The first ten minutes have now been released in low-quality, buffery WMV on the website of Yahoo! Japan, and it looks like it’s got about as accurate a take on the power of a group of computer blackhats as Hackers and The Net, and with worse technobabble. This is 2007, for crying out loud…
It doesn’t just look worse than Die Hard with a Vengeance, it looks worse than Speed 2. It looks to be about on the same level as Firewall. That’s not good.
Of course, we can’t judge the full movie on the first ten minutes, but this doesn’t look hopeful at all; and it’s a shame, because I think Bruce and John McClane deserve better than Len Wiseman, a PG-13 rating and a computer-hacker plotline that was outdated when Mitnick got arrested. Nice work, guys.
[via Film Ick.]
F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E 
I’ll judge it after I’ve seen the final product.
Snarky internet criticism has gone too far when an entire movie is dismissed off-hand because the first couple minutes sucked.
It’s not as if anyone enjoys ANY Die Hard movie for the concise scripting. This is a franchise built on “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker”.
I’ve always thought that the first one especially is a very clever movie in its construction – it cares about character development, for example, which most Die Hard ripoffs completely forget about (even the scumbag news reporter gets a couple of character scenes). I’ll probably end up seeing the film anyway (thank you Cineworld Unlimited Card).
Die Hard may well be a franchise based on that one-liner, but as we know DH4 has got a PG-13 it’s not going to have very much of that at all – ‘motherfucker’ is, I think, an automatic ‘R’ (and an automatic ’15’ over here), although as Pirates 3 proves you can get away with rather a lot of violence at PG-13 nowadays. At the very least the direction doesn’t look too unwatchable from the clip, though, so here’s hoping it’s just an unrepresentative sample.
These first 10-minute things are always worrying because usually the film companies put them out when they’re the best ten minutes – as happened with the Dawn of the Dead remake, ISTR the first one to do it. (Fox recently did it with 28 Weeks Later, however, so this may not apply all the time.) Technically speaking this may not be the first ten minutes, either – there’s a bunch of CLIP flashes and sudden blackouts in this – so there’s that to consider.
I think I’m just burned out with disappointing multiple sequels right now – X-Men 3, Spiderman 3, Shrek 3 (what do these have in common?). And the trailer for DH4.0, which I’ve seen in front of a number of films recently, gives away everything and really isn’t appetising. I do hope Bourne Ultimatum doesn’t suck, though, at least it’s the same people as Supremacy doing that.