John McClane (Bruce Willis) is having another in a long line of bad days. His daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who won't even take his last name as her own, won't speak to him and he is sent in the middle of the night to pick up a hacker, Matt Farrell (Justin Long), by the FBI. Someone hacked the FBI mainframe and now they are pulling in every one who could have done it. John just happens to be the only senior detective to be in range of Matt.

Things go from bad to worse when Thugs show up to kill off Farrell who was inadvertently involved in some conspiracy to take out all electronic systems from defence to financial. The crazy mastermind behind this Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) is none to pleased with McClane and Farrell escaping and so much violence, car chases, and crashes ensue.

To detail any more of the plot would spoil what little there is, suffice to say that this is not a film that needs an over abundance of brain power to appreciate. If anything the reverse is true. It's not clever so it makes up for it by having really big explosions as often as possible.

This is a formula that works reasonably well. In some way the template for the whole series, looking past their technobabble anyone with even the remotest of knowledge can see that is all copied out of an internet for beginners book (pop up edition) on global cybercrime.

The cast is pretty good, Willis does the standard thing he does and is very good at it, he doesn't yet look too old for this sort of thing. This isn't like Harrison Ford levels of escaped from a nursing home action hero. Justin Long does a slightly more reserved performance than some of his usual stuff and works reasonably well as foil for Willis's macho gun battling I'll kill a helicopter with a car just because I'm out of bullets McClane.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead has only a few lines but she acts in the manner you might expect from someone who is the daughter of someone like John McClane.

Timothy Olyphant is a pretty good bad guy, he's not English which is of course a big handicap for a bad guy in a die hard movie. One and Three were really good partly, nay mostly, because they had quality English bad guys. No one even remembers two which had William Sadler as the bad guy, who despite being a very good actor in things like Shawshank is not English. Anyway Olyphant plays the ruthless evil bad guy with style and aplomb mostly not affected by McClane's ceaseless attempts to foil his plans.

All in all this is exactly what I was expecting from another Die Hard film, it's loud and not very clever it makes up for it with loads of outrageous action. If you like action films you really can't go wrong with this.

Ah, another Die Hard film. I really like this series of films (although no. 2 was not nearly as good as the others). I really wanted this one to be as good as the rest.

The good news is that it is good. As Matt (and Tycho) say, if you've ever used the internet (which given you're reading this is likely) you will need to suspend disbeleif and just let the random technical terms flow past you. Focus instead on the action.

The action is well done, pushing believeability a fair bit in places, but not too far. There are sections with the general feel of the first film (plenty of in-building stuff) and sections that feel like the third, frantically moving round a city against the odds.

There are a few good nods to the previous films, done in a suitably suttle manner that you might miss them first time through.

Having someone for McClane to talk to and interact with is essential in these films, and I think this is what was missing from no. 2. In 1 its Al, the cop on the outside. In 3 its Zeus. Farrell does well in this as he's in the centre of the action, and relatively useless at the things that McClane does well.

Overall, I don't think it was quite as good as either the classic first or the frantic third film, but it was comfortably better than the second

In my opinion, this makes it a pretty damn good film.