Ah, the summer blockbuster. Given that I was only 2 when Jaws came out, I never knew a world without it. The concept has morphed over the years and lately, with fierce competition for those precious summer dollars, it has become almost a caricature of itself. Big budgets, special effects and heavy action are supposed to draw us into the seats for an experience that can’t be replicated on our small screens. Unfortunately, of course, this has too often also meant a persistent recycling of old ideas, a neglect of story and character, and a pandering to the lowest common denominator as the films strive to appeal to the widest moviegoing audience as possible. Reading film reviews, there is typically a noticeable change in tone from a lot of these folks, many of whom have long since grown cynical about the whole summer tone to movie-going.
And so we turn to Live Free or Die Hard, the latest attempt to resurrect an old franchise. The first in the series, Die Hard, generally makes my short list for the best action films ever made. It combined a tight premise and clean “rules,” something that is vital for this genre, with great action and solid acting, particularly from Alan Rickman, who gave us one of the most delightfully vicious villains in film history. After that, the franchise failed to live up to its predecessor. The second was OK, though a shadow of the first. The third was better, but still less than the first. The challenge for both of those films was their need to get broader. In the first film, Bruce Willis gave us John McClane, a New York City cop that gets caught up in a terrorist attack on an office building. Part of the film’s strength was the boundaries of the building, forcing all the action to take place in tight quarters that imposed real limits on where the characters could go and what they could do. In the later films, the work got bigger, with John saving an airport in the second, and the entire city of New York in the third. As it got bigger, the franchise lost the hold that made the first film so exceptional, and the films became simply ordinary.
With that history in mind, I entered Live Free with some trepidation. In it, John McClane, still a New York City cop, is ordered to go pick up a known computer hacker as a favor for the Feds. As he is doing so, the apartment is attacked by assassins, who are set on killing the hacker. John rescues him, leaving him is as the only survivor of a simultaneous effort that killed a number of hackers. This is but one part of a larger mystery, as we see these same villains begin to infiltrate computers around the country, taking control of traffic signals in D.C. only to cause simultaneous accidents around the city, then infiltrating the stock exchange only to create a panic in the marketplace.
The film does a great job of drawing us into the emerging chaos that comes as the villains reveal their intentions. What we learn is that they are about attempting a “fire sale,” a simultaneous attack on every computer system of merit in the country, causing the entire nation to come to a grinding halt. The notion of a fire sale lies in hacker myth, but now we are seeing it unfold in reality. Of course, it’s up to John McClane to figure out how to stop it.
As I said, the franchise has kept building up the premises. It’s pretty far-fetched, but does a capable job of selling it to us. McClane is served up as an old-school fossil, an aging cop that doesn’t understand the high-tech world. The hacker, ably played by the goofy Justin Long, provides the comic contrast as well as the know-how that helps navigate the technological aspects of the battle. McClane fights to keep him alive, take out whatever bad guys he encounters, and eventually, to rescue his own daughter from the clutches of the henchman.
Live Free will have to compete with a lot of high-budget action movies this summer, but if it’s a big explosive few hours you want, you’ll do a lot worse than to check this one out. As an action piece, it certainly is the best of the franchise since the first. The villain, played by Timothy Olyphant, is no Alan Rickman, but the premise is just so broad, that it is amusing to see how they can pull it together and resolve it.
As a side note, the movie presents an interesting commentary on the ratings system. In an effort to get the adolescent movie dollars, they set out to make this the first PG-13 rated film in the franchise. They thus had to play with McClane’s signature line (“Yippee-ki-yay, mother_____”) but still pulled off an incredibly intense action experience. We’re OK with our kids being unsupervised and see government buildings and power plants blow up, helicopters and planes shot down, and a body count that was at least in the dozens, but can’t expose them to a single word referring to a sex act that unfortunately is pretty ordinary language of the street. Interesting.
Leaving the movie, I mused about the possible political commentary that lies underneath the film. Bruce Willis long carried the reputation as being one of the four Republicans in the movie business. He recently tried to distance himself from that reputation. This film involves a villain who, in his overzealous attempts to protect the country from itself brings the nation to the brink of disaster. Of course, while he is overzealously protecting the country, he also made sure he could make a tidy profit for himself and his own. Intended of not, thoughts of Halliburton and Guantanamo Bay danced in my head for awhile.
McClane is a quintessential American action hero. He is fearless and daring, inventive and bold. He is able to accomplish what the bureaucracy of the federal law enforcement, always mocked in this franchise, can’t accomplish because he is the only one that combines common sense with his heroic strength. As enjoyable as he is to watch, what interests me is how ordinary his picture of heroism is for us.
Whether its McClane, Jack Bauer, or Indiana Jones (coming next May), our heroes have a particular look and represent a value system that we are immersed in within our culture. That is all well and good, until we turn from our culture to other pictures of heroism. I think particularly of the Hebrew writer and his depiction of faithfulness in Hebrews 11. Within that story, heroism is entirely absent, but instead that which is worthy of admiration is faithfulness. In the seductive challenge to build up a story of faith, and a picture of a savior, that is so often in our own image, it is worth asking how much our pictures of heroism will alter, even corrupt, our images of faith, and particularly our image of our Savior. Left unchecked, this temptation suggests a spiritual cost that may be higher than rising ticket prices and overpriced popcorn.
Friday, July 6, 2007
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