| 9:14p |
Movie Review: Die Hard 4.0
Die Hard 4.0 is Die Hard With A Vengenace for really fucking stupid people.
I got your attention? I initially didn't have the 'really fucking' there, or the boldfacing but I think it adds something to the piece. It basically says If you enjoyed Die Hard 4.0, you're really fucking stupid.' This is part of my recent self-improvement push, to both understand why I make these desperate cries for attention and my overwhelming desire to analyse my own objectionable behaviour vocally in an attempt to try and convey it like it's humour rather than rudeness. Then I can get overly self-analytical in the second paragraph and cry myself to sleep over a totally justified statement on someone else's facebook status that makes me feel like a waste of a person.
In my last movie review I wrote about the free-ride expectation-light existence of Action Films. That is to say, if your Action Film makes no sense but has a good scene of you kicking a guy in the face, it doesn't matter, because the people who watch these movies don't want to think about it. Therefore, a selection process comes up, where people who don't want to think embrace these movies, and the people who make these movies realise the people watching them don't want to think about them. The unfortunate side effect of this is that a genre that's produced good films like Pitch Black and Die Hard With A Vengeance, has produced a piece of crap like Die Hard 4.0.
It's no doubt obvious by now that I'm going to have to explain what I think about Die Hard With A Vengeance so as to give appropriate contrast to my opinion of Die Hard 4.0. It's especially necessary given that, just as a field of comparison, a review of a movie in this genre would be given to comparing any movie in this genre to one of the best examples in the same genre. Being the sequel to the best Action Film I'd seen could be seen as a warning sign right off the bat, but the Die Hard franchise was, prior to this movie, two-thirds good, and I was totally willing to give 4.0 the benefit of the doubt. I don't think I judge sequels unduly harshly. I don't think so. Either way, I'm going to avoid poo metaphors this time as we consider and contrast movie A, a good movie, with mobie B, Die Hard 4.0.
So let's do a quick run down of what I liked in Die Hard With A Vengeance. For a start, the casting was handled well, with John McClane's characterisation as a down-to-earth, wrong-place, wrong-time hero who combines street smarts, an extreme but not too extreme action-man physicality and an iron will, carried off brilliantly by Bruce Willis. Samuel L Jackson did a great job of playing Zeus Carver, a wonderfully unstereotypical black man whose presence required a certain measure of authorial testicles, and did he pull it off well or what? Then you throw in a villain being played by Jeremy Irons and even Uwe Boll directing a George Lucas script would have a hard time fucking it all up. And they didn't stop there. The music was great. The direction was great, the sets were effing brilliant. Special effects were also handled really well because the movie didn't try to do anything ridiculous with computer graphics. For the most part when you saw an explosion, you were seeing something that a couple of guys with a chemistry set had set up quite well to go 'foom' and the overall effect is great. Objects fall with weight, explosions cast rubble around, all that good stuff. The thing that you don't have to pay attention to when you do the special effects in a more manual fashion. Then, the glory of glories to Die Hard With A Vengeance is that the movie keeps making sense if you think about it. It all combined to create a gigantic, steel-toed boot to the forehead of the moviegoing public which kicked the majority of their target audience into unsensibly stunned joy, and then turned around and applied a boot to the arse of every long-haired gaggling smartarse like myself who was all prepared to disdain it as running a franchise out on its last legs and using star power in the vaunted phoning it in phase of their respective careers.
Twelve Years Later, we get Die Hard 4.0, which is a very different beast. Where Vengeance was a smart film that parodied prior action films and held them together with a taut, sensible plot, 4.0 is a fearmongering pile of dogshit that takes the smart bits from its predecessors and stitches them together with a healthy dose of nonsense to get cheap emotional reactions. Rather than sustain its plot on the basis of narrative and storytelling and get its representation of science and technology generally right, the movie relies on the fact that its viewership are going to go into the movie with a willingness, nay a desire to not think. And lords, does it show.
I suppose I could get authoritive, as a reviewer, and point squarely at the audience, with a certain additional sense of smarm, saying You, yes you, fetid chimpanzees like yourself are to blame for this god-awful stain of a movie but that's just distributing responsibility and makes it look like it's everyone's fault at large. If it's everyone's fault, nobody is to blame, and that makes the whole thing a bit less embarassing for the population. I have no intention of doing any such thing
Now, the technology that was introduced in Die Hard With a Vengeance was real technology. It's entirely reasonable for there to be a highly explosive liquid that's composed of two chemicals that are safe and inert to transport otherwise (for example, thermite and tannerite both behave in this fashion). It's reasonable to make a highly magnetic panel that can support a light bomb. Radios - at least in the mid 90s - were still in common use by the police force, and explosions.
Now, of course, there are some acceptances. The 'light shockwave' explosions you see in the Die Hard Univers aren't uncommon, with McClane being somehow close to an explosion that can throw a train through the air but doesn't tear him into his component bits or even demonstrating any of the problems you get with actual explosive trauma. I can understand that, and there were some actual concessions made towards things like cover, and how John can't just breeze past opponents. He and Zeus demonstrate reactions to some of the ridiculous things they do, and there are always those obvious, face-and-upper-arm cuts that remind the audience that yes, of course, John is actually at risk of suffering or dying in this situation even though we all know full well that he's not. In essence, the threat presented in Die Hard With A Vengeance is a real potential terrorist threat as would be fielded by a clever, devious, ingenious opponent who composes a clever plan, and capitalises on windows of opportunity. Basically, it was a plan that worked, even when you thought about it.
Die Hard 4.0, on the other hand, isn't so well-crafted. Instead of using demonstrable things that they can show as a threat, every threat in Die Hard 4.0 is a nebulous com-pu-tor problem. Hackers in the internets! Tubes full of terrorism! Connecting up to the old sat-net!
The entire premise of Die Hard 4.0 is predicated upon an audience that not only doesn't understand computers, but fears them. It's the same family of people that happily smoke and drink but are cautious of the idea of ordering a pizza online because what if the internets get me? I would assume with even a basic level of high school education any person watching this film would have reason to ask themselves: Is it possible that every single thing in the United States is hooked up to the internet? When you take a step forward and deal with people who have dealt with the actual internet, the question comes up: Given what you can achieve with the internet, do you really think that every major service and the like in the United States is easily and centrally controlled? Because the answer in both cases is no. No, they're not.
The movie pours every possible fear, every tiny niche problem (the traffic network failing) and rather than concoct a way or a reason in which or for which way that one could go badly, it instead seals all that reasoning in the wonderful black box of com-pu-tors. Without needing to explain or justify exactly how this works, the movie just assumes that yes, of course, it's entirely feasible for a gang of spotty hackers being bossed around by a breathtakingly incapable actor portraying supposed-villain Thomas Gabriel. I know it's a tall order to follow up a role that's been held by both Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons. Moreso if one is in fact, not an actual actor per se.
This means that any time you encounter a computer in this movie, you are not going to see it do anything that resembles an actual computer's operational behaviour. If it has a chip in it, it can be hacked, and in turn can be used to hack things. If all telephone providers in the United States went down, people could still access the internet, demonstrating a colossal failure of understanding of how the internet functions and hey, while we're at it, you can turn any PDA into a satellite phone that operates completely free of any such provider malarkey because the internet is carried through the airs on the radiation-laced wings of vaccine fairies when they're flying back on the way from dispensing big buckets of autism. Whoever handled this movie clearly was not so stupid as to actually think it worked, but seemed to cynically think that the audience would be just retarded enough that it wouldn't be a problem.
There are other elements to the movie that make it bad. On the one hand, I thought Die Hard With A Vengeance handled a racist black man quite well, I feel that Die Hard 4.0 was quite sexist. Not because it showed John punching a woman in the face - indeed, that he was willing to fight her like he would fight a man is one of the points in the movie's favour. But then, the woman - who had no actual personality but being John Gabriel's generic asian hottie (another shortcut towards characterisation by making her something lathered up nerds fap over, a computer super-savvy asian kung fu artist who happens to be very sexy) - is then referenced entirely in insulting, perjorative words that have no actual connection to the woman. She's called a slut, a hooker, a whore - none of which she showed any indication of being. A bitch? Sure. That I can get behind. Manipulative? Same thing. Worse, because McClane is 'getting under Gabriel's skin' it's considered okay. In theory, it's a sign of John being smart. In practice, it's an excuse to have the macho uberhero spout sexist drivel to another man in a way that gives wife-bashers a boner.
Then we get onto the notes of non-computer science stuff, like how natural gas is shipped from point to point in big burning caravans and the rest of the time, it seems, the tubes are empty. That natural gas detonates on contact with oxygen. Helicopters can't make a journey in half an hour that a car made in five minutes, that the pilots of F-22 hornets are in fact both incredibly shortsighted and retarded, that a car running into a flat concrete post will ride up it like it's a ramp. That - okay, look, I'll stop.
It's a despairing thought, but we are routinely offered entertainment that has no connection to the reality that it's supposed to depict: Art and entertainment are ways for our mind to unpack and handle the information that they've accrued over the course of the days. They're ways for us to consider and re-examine and think, and this is a genre that blunts our ability to do it when it's wielded like this. It's depressing.
Just to be clear, however, both films piss on 12 Rounds. |