A long time passes between the rhird and fourth films in this franchise. I'm guessing that after the third tanked, they decided to put McClane to bed until there were actual terrorists for him to defeat.
We finally get them in this film. In complete opposition to the first three films, the bad guys are terrorists this time, but he doesn't think he's a terrorist. He's also stealing billions of dollars, so maybe he is crook and not a terrorist, but I'm going to have to go with greedy terrorist.
There are no mentions made of the second or third films at all in this installment, though this does set up number 3 to have been the true and canonical sequel to number 2 - McClane has always been a New York cop. They also expanded on the separation from his wife so that now he is divorced. The only bit of continuity that gets messed up is the age of his daughter, Lucy. In the first film (the only other time that we see her) she is roughly six to eight years old, let's lowball it and say six. This movie is 19 years after the first one and Lucy is now a student at Rutgers. Ok, 25 year old co-ed isn't too far of a stretch maybe she took a year off to travel and another year or two to work. Except that she looks 19 or 20 and acts the same. It is strongly implied that at the beginning of the film that she is newly on her own. Now, if they had made her a law student or something, I could have save a few pixels here.
The producers learned from the mistakes of 2 and 3 - in 2 it was that he was the Rodney Dangerfield of police detectives and in 3 it was giving him a partner who was also a bad-ass. This time around, the FBI listen to him from very early on, and the sidekick is a kid who needs McClane's protection to stay alive. Plus, they give him his motivation back - he has to stop the bad guys in order to save his daughter's life.
Less stuff blew up this movie than in the first 3, but the effects were cooler - you didn't just get a truck blowing up in the tunnel, you get a truck blowing up that sends other cars flying through the air that McClane and his sidekick barely dodge. You don't have a car chase shout-out, you have a fighter jet chasing and demolishing a big rig and the highway that it's on. And very noticeably, you don't have a tough assassin chick that only engages minor characters, you have a tough beautiful assassin chick that takes it to McClane and for the most part kicks his ass.
I watched the unrated version this time around. I honestly couldn't tell any difference from the theatrical version. Whatever was different was minor.
Now that I'm on the far side of Die Hard, I can recommend the first and fourth movies. They have a relatively simple and straight forward plot and stick to it. The characters are all motivated to act the way they act. The second was unnecessarily complicated - they weren't just pulling the wool over McClane's eyes, they were pulling one on the viewer too. And the third one...well, it just kinda sucked.
Live Free or Die Hard at IMDB
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