That would've worked as the title. What was an honestly quite worthy PG-13 action flick with laughs, shit blowing up, and John McClane still couldn't escape the fact that it's PG-13. No matter how cool an action sequence is or how funny a line comes off, one can't help but imagine the R-rated version in this case, seeing as how it's a sequel to three other R-rated movies that have put us in a certain mode by now.
 
Not to take away from their efforts too much. The action is good, most of the dialogue is fun (even if accidentally here and there), and it doesn't ever get plain old boring. This time around, McClane (Tobey Maguire... no, wait, Bruce Willis) is assigned to deliver a hacker kid (Justin Long) who's wanted by the feds to Washington DC, as a "firesale" (systematic takedown of the whole country via computer information) is beginning to screw up schedules. Cliff Curtis (no, you shouldn't know that name just yet, I just wanted to sound like I knew my actors for a second) shows up to be the FBI guy who believes in McClane and yells at the other government flunkies for him.

The evil computer hacker (wow, that still sounds lame after all these years of trying to make them look like real bad guys, huh?) is played by Timothy Olyphant, who, while unparalleled as a comedic bad guy in "The Girl Next Door," doesn't quite fit here.

Or, is it just his lame-ass computer hacker bad guy that we're sick of already? I don't know, and won't pretend to, he just sucked. He's a great actor, but really is more like the Jim Carrey of all villains, and "Batman Forever" was forgotten long ago.

Anyway, yeah. His character is Thomas Gabriel, a pissed-off ex-government hacker who ran security and got his life screwed up after they decided to blame him for the faulty measures that led to ol' 9/11. I know this, because it's explained, even justified by him in the inevitable monologue he gives near the end about why he thinks he's the good guy here. To be fair though, come to think of it, his dialogue really was pretty lame for the most part -- I'll bet Olyphant could've worked here and brought a lot more to the table if they'd given him lines not much like "Let's keep them chasing their tails" and told him "try it a few different ways, not just like you're the most evil, evil computer guy in the whole world."

Short version, he (Olyphant ) tries to screw up the whole country and take all the money (although one does wonder where in the world you'd go to hide after publicly stealing all the money from the most powerful nation on the planet -- maybe they'll do "Die Hard With Kickass Aliens on Saturn" next), McClane gets in the way through good old fashioned shooting, he kidnaps McClane's sassy daughter, McClane has to go and save her. The outcome? It's PG-13, take a wild guess when "Yippie Ki Yay, Motherf*****" gets blurted out.
 
Even then, at a pretty cool climax in concept, one has to miss what would've been a so much cooler R-rated version. This is "Die Hard Dumbed Down." No innocents die except people in crashed cars who we don't see and some security guards, who no one ever cares about because they're security guards and should've known better than to be a security guard in an action movie. There's a chase scene near the end with McClane avoiding a fighter plane shooting missles that's just plain ridiculous -- our cue to go "Oooh... Aaaah... the computer graphics action sequence."
 
Saving graces keep it worth calling a worthy sequel though, as, while it does take place a while after "Die Hard," it's not begging to win our approval as much as "Die Hard With a Vengeance," where we actually had to meet the real bad guy's brother who's come back to get some. Bruce Willis and Maggie Q's fight is a genuine John McClane moment for the books, as are a couple other snippets that remind us this is a much better action flick than most other PG-13 plates of crap, namely everything The Rock (our new action hero... riiiight) has done.
 
(three bongs, four if you're in a good mood before you spark)