A <em>Die Hard</em> for the Bush Era

Since Reagan's second term, Hollywood has responded to each administration with a Die Hard movie. And now at last we have the George W. installment. Bruce Willis, as the indefatigable NYC cop John McClane, this time saves (spoiler alert) the entire country from collapse by foiling a takeover of the national computer network. In a New York Times piece, Caryn James opines that Live Free or Die Hard "expertly captures a current fear: What if we're disconnected from our information overload?" She says, "The loss of our information fix ... hits a very raw nerve. It evokes the disoriented feeling from April when all the BlackBerrys went out."

Uh, no. I didn't get a "disoriented feeling" when all the BlackBerrys went out, because I don't have a BlackBerry and never will, and Live Free or Die Hard didn't scare me because it tapped into some deep-seated fear of losing my Internet connection. It scared me because it gave a glimpse of an America in which pandemonium rules. Between kick-ass action beats, when McClane and his young hacker sidekick make their way to a D.C. police station after all the traffic lights and phones have gone out, and the stock market has collapsed and every city's transportation system has shut down, we get a brief, slo-mo sense of what true chaos feels like -- it's post-Katrina New Orleans on a national scale.

Even scarier, the government is totally unprepared. ("It took FEMA five days to get water to the Superdome," the hacker reminds us.) That's what makes this George W.'s Die Hard: it's explicitly Homeland Security's incompetence and indifference that make the nation so defenseless. In fact, the terrorist mastermind is a former government security expert who wants to prove the network's vulnerability. So, naturally, a bald, fifty-something Luddite cop is America's only hope. But if Bruce Willis won't come to our rescue in real life, who will?