomi Plaza in the original movie. The writer, whose next script, Unstoppable (about a runaway toxic train), is being directed by Martin Campbell, who made Casino Royale, learnt quickly to defer character decisions to the instincts of his action-star protagonist. “You really do need to check in with him as John McClane on a film like this,” he says. “He’s been doing it for so much longer than anyone else on the movie, and although he clearly is not the character, he has coloured John McClane so much that it is in many ways a product of his own personality.”

Early sneak previews of the movie have already generated ecstatic word of mouth in an already curious industry. Alongside Sylvester Stal-lone’s reinvigorated 1980s franchises ( Rocky and Rambo), plus the forthcoming Indiana Jones movie, there certainly seems to be a healthy market for old-fashioned unironic action pictures. “I do believe that there are people in their twenties, thirties, and forties who simply feel like there is another way that these big summer blockbusters can go,” says Bomback. “But that way is mostly being ignored.” Mostly, that is, until now.

THE RETURN OF THE ACTION ICONS

Sylvester Stallone Made a triumphant comeback earlier this year with the low-key and brooding Rocky Balboa. Currently finishing off a reboot of the old Rambo series, John Rambo.

Harrison Ford After more than a decade in the career doldrums, churning out dross such as Firewall, Ford is now prepping for Indiana Jones 4. His on-screen father, Sean Connery, claims he won’t leave retirement.

Jean-Claude Van Damme The also-ran of Eighties action heroes, Van Damme continues to build on a sizeable cult audience.

Live Free or Die Hard opens on July 4

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