Every film this week hinges on a classic male crisis about sex and power. In Die Hard 4.0, Bruce Willis’s teenage daughter becomes an unwilling bargaining chip. Her captors are state-of-the-art terrorists. They have the computer codes to bring America to its knees. But you don’t mess with the daughter of an old-school cop such as John McClane. Why? Because Willis is the only grunt in the New York Police Department who can crash a rented car into a helicopter gunship and put it on expenses. It’s this designer anarchy that keeps Willis vaguely in fashion.

“John, you’re a Timex watch in a digital age,” complains his FBI boss. But Willis, who has been racing around saving cities for the previous three Die Hard movies, has never stood still enough to know what that means. So when the routine arrest of a systems hacker young enough to be his son turns into a one-man salvage operation to save the United States, Bruce finds himself back in action. That’s Bruce. He might be bald, middle-aged and very badly paid. He might know nothing about computers, and he might be everyone’s ultimate nightmare as an employee, but he’s a modern-day John Wayne figure all the same.

This time, though, he also has a sidekick – Justin Long, who previously starred in The Break-Up, is the genial young geek who needs to be saved from trim teams of psychopaths dressed in black. I like this actor. He’s a cheeky joy, and he makes Willis look surprisingly good.

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

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

For better or worse Willis and Long end up having to look after each other when no one else will. A crack team of acrobatic assassins is eager to erase Long to protect computer secrets he doesn’t even know he has. Much has happened in the 13 years since the last Die Hard movie – Willis himself, once Hollywood’s leading action man, is now past 50. The old timer knows it as well. He doesn’t much care for his clothes, but he wears the character of McClane comfortably. In doing so, the film delivers an astonishing number of set pieces. Willis doesn’t feel alive unless he’s hanging by his fingertips off the end of a crane, while the nerdy Long can only watch helplessly.

The set pieces bring tears to the eyes. If Timothy Olyphant can pass himself off as a state-of-the-art terrorist Hollywood is in desperate need of fresh terror. This supposedly slick computer maniac, partly inspired by Bill Gates, looks ripe for a spanking. There is clearly a real fear about geek terrorism, and this is a finger-wagging sort of film.

But Willis is an old-school meat-head. He is the proverbial sack of potatoes in a huge number of humiliating beatings. He doesn’t seem to mind being drenched from head to toe in fresh blood. And, in revenge, he has a bag of nasty tricks up his sleeve. The visceral pleasure of ramming a deadly Asian kung-fu chick down a lift shaft with a 4x4 SUV at 70 miles an hour is clearly quite exciting. The aesthetic point might be elusive, but that’s Bruce. Like this film, he has little time for detail.

15, 129mins

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