Deadhouse Gates

I worried about “Live Free or Die Hard” before it was released. While the first 3 were rated R, this one would be rated PG-13. I didn’t like “Die Hard 2″ because it was missing John McTiernan’s intelligence, and McTiernan was also sitting this one out. And as much as I like Bruce Willis, I was worried that he might be a little long in the tooth to be an action hero again. Then I saw the movie, and my fears were put to rest.

In “Live Free”, John McLane (Willis) is an old man who doesn’t do much chasing and shooting after bad guys anymore. Instead, he’s called on to escort nerdy hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long) from New Jersey to Washington, DC to advise the FBI about someone who’s hacked into their database. Unfortunately for them both, Farrell has been targeted for assassination that very night by the same hacker. By the time they elude the killers and get to DC, the hacker Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) has infiltrated every government computer and brought the country to a complete halt. And that’s when McLane decides to go after Gabriel using the same M.O. of the first three films: blowing up everything between himself and the bad guy. But he needs Farrell’s help in finding the bad guy and undoing the techno-damage, and so they become an unlikely team.