Live Free or Die Hard

Can you believe it’s been 19 years since we first heard John McClane tell off some baddie with his trademark retort “Yippiekiyay, motherfucker!” right before he blows them to the next life? In 1988 no one outside of academia had heard of the Internet, and Tim Berners-Lee wouldn’t invent the World Wide Web for another half decade but in the short time since the last Die Hard flick network connectivity has become a pervasive utility underpinning our economy and government. It’s not just blogs, YouTube and Facebook after all.

Live Free or Die Hard, as unlikely as this sounds, is one of the first major studio productions to recognize this sea change and take it into account in a serious way. An uber-geek brought into the federal government in the wake of 9/11 told his new bosses on his first day of work that network security was far more important than they thought as well as nowhere near sufficiently implemented to protect us. Determined black hats could easily break through and conduct a “fire sale.”

What, you ask, is a fire sale? Think of our country as a three-legged stool: government, finance and energy. Because each of them have become so dependent on connectivity they are all vulnerable through an attack via this single route. And our angry geek (Thomas Gabriel, played by Deadwood‘s Timothy Olyphant) left the government when he wasn’t taken seriously and decided to show everyone how right he was.

Part of Gabriel’s plot requires the assistance of other alpha level computer hackers, which he acquires through innocent looking fronts. Helping him is his combo martial arts/hacker lover, played by Asian hottie Maggie Q, because you know young hackers are totally out of their minds dealing with such a luscious lady. With the plot about to launch and their assistance no longer needed, Gabriel’s muscle squad murders the external contractors.

McClane, already over the river in New Jersey to visit with his daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) whose now a college student at Rutgers; actually he’s there to spy on her as she returns from a date and Lucy is, not surprisingly, angry at him. The Feds, noting a strange glitch in their computer network, have started rounding up hackers they think could have been responsible and have asked the NYPD to have a senior detective to pick up Matt Farrell (Mac Guy Justin Long) in Camden and drive him to D.C. (Okay, why wouldn’t they ask the Philadelphia police, who are much closer, or the Camden police? Because then John wouldn’t be in Washington when this goes down.)

McClane arrives literally just in time to save Matt. We know that if he’d pressed Enter on his computer keyboard the plastique planted inside would have killed him and McClane and Farrell find out seconds later when the musclemen launch a frontal assault after the computer doesn’t explode. The two get away, barely, and head to the Capital.

Gabriel’s attack gets into high gear while our heroes are on the road. Traffic computers are programmed to keep lights green in all directions. He forces the same videos to be shown on all television networks and net-connected computers. Cell phone networks and then landlines and even satellite phone systems are shutdown. Stock market computers are flooded with false transactions. Government computer networks are compromised.

The public is going into full panic mode, precisely as planned. Even the FBI’s team tasked with responding to this type of attack, lead by Bowman (Cliff Curtis) and Molina (Zeljko Ivanek, who seems to be playing key supporting roles everywhere these days), are having a hard time understanding events. Which is where Farrell steps in and is the first to utter the words Fire Sale, something the Fibbies won’t accept. Yet. Until they realize Gabriel is going after the power distribution grids as well.

Live Free, though, is a Die Hard movie–in fact I think it’s the best of the four–and so, once he understands what’s going down, John McClane steps up and does what only he seems able to do, cutting through the BS and panic and putting his life on the line through an increasingly threatening series of confrontations until the bad guy gets to hear him utter those two words and then die.

Director Len Wiseman (Underworld, Underworld: Evolution) and writer Mark Bomback (the 2004 Robert De Niro thriller Godsend) smartly recognize that McClane is older now and as ungeeky as one can be, so that having him succeed singlehandedly would have made this movie a farce. There’s plenty of the cynical, sardonic humor you’d expect but having Justin Long’s character stay with McClane, despite our boy’s misanthropy and the youngster’s fear, provides a far more believable result. Lucy, kidnapped when Gabriel realizes that McClane just won’t go away, also gets the chance to step up in the end and show she’s a chip off the old block (as disgusted as that might make her). In fact, I wonder if the producers did this with the idea of a Die Hard: Next Generation movie in mind.

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