Contested Sequel: It's either another fun installment or the point where the franchise became too over-the-top.
Critical Backlash: On release, the film was badly received by fans of the series, due to its neutered violence and improbable action scenes. Many years later, some fans started to comment Live Free doesn't deserve that much of a bad rap, especially because its unrated cut restored strong language and violence. This sentiment only grew stronger after the critical failure of A Good Day to Die Hard, which led some fans to regard this film as the true last Die Hard installment.
Critical Dissonance: Critics loved this film when it came out, and it has a respectable 82% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Fan tend to rank it much lower.
Fan-Preferred Couple: While John McClane had his tumultuous marriage to Holly in previous movies and Matthew Farrell has his budding romance with Lucy in this one, fans expressed far more interest in McClane and Farrell getting together due to the movie being centered around their dynamic and Bruce Willis and Justin Long having good chemistry too. Most of the fanfiction about the film series as a whole is John/Matt.
The villain's apparent motivation for messing with America's computer infrastructure is to teach them a lesson for ignoring him about the threats cyberterrorist can pose. In Real Life, Dr. Bruce Edward Ivins was suspected to have caused the 2001 Anthrax attacks for this same reason.
Watching any of the scenes between John and Warlock is a lot of more awkward after all of the stories about how Bruce Willis abused Kevin Smith during production of Cop Out.
Magnificent Bitch: Mai Linh is a computer and combative expert and Thomas Gabriel's girlfriend, who contrasts her dramatic lover by constantly keeping a cool head. She assists Gabriel by helping to oversee the other hackers working on their team and freelancing other hackers for outside help, then taking the outsiders out with a virus that makes their computers explode. She shares in Gabriel's plan to launch a Fire Sale to shut the power down in the country and prove the system is vulnerable, while also digitally stealing money to get rich off the ordeal too. Upon discovering McClane's involvement and his protecting Matthew Farrell, Mai redirects their Federal escort into a direct ambush and skillfully overtakes the guards at the facility needed for the mission with extreme ease before engaging McClane.
Strawman Has a Point: Gabriel did try to warn the government who hired him that their security was woefully inadequate... It still doesn't stop him from exploiting those weaknesses to get rich and kill people (and not in that particular order).
