Now Die Hard 4.0 is not a classic or a masterpiece in any sense of the word. It is not the kind of movie that you would put on your list of “movies to watch before I kick the bucket or someone kicks it for me”.
I knew right from the beginning that the movie was going to be a thriller, a more or less mindless set of brilliant action sequences held together loosely by a plot of some sort. Armed with such minimalist expectations, it was hard to be unhappy with whatever it was that I saw.
With a litre of Tropicana Apricot Twirl and three INR 5 bags of Lays Chips that I got free with them, and with headphones on so as not to disturb the rest of the family, I sat down at 0130 AM to watch the movie, and two hours later as I am waiting for sleep and LJing about this, I figured out that the movie wasn’t all that bad, really.
The movie is based on John Carlin’s article for Wired magazine, titled “A Farewell to Arms” (there is also a Hemmingway play by the same name, I think) and the article heralds the digital winds of change sweeping the ways of the world as we know it. (Blame the winds of change part on the Scorpions concert hangover!)
Although dismissed as a truckload of bullshit by some people, I thought this movie with all its sequences, including an occupant of a chopper being evicted unceremoniously by water from a fire-hydrant gushing upwards, some brilliant car crash sequences in a tunnel and some other sequences involving an F35 and a hugeass truck really was value for money (INR 30 for the rented DVD).
Maybe it is necessary to have doomsday prophets as these that assist in keeping well oiled the mental machinery of those whose job it is to serve and protect the masses, and Hollywood script writers are cashing in on the sensationalism aspects that go hand in hand with large scale natural or human-induced calamities.
One must confess however, that doomsday prophecies make for some entertaining viewing.
Maybe I liked the movie much better because I saw it right after the family sat and watched “Om Shanti Om”. On asking Monkee, who had seen the movie recently about who had starred in the movie (having been, I profess, ignorant to a significant extent about this movie), our man said – “You tell me the names of Bollywood stars that you know, and I will tell you which of them are NOT in the movie!”.
Although he usually has a penchant for exaggeration with regard to trivial matters such as these, I found out during the course of the movie that the statement made was not unwarranted, given the thousands of cameo appearances that the who’s who of Bollywood made in the movie, specially in one of the songs.
The long weekend means that the movie watching binge has still not come to an end.
