New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Len Wiseman.
Cast: Bruce Willis, Timothy Olyphant, Maggie Q, Justin Long, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Description: Still resolutely kickin' it old school, Bruce Willis plays on his age but doesn't skimp on the action in this likably silly popcorn movie. To compensate for his creakiness, there's a hi-tech terror plot to foil, which means McClane is thrown together with a nerdy young hacker, but the thrills are pleasingly retro despite the techno trimmings.
Country: US. 2007. 128mins
A battered 52-year-old Willis is all there is to commend Die Hard 4.0 as a drama
Armageddon out of here: John McClane (Bruce Willis) and his new computer nerd sidekick, played by Justin Long
It's getting upsetting. Is there never going to be a blockbuster rehash that isn't much more than a pale imitation of former glories?
This fourth episode of the Die Hard series, with its plot that seems to have come straight out of Marvel Comics and its preposterous if dynamic action sequences, has only a battered 52-year-old Bruce Willis as John McClane to commend it as a drama. And he's not allowed to do much more than let blood - much of it his own.
As one American critic accurately has it, he's now a superman without a costume.
It has, of course, been 19 long years since the original Die Hard hit us between the eyes, encouraging us to regard Willis as a heroic blue-collar superstar and giving our own Alan Rickman his first chance to prove himself as a pretty convincing white-collar villain.
It's a pity that director Len Wiseman didn't look more closely at John McTiernan's original. Instead, he gives us what so many Hollywood blockbusters do these days: action without much logic to it and a barely credible storyline. But action there certainly is.
This time around, McClane is fighting to save his daughter, Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). He's worried that she's choosing the wrong sort of boyfriend. She's fed up with dreary Dad but learns in the end to be eternally grateful for what he puts himself through to rescue her.
He's now got a partner who's not Samuel L Jackson (as in the third Die Hard), more's the pity, but computer geek and hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long), a young man who looks in permanent need of a shave and a shower. They are fighting Timothy Olyphant's smooth but rather amorphous cyber-terrorist, who is about to unleash Armageddon on the US.
The villain's partner is the most attractive person in the film, the high-kicking kung fu expert Maggie Q. She beats up poor McClane fairly comprehensively.
The action never stops, with car chases, shoot-outs, mighty explosions and a ludicrous battle between McClane in a huge 18-wheeler truck and a fighter plane that can act like a helicopter by stopping in mid-air, armed with rockets that ought to have blasted him to bits in three seconds flat. It's positively maniacal, with McClane's once celebrated one-liners seeming desperately mechanical.
Wiseman orchestrates the whole thing with the élan of a slightly mad master. Because of his skill, Die Hard 4.0 survives as a slightly improbable action movie. But that really wasn't what the first of the series was about. It was about a slobby detective, virtually ignored by his superiors, finding a way past nasties who ought to have eaten him for breakfast, but who proved unequal to his native shrewdness and his tough insistence that might isn't always right.
Willis pulled that off to perfection. Here he suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with commendable fortitude, without being allowed much depth of character at all.
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Absolutely spot on, I though this movie though not completely bad, wasn't a patch on the original. Even McClane's Roy Rodgers catch-phrase is mumbled out due to a gun shot. McClane somehow manages to survive yet clearly he should be nursing broken ribs and dislocated shoulders. One thing is for certain it will make money.
- Al, Glasgow
"a fighter plane that can act like a helicopter by stopping in mid-air"
That would be a Harrier Jump Jet then.
- Nobby Clark, London
Morning:
14°c
