It’s been 19 years since New York Detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) dropped bad guy Hans Gruber out a window, 12 since he blew up a chopper carrying his brother Simon on the way to Canada. In that time the hard-boiled cop has gotten older, a little crankier and certainly even more protective of his estranged family, especially daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), but none of that has made him someone you’d want to pick a fight with.

Just ask cyberterrorist Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant). All he wants to do is shutdown the country to prove a point as to how vulnerable the cybernetic infrastructure of the United States is after 9/11, maybe steal a few billion dollars while he’s at it. All he needed done was for his men to squash a lowly hacker named Matt Farrell (Justin Long). But no, the feds have asked McClane to bring the guy to D.C. Now, thanks to a few misplaced bullets, Gabriel and his cronies have a seriously pissed off analog fly stuck right in the middle of their digital plan, and the fact he’s there is really starting to drive him mad.

Yippee-ki-yay, mother… well, you know.

I’m not really sure the world really needed Live Free or Die Hard. Like any child of the past twenty years, I’m just as much a fan of the Die Hard trilogy as anyone else. Heck, John McTiernan’s 1988 original is as close to the perfect action film as you are ever going to find, the picture working so beautifully everyone and their sister, whether they be a filmmaker or not, have stolen at least something from that bullet-riddled classic. But really, a fourth adventure? Now? Goodness gracious why?

Oh well. Just because you don’t ask for a sequel doesn’t mean Hollywood is going to take that silence as a reason not to proceed. Why else do you think we ended up with Be Cool or this August’s Rush Hour 3? Thankfully, this fourth entry in the crackerjack series proves to be as blissfully entertaining an adrenaline rush as we’ve seen in ages, its low tech thrills and spills far more exhilarating than those found in the CGI heavy Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean:At World's End and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer all combined.

Don’t get me wrong. This is nothing more than a nonsensical 130-minute comic book, director Len Wiseman (Underworld and Underworld: Evolution) keeping the foot squarely on the gas pedal and the common sense totally to a minimum. Bodies fly through the air, get pounded by cars, leap from crumbling freeways, get hurtled like confetti and sprint down building ledges like raindrops only get off the ground, dust themselves off and continue fighting like nothing ever happened. It’s silly and absurd, and for those having trouble suspending their disbelief entering the theater to watch this is probably as horribly awful an idea as you’ve had this year.

Too bad for them because, for the rest of us, this fourth Die Hard is a hoot. Sure a lot of it feels cribbed together from other movies. Bits of True Lies here, dabs of Enemy of the State there, globs of The Italian Job just about everywhere, great big helpings of 24 filling just about every single pour, but that doesn’t make the film any less entertaining. This has got to be one of the most frantically exhilarating films I’m likely to see this entire summer, and even if I know better I’d be lying out my patootie if I even remotely tried to admit otherwise.

Now in his fifties, Willis proves to be as game and as willing to take a pounding as he’s ever been. It goes without saying that, like Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones and Sean Connery (sorry Daniel Craig) is James Bond, the actor will always be synonymous with John McClane. This is his signature character, the man he was born to play, and as such it is as close to as harmonious a joy as any I’ve had this summer to see him back up on the cinema screen hunting bad guys once again.

Listen, I’m not about to say I needed this movie, but now that I’ve gotten to see it I’m perfectly happy to know it’s out there. For two-plus hours I was happily whisked away into the land of Die Hard, content in the knowledge our working class superhero McClane was saving the day as if the past two decades hadn’t happened. That’s more than enough for me, and I’ll certainly live free in the knowledge this cinematic everyman still had one more ecstatically exhilarating adventure left in him. Yippee-ki-yay indeed.

Film Rating:  êêê  (out of 4)