Yipee-ki-yay...not

When "Die Hard 2: Die Harder" came out, I made a gag with my friends about how the series couldn't consist of more than 4 movies:

Die Hard

Die Harder

Die Hardest

Dead

It's so sad that my prediction came true.

After watching "Die Hard 4.0" (a silly title but still vastly better than "Live Free or Die Hard"), I'm sorry to report that it was DOA. The movie may have starred Bruce Willis as John McClane, but this sequel was Die Hard in name only. Sure, it qualified as a big action summer popcorn flick, but I think that was why it ultimately failed. I'm surprised that Jerry Bruckheimer/Micheal Bay weren't involved with this movie because the action sequences were SO over the top. Sending a flying car to kill a helicopter? Surfing the tail of a hovering F-35 VTOL jet? Driving an SUV through a room and into an elevator shaft to take out a bad guy? Check, check, check. And don't even get me started on John McClane's super human powers. In Die Hard, we felt his pain as he pulled blooody shards of glass out of his bare feet. This time around? He's still walking after jumping out of a speeding car (yeah, rolling like that would really help), getting kicked out a window, falling off a jet and being shot through the chest. I know that a fair degree of Suspension of Disbelief is required for movies like this, but this was too much.

The magic of the first Die Hard movie was that it was about an average guy showing up in the wrong place at the wrong time and (relatively) quietly taking out the bad guys. Yes, there was an exploding helicopter in that one too (come to think of it, a big helicopter scene has been featured in all 4 movies...) but the appeal was to watch John get down and dirty with the bad guys on a simpler scale. 1 guy stuck in a building with a bunch of villains. And Alan Rickman as Hans Grueber will always be the ultimate bad guy. Planned, poised and classy, perfectly contrasting McClane's raw nature.

To be fair, the series started it's nose dive with DH2 and entered Mindless Action Land in DH3. But at least DH3 had Jeremy Irons playing a Grueber, unlike DH4 which featured a boring, whiny computer geek as the main villain. I'm sorry, but there's a reason why Timothy Olyphant isn't a household name. In a different role, maybe. But as the villain in a Die Hard movie, uh-uh.

RIP