15, 129 mins

Die Hard 4.0 was not, it seems, the first choice of title for the latest addition to Bruce Willis’s action-movie series. In America, the film is called Live Free or Die Hard, but somebody must have felt that such a star-spangled rallying cry wouldn’t travel well. Yet, even if thinking of a replacement title was the last item on a Friday afternoon’s agenda, there’s no excuse for that fatuous “4.0”. Has there ever been a more feeble attempt to make a sequel sound fresh and snazzy than this aping of the numbering used for computer-software packages?

The film itself, directed by Len Wiseman, keeps up this courting of young viewers, but in a more forgivable way. The plot makes a big thing of up-to-the-minute computer technology, the villain being a well-funded hacker (Timothy Olyphant) who threatens to bring America to a standstill by disabling the country’s electronic infrastructure. In trying to thwart the menace, John McClane, the resolute cop played by Willis, is helped by a young computer-boffin sidekick (Justin Long) who makes jokes not only about our hero’s lack of techno knowledge, but about his baldness.

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

Yes, McClane is now as much of a cue-ball-head as Willis is in real life. It makes more sense than giving the star an artificial version of the hair he had in the previous Die Hards (in 1988, 1990 and 1995), but I was disappointed by the other big change in McClane’s appearance: he seems to have lost his fondness for white vests. With Willis in a khaki sweatshirt, there is little continuity between the McClane of old and the character now before our eyes. His estranged wife never made it to the third instalment, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, and now the woman with whom he has issues to resolve is his daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). His catch phrase, “Yippee-ki-yay, motherf***er” – first heard in Die Hard, an 18-certificate film – has its naughty bit drowned out. Even in its plot, Die Hard 4.0 is not truly Die Hard-esque. The classic formula, as seen in the first two films, had McClane fighting bad guys in a single, confined setting. Die Hard: With a Vengeance relaxed the rules a bit by letting him roam around New York, and now there’s no stopping him. This new episode takes him on a tour of the eastern seaboard, from New Jersey to Washington, DC, to West Virginia, then on to Maryland.

The purist in me thinks that if you’re not going to make a traditional Die Hard film, you shouldn’t trade on the brand name. All the same, Wiseman’s film is enjoyable in its own way. It doesn’t avoid the old drawback of thrillers about computer crimes: tiresome scenes in which we’re supposed to be excited by graphics flashing on screens and people frantically typing. But those bits are hugely outweighed by the sequences that put McClane through his paces. The action is flamboyantly staged, and Willis is both entertaining and – despite his years – as credible as he needs to be. To counterbalance the film’s pitch to young viewers, there are jokes about how much fitter McClane is than his sidekick, and that state of affairs doesn’t seem farfetched.

Of course, McClane does a few things that people of any age would be lucky to pull off in reality. He dodges bullets and explosions, drives like a loony and has a fight in a car as it hangs precariously in a lift shaft. He is particularly successful in fending off a pursuing helicopter, first by uncorking a fire hydrant beneath it, then by launching a car at it. How much absurdity you can take from a film such as this is a matter of taste. I began to feel disengaged in the last few scenes, around the point at which McClane stands for a while atop an airborne fighter plane, then jumps several metres to the ground without so much as spraining an ankle.

One of the hallmarks of the earlier Die Hards was that McClane was more vulnerable than the action men played in those days by Stallone and Schwarzenegger. Hard though he was, he was still at risk of dying. In the spectacular but silly finale of Die Hard 4.0, he is so powerful that you wouldn’t bet against him surviving a bullet between the eyes.

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