Live Free or Die Hard

You thought I was going to blog about Harry Potter, didn't you? WELL YOU WERE WRONG!

I will probably succumb and write about HP after I read the book, but now you get a movie review because I'm too tired to do anything else. It's kind of hard to do a good review more than two weeks after you saw the movie, though.

Live Free or Die Hard was a very enjoyable summer flick, but unfortunately nothing really stood out as unusual so I think it may vanish into the woodwork. Astonishingly for most action movies it had a reasonably clever and maybe even plausible plot. The stunts, of course, were not plausible at all, but they were fun.

Most of the fun of the movie comes from the interaction of the main characters, though, and there is some good dialog. Justin Long came across as a Keanu Reeves-Matrix look-alike, only with ACTING SKILLS, which was almost shocking. Most of the villains didn't get much screen time, though, and they didn't have a lot of dialogue, either, which made them seem kind of one-dimensional. The one thing I do have to say in their favor is that the main villian is presented as being out for revenge because he tried to warn the government that a disaster could happen but they ignored him. So, predictably, he's causing said disaster. He's never portrayed as a sympathetic character. You are not supposed to think, oh, poor him, screw those guys that wouldn't listen to him. Instead the director did an excellent job of making you think: "Wow, what a jerk."

It's fun, but it needed some surprising or vibrant element to make it all really come together and be exceptional.