Best movie ever!
OK, maybe not ever.
Maybe the best movie this year … apart from The Last King of Scotland. (Was that this year?)

I was lucky enough to get to go to the ‘Welsh Premiere’ of the film, held at the Odeon Cinema in Cardiff Bay, in aid of Help a South Wales Child, Red Dragon FM’s own charity.
The place wasn’t quite awash with celebrity as was promised, but, it was still able to mingle with the likes of Welsh International (and all round bloody good rugby player) Colin Charvis and the one and only Goldie Lookin’ Chain.

Onto the picture itself, I’m a big fan of the Die Hard franchise, having watched each movie around about 15 times each, perhaps more (I kid you not). I just can’t get enough of them, and I don’t know why. I’m not a particularly macho kind of guy, and I wouldn’t class the action genre as my favourite, but something about Bruce Willis and the frantic heroics he finds himself performing hits a spot for me, and as I’m led to believe, quite a lot of other people.
Perhaps it’s the ‘everyman’ character that he plays? He isn’t ‘the last action hero’ by far.
By the third instalment he is a divorced, borderline alcoholic with a major attidude problem. But despite this, With a Vengeance is my favourite of the first three.

Die Hard 4 starts tamely enough, setting the story up to follow through later in the movie, by introducing John McClane’s daughter, Lucy, who we had already met once, albeit briefly, back in 1988 in Die Hard as a 4 year old.
Then John gets the call, the one he will obviously regret for a long, long time. Of course, he is sent by his commanding officer to the wrong place at the wrong time and gets caught up in a fire fight of epic proportions. The rest, you can kind of figure out yourselves, but it is pretty spectacular.

At no point does this movie drag on, it’s punchy but at times over the top, but what do you expect? If it wasn’t a little OTT, fans would complain about that instead. I firmly believe that Die Hard 4.0 was made as an end to the series. Bruce Willis has said that this is it, that he wants to finish off his run as Detective McClane, and who can blame him?
Since the first Die Hard movie thrust Willis into the big time as a star, he has gone on to act in films of a far higher calibre and show his skills as a truly great actor who is able to adapt to the character in many different scripts.
But as with anything, the initial success will undoubtedly be in the forefront of many peoples minds, especially if sequels are produced and received to acclaim. It becomes almost like the actor is obliged to do another. Willis has said previously that he had been hounded by press and fans, with their first questions to him being about Die Hard and if or when there will be another one.

The plot is enthralling, but also, quite scarily, plausible.
A group of hackers gets into the infrastructure of the American goverment and from there, work their way outwards, wreaking complete havoc and causing chaos.
With complete control over gas, electricity, phones, satellites, traffic lights, television and much more, they have the entire United States in their hands, not knowing which way to turn or what is going to happen next.

How can McClane fight these cyber-terrorists, when we learned a long time ago that he used to not even understand fax machines, I hear you ask? With the help of a sidekick of course. He picks up Matt at the beginning of the movie, during the first shoot-out, of course, Matt is a convicted hacker, with knowledge of pretty much everything. A good guy to have around, considering who McClane is up against.

How has this movie affected the order in which I rank each instalment of the Die Hard series?
Quite significantly, I must say, and I can only imagine becoming fonder of it as time goes by.

My table will now stand as shown below;

1. Die Hard: With a Vengeance
2. Die Hard 4.0 (Live Free or Die Hard)
3. Die Hard
4. Die Hard 2: Die Harder

I would recommend this feature to anybody who even remotely enjoyed any of the other Die Hard movies and fans of Bruce Willis himself, if you want to see him jumping out of moving cars, even at the ripe age of 52. Though it would seem that hasn’t affected his ability to stay sharp and handle a weapon with the greatest of accuracy. 7/10.

Bruce Willis puts in a decent performance and lets Josh Hartnett steal the show.
The storyline in Lucky number Slevin is confusing at parts, but, never the less, a very good concept.

A nice twist befalls the viewer, but a lot of vital plotlines are left unanswered come the credits, almost as if they had another hour of footage that was cut out for some reason or another.

Morgan Freeman is good eye-candy and Ben Kingsley proved once again that he can play a good villan, and not just a skinny bespectacled Indian man.

If you’re expecting a similar movie to ‘Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels‘ or ‘Snatch‘, you’ll be dissapointed, that’s not what it is at all.

What can I say? This movie has been the UK’s No.1 movie in the cinema charts for the last two weeks, but why?

Well, obviously the charts only guage how many people go into the theatre and not those that leave prematurely, which I should have done.

Opportunistic and monotonous are the only ways that I can describe this movie.
The trailer boasts

From two of the seven writers of Scary Movie

We can see why the other five did not want to get involved.
I let off more laughter at the pre-feature trailer for Scary Movie 4 (which, by the way, looks great), than I did through the entirety of Date Movie.

Date Movie was kind of like the Scary Movie series disowned leprosy-ridden little half-brother. Attempts were made to rip the piss out of movies and tv-shows, to little effect. I mean, when we saw Meet the Parents, we understood that the cat was using the toilet on its own, we didn’t need 3 minutes of a feline making diorreah noises on top of the bowl to make us laugh. It was funny originally. Plus, that movie was out 6 years ago, talk about behind the times.

The Michael Jackson gag? Come on. Also, it was done in Scary Movie 3.
He was acquitted, give the guy a break.

The twists and turns, in what little storyline there was, were as bumpy as driving the swiss alps in a Robin Reliant.
Alyson Hannigan, although a talented actress, was clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel when she accepted this role.

0/5 – The lowest possible star rating, and on my first review too. Lets hope I don’t choose too many more stinkers.
IMDB link

Since I seem to be getting through an alarming amount of movies these days, I have decided to create a movies category to review and rate those that deem worthy of my time, and also those that I wasted 80 minutes of my life on.

I’ve decided to go with the star system. Yes, original, I know.

That would be a 1 star rating. Which, yes, you guessed it, isn’t very good.
You can expect movies like ‘Down with love‘ to have lifelong membership in that club.

And that, is 5 stars. The Die Hard trilogy has automatic membership to that club.

But, you’re all intelligent enough to work this out for yourselves.
Stay tuned for the reviews to come sliding out in the next week or so…