Live Free or Die Hard
January 2008 Reviewed by: Doug Blackburn Format: Blu-ray	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Whoa! John McClane is back with a vengeance -- err, they made that one already. Well, he's back, and did they ever make a doozey of an action flick. Live Free or Die Hard just catapulted itself onto my Top 10 Action Movies list. There's little waste and no fat on this one. It barely gives you time to absorb one action-packed sequence before another starts setting itself up. The bad guy is a royally pissed-off former government data-security expert who seems to have an international cast of bad-guy friends and an unlimited budget for helicopters, semis, computer hardware, satcom gear, and machine guns. McClane's NYPD persona is thrust into the story when he saves a hapless hacker from death by exploding PC virus.

Image quality is stunning in every way, except there's a surprising amount of film grain visible, especially when you use pause or still-frame mode to confirm what you think you are seeing. You can see far more grain than I would expect from a top-tier production. There are occasional white dust specks, but they are few and far between, indicating a very clean transfer print. Detail and color are exemplary throughout with the exception of a few CGI additions here and there that seem a little low in resolution compared to everything else. But don't let these nits put you off this demo-quality disc, it really looks great and makes a heck of a system demo disc. I detected no compression artifacts in the MPEG-4/AVC transfer, even when using stop-frame mode to look carefully in trouble-prone sequences like explosions and smoke.

Audio quality is remarkable, even though I wasn't able to hear the best the disc has to offer. The best audio track is DTS-HD Master Audio, but I have no Blu-ray player that will decode the full soundtrack or send it to my processor for decoding. So I was stuck listening to the core DTS soundtrack that is embedded within the DTS-HD MA track. The DTS track only has 1/10th or less the amount of data in the full DTS-HD MA track, but it sounds so good it's hard to believe it's not an uncompressed or lossless audio track. Music is especially well recorded with a wealth of natural-sounding orchestral instruments. But the sound-effects track is also exemplary and has some interesting, though not overpowering LFE activity. I have to rate the DTS core a 4.5, knowing that the lossless DTS-HD MA track will unlock even more detail and transparency for the lucky few who have players or processors that will decode it.

The extras lineup: a nuts-and-bolts commentary track with Bruce Willis, director Len Wiseman, and editor Nicolas De Toth; a simple maze shooting game that operates as poorly as any game on disc I've ever examined; a series of featurettes on the Die Hard franchise, cast and characters, sets, stunts and action sequences, editing, digital intermediate process, sound editing, and the music soundtrack; a fairly long front-porch talk with Kevin Smith sort of interviewing Bruce Willis; a music video; a trailer; and a Fox Movie Channel short feature on the Die Hard movies. I found the digital intermediate and sound featurettes more interesting than the others, but overall, the extras are fairly interesting and worth watching. Most are 16:9 and in standard definition.

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