Lets get it straight from the outset, this is a boy's film, and boy's love it when a production hires good character actors, gives them some big ass guns and has them picked off one by one, starting with the worst actor to the best. There is enough in this film to keep the fan boys at bay, and a great deal of homage to John Mc Tiernan's original to prop the film up high. Kudos's goes to the writing team for understanding that drab exposition can kill an actioner like this, and it is delivered in a way that keeps the pace going and allows another well known character actor to have a piece of cameo pie. There are obvious tokens in the film, that smells a little of studios fear that a wide release film must be politically correct on all matters gender and ethnicity, but it works well in the story and adds some multi cultural flavour as the characters battle their camouflaged foe. The effects are great and mostly practical, leaving the carton style CGI found in most medium budget monster movies in the dust. All in all the film is a hoot, it loses a couple of stars for overall innovation but fits nicely in the originals universe (or some other universe ;-) very well.
