So, Die Hard 4.0 suggests we are finally in a post-post-9/11 worls. Gone are the days when every action/adventure/disaster movie had to make reference to the fall of the Twin Towers. Len Wiseman's skillful if brainless update of the John McClane story featuring a now 52-year-old Bruce Willis can't quite ignore 9/11 totally, but it can shunt it to the sidelines. The terrorists here are a mostly European but American-led and movitivated by greed and revenge: their leader is, in fact, a security expert whose insistance that America's defence was flawed was ignored. In this, he has more in common with officials who warned about the overloaded levees of New Orleans than CIA or FBI anti-terror agents. As you may have seen in the trailers, Die Hard 4.0 does feature a scene of Congress exploding, but this is immediately followed on screen by McClane telling the powers-that-be "it's a fake". The computer hacker played by director Kevin Smith (I asked Wiseman if this was a nod to his own comic-geek past, but he said no) is not concerned with international terrorists, but with the incursions of Big Government. In Bush's America, the threat is now seen as internal.

A note on a couple of other sequels. Shrek 3 proves the big green ogre has run out of puff. And the clumsily titled 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer manages quite superheroic feat of being even duller than the first Fantastic Four movie. Am I alone in thinking the FF are a fairly lame choice to cull from the Marvel stable? At least two of them have powers that are frankly rubbish, especially Ioan Gruffudd's stretchy Mr Fantastic, who looks on screen alarmingly like a condom. Comic fans (yes, me too, like Kevin Smith and Len Wiseman) must wait and hope that Iron Man with Robert Downey Jr puts a bit of smartness as well as spectacle into costumed heroics.