Free wheeling

It has been more than 10 years since Bruce Willis played John McClane, the tough traditional cop and sand in the gears of dastardly plots by evil geniuses. In the fourth installation of the Die Hard series, Live Free or Die Hard, John McClane is back in action.

This time, he's not fighting a bunch of bad guys who've taken over an airport or a high-rise apartment during an office Christmas party. He is fighting a bunch of bad guys who've hacked into a network of computers.

In this techno-thriller, McClane is ordered to escort a young computer hacker named Matt Farrell (Justin Long) into federal custody. This is where things start to unravel for McClane, Farrell and the entire population of Washington, D.C. A former government agent is using his own computer programs to disrupt the federal grid, wreaking havoc on communications, banking and traffic flow.

Long is very funny as a cynical, sarcastic computer nerd. This time bad guy Timothy Olyphant, as evil genius Thomas Gabriel, read his lines while causing chaos every time they hit "Enter" on their keyboards.

The film also stars action actress Maggie Quigley, better known as Maggie Q, who made her name in the Hong Kong film industry before moving on to Hollywood projects like Rush Hour 2 and Around the World in 80 Days. She had a starring role in Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible III, in which she plays Zhen, a member of Cruise' team of agents who hunt down an arms dealer. Q, born to American and Vietnamese parents, plays a villain in Live Free Or Die Hard.

Director Len Wiseman, confidently stepping up from the smallish budget Underworld films to mega-budget Hollywood mainstream, opens the film crisply, and he effectively escalates the action from the sinister threat of keyboards clicking and data flashing on video screens to guns blazing and buildings blowing up.

The scale of explosions and property damage only increases from there as Olyphant and crew take on the tenacious McClane to get Farrell, a loose end in their cyber-terrorism scheme.

At times, an aging Willis, now 52, appears a little less dexterous than in the three earlier Die Hard films, but he looks unyielding for any action sequence, no matter how unbelievable.

This latest Die Hard film, the first in a dozen years, is probably the best in the series, an invigorating return to the style of blockbuster that dominated summers back in the early 1990s. In those days, when the blockbuster was new, there was an excitement about it as a popular new form. Live Free or Die Hard rediscovers the freshness of this much-abused genre by returning to basics: strong characters, compelling situations and grand-scale action.

Live Free or Die Hard has opened at cinemas citywide.