FOLLOWING in the footsteps of Sylvester Stallone’s revival of Rocky, Bruce Willis’ wisecracking, buttkicking Detective John McClane returns to chase terrorists, after a 12-year absence, with the solidly crowdpleasing “Live Free or Die Hard.”

Like the latest Stallone fi lm, this is not so much a reboot as a sort of greatest-hits selection that homes in on the original concept of the character - in this case, a no-nonsense cop who, through sheer brawn, specializes in outwitting bad guys much smarter than he - and plunks him down in the post-9/11 world.

McClane is busy roughing up a boyfriend of his angry daughter, Lucy (Mary Ellen Winstead), a Princeton coed, when he gets a 2 a.m. call ordering him to corral a computer hacker and deliver him to the feds in Washington.

Our hero not only fi nds Matt the hacker (Justin Long) but also saves him fromA snipers and a downloaded virus that somehow turns his computer into an explosive device.

By the time they get to D.C., the nation’s ca pital is in the midst of the July 4 weekend and a cybermeltdown.

Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant), a rogue security expert who formerly worked for the Department of Homeland

Security, has begun using his extraordinary hacking skills to disable the nation’s transportation, financial and utility systems.

Matt is the only survivor among a group of hackers who unwittingly designed Gabriel’s programs, so Gabriel tries to trap Matt and McClane in the ultimate kind of gridlock - in a tunnel where cars head at them from both directions.

It’s not giving away much to report that not only does McClane survive but that his driving skills are such that he can catapult a police cruiser over a toll booth to down a pursuing helicopter - a stunt that inspired applause and cheers at Friday night’s premiere at Radio City Music Hall.

The feds are so freaked out that they turn to McClane and Matt to stop the chaos after Gabriel interrupts TV programming with a montage of every president since FDR delivering a threat to bring the country to its knees.

The montage is about the only original thing in “Live Free or Die Hard,” which returns to the elevator shafts of the fi rst “Die Hard.” This time, it’s in a West Virginia power plant, where McClane goes hand to hand with Gabriel’s minions, led by Raffaelli (Hong Kong action star Maggie Q).

Mostly, the fl ick relies on old-school stunt work rather than computergenerated effects. There was considerably less audience response to a CGI-heavy, “Mission: Impossible”-style sequence in which McClane suspends the laws of physics and jumps from a stationary truck onto a passing plane.

Nor is there a memorable villain here like Alan Rickman’s in the original. Gabriel’s motives are murky at best, and he’s way too well dressed for a computer geek. Kevin Smith, who has an amusing cameo as a hacker who lives in his mother’s basement, seems closer to the truth. But none of that stops “Live Free or Die Hard,” energetically directed by Len Wiseman (“Underworld”), from being a lot of fun and one of the season’s better sequels.

And that’s largely a testament to Willis, who at 52 looks great in an intensely physical role and can still spit out wisecracks and insults with the best of them - even if the PG-13 rating (the three earlier versions were rated R) allows him to utter his favorite 12-letter-word only once.