The wife and I rented Live Free or Die Hard over the weekend. Most. Unintentionally. Funny. Movie. Ever. There were intentionally funny parts, of course, including some good wisecracks from both John McClane and stereotypical hacker dude, but the "serious" scenes were funnier by far. The trailer-spoiled slaying of a helicopter with a catapulted police car was a hoot, as was the supposed-to-be-creepy conversation between the googly-eyed bad guy and McClane's daughter.

Thinking back on the movie, I do have a few little nitpicks:

• Apparently the villain got his HR policy out of a Bond movie: sidekicks included a ninja babe, a freerunner, and the always-popular bearded foreign weapons guy. However, he didn't have a deformity (besides the previously mentioned bug eyes). Where's the scar/prosthesis/embedded bullet?
• As usual, "hacking" skill consists mostly of typing speed and the ability to explain the movie's plot to laymen, and everyone in the movie uses custom non-Windows, non-Mac, non-KDE, non-GNOME interfaces with integrated video conferencing.
• I know road rash isn't really photogenic, but I can't get over McClane diving out of a speeding police cruiser and ending up with a pair of small cuts on his brow. Someday, some costume guy from E.R. or House is going to give us realistic-looking injuries on the big screen, but this was not that day.
• An "E-Bomb?" I mean, I understand that flooding the other guy's screen with spam is funny, but surely they had a writer or two on this movie, right?
• No helicopters are available to stake out the computer compound, so they send a fully-armed F-35 over instead to... um... blow things up along the way? What?
• And the heat-seeking, proximity-fused Sidewinder decides to go for a concrete freeway support pylon rather than the chiller on a mobile server farm? Which then causes miles of freeway to collapse? And the pilot then conveniently flies under the collapsing road, the better to catch some concrete with his lift fan? COME ON!

All-in-all, a whole lot of good, clean, completely brainless fun: should be enough guns and cars and explosions in this movie to keep anybody entertained for the duration.

Tags: diehard movie review hacking f35