Live Free or Die Hard
Bruce Willis is fantastic, although based on the trailers, I had to ask the question, “When did John McClane become a supercop?” But in the movie, what happens to him is very plausible within the Die Hard motif – wrong place, wrong time.
Justin Long is very funny and very heroic.
Kevin Smith is priceless as teh king of all internets hackorz.
While ranting and railing against the PG-13 rating, I have to agree that the one “Yippee-Kay-Ay-Motherf*cker” was well placed and that the action and violence was about equal to the R ratings of the other Die Hard films. Which leads me to ponder what has happened to the MPAA’s rating system? Did violence just get more acceptable?
Directed by Len Wiseman! Yay Underworld! And he’s married to Kate Beckinsale. The guy’s got it all…SO not fair 😉
There was a section in the middle of the movie (right after the bad guys blow up the power plant to try to kill Willis and Long) where Long was out of sync. It was like the continuity guy was on union break or something and made me really sad.
Yeah for the free running super bad guy! He echoed the super blonde from the first Die Hard and I was disappointed at his quick death in the end. Also the romance between the head bad guy (yay for Timmy Oiliphant) and his 2nd in command echoed the third Die Hard. Yay for nostalgia!
Tim Russ as a Homeland Security liason. Yay Tuvok!
29*4 = 116 stunt people. Yowzers!
Transformers
This movie was enjoyable mostly because I love the concept. I never read the original comic books or watched the original cartoon series. The only exposure I had to the concept was the CGI animated series Beast Wars, which had the main characters of Optimus Prime and Megatron, but beyond that were about robots who changed into animals duking it out. But the concept is lots of fun and I really enjoyed the movie’s execution of it. The plot nicely incorporated core elements of the Transformers while also putting its own modern twist on it which I thoroughly enjoyed.
That being said, the movie does tend to drag on a little bit. If I had my druthers, I would cut or severely limit Anthony Anderson and John Turturro’s roles and snip Sam (Shia LeBouf)’s parents here and there. Action movies tend to drag past the two hour mark (this’un clocks in at 2 hours and 24 minutes when it could easily be an hour 45).
I think the town they call Mission City, Nevada was used (at least in part) in the filming of Michael Bay’s last film, The Island. I distinctly recognize the ground floor of the building that Shia runs into during the battle royale from the part where Ewan McGregor shoots himself.
All in all, very enjoyable popcorn flick. Not the greatest movie of all time, but not a tragic slaughtering of Transformers (of course, pure blood transformer fanboys are MORE than welcome to challenge me on that) as predicted by Penny Arcade.