Movies - Live Free or Die Hard

There's not a lot to do when in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, so The Great Organiser and I took in a movie: Live Free or Die Hard. Despite being totally preposterous, it's honestly quite a lot of fun. The movie is supposed to be about John McClane, but he never really shows up. Bruce Willis gets called "John" throughout the film, but in truth Bruce is just Bruce and that's good enough for the purposes of an action film that pretends to be nothing else. In spite of a smattering of desultory gestures towards character development, Bruce is served up to the audience as a relatively complete package, bald head and all. The director, Len Wiseman, understands that Bruce is a known quantity; we know what we want from him and he gets down to business and delivers. It's not a perfect film by any measure, not nearly as perfect as the first Die Hard, which stands to this day as perhaps the definitive text-book action movie, but it meets its own expectations and even exceeds them. Pixel-driven special effects are ditched in favour of good ol' stunts and props and the script, despite being obviously written as a feature removed from the Die Hard oeuvre and later shoehorned into a vehicle for Bruiser, moves along at a decent clip. Think about it too much and it all falls apart but not to nearly the same extent as Transformers. In this instance it actually makes sense.