Live Free or Die Hard - B-

In theaters. Rated PG-13, 130 minutes.

Had I known this was directed by Len Wiseman, helmer of one of my top 5 worst movies of all time (1998's Godzilla), I never would have seen this in the first place. The fourth installment of the Die Hard franchise, this film is a good summer blockbuster: lots of explosions and cool gunplay, witty sidekick banter, and an aging but spry baby boomer saving the day.

The plot begins with John McClane (Bruce Willis) being asked to pick up a hacker named Matthew (Justin Long - the 'cool' guy from the IMac commercials), who turns out to be an unwitting participant in a techo-armageddon. Said techno-armageddon has been engineered by Thomas Gabriel (the always cool Timothy Olyphant) in response to being ignored by the government when he warned them that the entire US economy was vulnerable to cyber-terrorists. McLane and Matthew track down the bad guys and save McClane's daughter, with much fanfare.

The interactions between Willis and Long are genuinely funny, with Long playing the jaded young guy impatient with Willis for his decidely untechnical ways and with Willis playing the wiser and more old-school badass.

I have mentioned before that I am not a plausibility wet-blanket on films, especially Die Hard, but about 4/5 of the way through it got a little ridiculous. Willis ends up sparring with a fighter jet while driving a semi on a double-decker freeway, ultimately jumping from the burning semi onto the tail of the spinning out of control jet, and then hop onto the broken highway. It was too much, even for Die Hard. Absent that scene and the dumb FBI storyline, this would've probably been a B or B+.

Viewer note: Thanks so much to the idiot baby boomer guy behind me who explained the movie to his wife as if he had also ramped a police car up a tollbooth to take out a helicopter.