When a movie form achieves lasting popularity, it eventually becomes rather baroque, pursuing increasingly bizarre concepts and events in order to bring a little orignality to the overworked format. That has happened with action movies in recent years, as filmmakers have moved into grotesquely weird comic-book concepts and ludicrously impossible action sequences. In such a situation, a little classicism can be a very good thing, as it distinguishes a film by differing it from its increasingly mannered competition, and also foregrounds what people really liked about the genre in the first place. Live Free or Die Hard is a great example of that process, and a superb representative of the action melodrama form. Bruce Willis is the centerpiece of the film, of course, as NYC police Detective Lt. John McClane, who finds himself in Washington, D.C. sheperding a person wanted for questioning by the FBI, when the nation’s entire communications, transportation, and power grids shut down in the wake of an attack by terrorists (or so it would seem….).
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