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Live Free or Die Hard had a big challenge. How do you convince people that yet another Die Hard movie with Bruce Willis in it is worth seeing? How do you make a series so closely identified with the action-packed Eighties and Nineties relevant to a tech-savvy, post 9/11 generation? And more important to the people over at 20th Century Fox, how do you manage to reign in Willis’ use of the “s” word, the “f” word and the “m-f” word so that you can get a more marketable PG-13 rating?

The answer was simple— update the franchise for a new generation, mellow the Willis character a little, and by all means deliver on the action. Face it, the die-hards who care about the Die Hard movies want to see action, and this movie delivers in spades.

Once again Bruce Willis reprises his role as New York City cop John McClane, who once again has the familiar family issues with a daughter who is alienated from him ( Mary Elizabeth Winstead ). So McClane has a father-daughter relationship in need of repair. The plot revolves around a bunch of Internet terrorists looking to shut down the United States. These super-cyber-hackers are trying to take out the entire American communications infrastructure one step at a time so that they can open up access to America’s financial records and clean out Americans of all their financial data. Willis hooks up with a young hacker (Justin Long) who had unwittingly helped these villains do all this dirty work, and they head on an expedition to stop the super-hackers. The journey takes them down to Washington, D.C., and eventually throughout the mid-Atlantic region, including West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

There is action. Boy, is there a lot of action. There’s a shoot-em-up at this hacker’s apartment where John McClane almost gets killed. There’s multiple car crashes on the streets and in the tunnels in Washington, D.C. Bruce Willis does battle with a kung fu expert (Maggie Q) in that power plant in West Virginia, and of course the power plant blows up. There’s a scene where McClane is driving a truck that gets blown to bits by a fighter plane and winds up dangling from a broken bridge. We see McClane dangling in mid-air and hanging on to various vehicles for dear life. And lest we forget about this, there are the requisite scenes of people dodging bullets and getting shot. Fun stuff, and I found myself surprisingly entertained from start to finish. The action really carries this movie.

I keep on saying that I am fed up with sequels, that there’s no originality in Hollywood. And there’s not too much originality here, either. I’ve seen the original Die Hard and that was a better movie, a very hard act to live up to. But there is something else here— familiarity. There’s the FBI agent named Johnson again (shades of the original Die Hard), there’s the scene where Willis dangles in an elevator shaft again (ditto), there’s the relationship issue that needs repair. There’s eye-candy again in the movie, particularly from the gorgeous Maggie Q who does battle with Bruce Willis in some entertaining martial-arts scenes. And of course we hae a dangerous and full-of-himself bad guy (Timothy Olyphant) who is once again power-mad and out to show the American government who’s boss.

It’s the new twists on the old formula that make this movie interesting. The advent of new technology and the Internet is used to good effect in the movie, and they add Kevin Smith in a good cameo role as Warlock. This movie does a good job appealing to younger, tech-savvy audiences with these touches.

The one thing that I thought I’d miss the most was the salty R-rated language that this series is known for. They got rid of much of that, concentrating on the action scenes. I don’t know if getting rid of McClane saying the infamous “m-f” word all the time was a good thing or not. Perhaps it was, because it contributes to the feeling that we are seeing a different sort of McClane in this movie. It’s a grizzled and tired McClane we see, someone who is clearly out of it when it comes to modern music and popular culture. The movie has fun with the premise that this guy is still stuck in the Eighties and the world has changed around him. Yet in subtle ways we see that he, too, has changed. McClane clearly isn’t young anymore and in less mood than ever to shoot people up with machine guns, and looking to reconcile with his daughter. This movie shows that. Clearly, you can understand why his days of using the “m-f” word are behind him. Director Len Wiseman and writer Mark Bomback made a wise move by mellowing down McClane just a little bit. Just a little. Because the same guy we saw before is still there with a lot of punch left in him.

Sure, this movie is a little bit lacking in the plot department, but who cares? The bottom line for anyone going to a Die Hard movie is whether the movie hits the mark in the action department. Live Free or Die Hard delivers the goods in terms of blood, car crashes, stunts, and all the good stuff you expect to see out of a good action movie.

If this fourth edition for the Die Hard franchise proves to be the end of the series, it is a fine way to go out. On top. But, like Willis’ character John McClane, this movie franchise certainly is proving to “die hard”.