Twelve years after he last kicked terrorist butt in a grimy singlet, Bruce Willis's everyman hero John McClane is back: older, balder, grimmer.
The fourth installment in the Die Hard saga is not clever but it is big, brutal and exciting. It smartly updates the longstalled franchise to a post-9/11 world where both the reluctant hero, and the America he loves, have had some of the sass knocked out of them.
Willis furthers the late-blossoming revival of his career by again playing an ageing loser who gets a good working over, psychological as well as physical, as if he's atoning for all those smug, smirking Hudson Hawk types he played in his heyday.
So, McClane is still an NYPD cop, but he's now divorced, struggling to control a sassy teenage daughter, and looking forward to his pension. He's already given up the fight with his hairline.
Then all hell breaks loose when technocrooks, once again posing as terrorists, hack into the computer systems controlling America's defences, energy supplies, and even its traffic lights. The security forces are powerless, but the villains have reckoned without McClane's ability to fight technology with sheer testosterone.
The attack on America blurs into the background while McClane hares across the country, trying to save the day and his daughter, abetted by a computernerd sidekick (Justin Long), who is primarily there to blurt out the witticisms-McClane is now too stony-faced to say.
Director Len Wiseman, formerly known for the Underworld movies, isn't that bothered with character, but he never lets the pace flag and conducts the set pieces with brio. These include a multiple underground car-crash where vehicles fly like Tonka toys flung by a toddler, a vicious punch-up with martial arts star Maggie Q in a car suspended in a lift shaft, and an audacious duel between a monster "big rig" truck and an F35 fighter jet.
This is pacy, brainless fun, with enough references and in-jokes to please diehard fans (sorry). Still, it might be best if this were the last in the series. I can't see Die Hard with a Bus Pass, can you?
Die Hard 4.0 is released on Wednesday 4 July.
Die Hard 4.0
