LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD

This fourth outing for NYPD cop John McClane is a lot better than it has any right to be, given that it came out twelve years after the previous instalment, and that by 2007 Bruce Willis was into his fifties.

Since we're now in the twenty-first century the plot concerns a massive cyberattack on the US, and would you believe it, it's down to McClane more-or-less singlehandedly to save the day (again)?

But given that McClane knows diddlysquat about IT he needs the help of a young nerdy hacker, Matt, to do the clever stuff whilst John gets to do the action.  Matt is played by Justin Long (an actor new to me) and there's a nice chemistry between them amid the predictable comedic moments arising from their disparate ages and life experiences.

I also appreciated that the series of action stunts which become ever more extreme, culminating in McClane in a truck battling with a jet fighter, have a minimum of CGI, so that there's a nice practical feel to them.

McClane's daughter Lucy gets dragged into proceedings which gives the climactic scenes some emotional heft, and it was nice to see father and daughter in a much better place relationship-wise by the end than they were at the outset.