It's the beginning of the Fourth of July weekend, but New York City Detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) isn't celebrating. He's had yet another argument with his college-age daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and received a crushingly routine assignment to bring in a young hacker, Matt Farrell (Justin Long), for questioning by the FBI. But for McClane, the ordinary has a habit of exploding into the extraordinary--abruptly hurtling him into the wrong place at the wrong time. With Farrell's help, McClane slowly begins to understand the increasing chaos surrounding him. An attack is underway on the vulnerable United States infrastructure, shutting down the entire nation. The mysterious figure behind the scheme, Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant), stays several moves ahead of McClane as he implements his incredible plans, known to uber-geeks like Farrell as a "fire sale" (as in, everything must go!)

The Die Hard series was one of those that really didn’t need another sequel as for the most part the series had played itself out and like their comment in the film John McClane had stayed in the analog world while most of us had moved onto a digital one. And despite everything it had going against it, a dozen years between installments, a complete change in the world and terrorism, and a completely altered movie landscape the movie still manages to deliver a really good movie. In fact the fourth installment might be better than the third one and even though there were quite a few little things that bothered me a lot about this installment it was still fun, enjoyable and it was still the John McClane we remember and had grown to love.

One of the things that bothered me the most about this installment was how much they felt they needed to dumb it down for the average moviegoer. From saddling it with a Pg-13 rating, to throwing in the guy from the Mac commercials as comic relief. I know you can get away with a lot in today’s modern day action film and as far as the action went there was no real step down in that department for lowering their rating. The step down comes in language the most famous line of the entire series Yippe Kiyay Mother F*&#er only gets to be used once and that at the very end of the film. That one sentences sums up the character of John McClane better than anything you could say about him, its that unabashed, hard edged, screw it lets go kind of feel is what has always made him cool and when he utters that famous sentence it captures everything you ever need to know about John McClane.

The other problem is the mac dude, he’s annoying in the commercials, so much so you want to smack him until you break your hand on his face. I don’t know what they saw in him that screamed second banana unless they were buying into that whole macs are cooler crap the commercial spews and that buy having a mac hacker we are adding instant credibility to the movie. Heck anyone who owns a computer knows the hackers like windows because everyone uses windows. They had to update the terrorism of this film to cyber terrorism because money-stealing madmen like Alan Rickman I guess don’t make as much sense anymore. But Alan Rickman was ten times the villain that you see in the film and second bananas like Sam Jackson are ten times the sidekick that the mac dude tries to play.

They even throw in Kevin Smith as the ultimate hacker in a funny twist, the reason its funny is because you don’t believe Kevin Smith as this uber hacker because its freaking Kevin Smith. Kevin does get off some great one-liners ala Kevin Smith though and the banter between Kevin and Bruce is ten times what the mac dude was able to muster. So he is funny and refreshing but man is he miscast.

What was and is still cool about the character of McClane and what Bruce Willis manages so well is that wrong guy in the wrong place all the time of mojo. Man this guy gets stuck in the worse situations and all he wants to do is go home but first he’s got to kill himself a whole slew of terrorists save the day and feel like he barely gets a thanks for all his efforts. I mean he is the average every day joe that can and will kick your ass if you piss him off. No other actor could do a better job at McClane than Willis and it’s the character that defined his career and he is once again at home as New York Police officer John McClane having another bad day and we love to see John have a bad day.

Grade: B+