A Good Day to Die Hard review

                 Apparently it’s a bad day to ‘Die Hard’. There, I did it. I made the obvious pun, and you know what, I don’t feel at all bad about it. I say, if the people responsible for this film are so lazy that they can’t bother to come up with an actually story for their fifth-coming sequel to this beloved American franchise, then I shouldn’t feel too bad about reducing their cynical output into a simplistic blurb. In case you were wondering, I didn’t really care for “A Good Day to Die Hard”.

                In 1988, when the original “Die Hard” was release, Bruce Willis wasn’t seen as a muscle-bound action hero like his contemporaries Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The character of John McClane was relatively normal looking, unsure of himself and he wasn’t invincible, but he got the job done and cracked wise while he did it. It was a refreshing nudge towards realism—or at least relatability— in action cinema and the genre was changed for the better because of it. Now, 25 years later, when this franchise has been so disconnected from its origins, the “Die Hard” brand has morphed into something else altogether. 

                Bruce Willis returns as McClane, who is looking a bit older and is a little bit more embittered with the world at large. When he hears that his son Jack (Jai Courtney) is in some trouble in Moscow Russia, he decides to go down and sort things out himself. Later, he finds out that Jack is actually a CIA operative and by trying to save him from some Russian terrorists he accidentally blows his son’s secret mission. Together they have to try and salvage the assignment and stop a generic missile heist.

                From the first few minutes on, this film thrusts you into the ultra-violence and for the entirety of its running time it barely lets up. Once the momentum of its kinetic destruction starts, almost nothing can get in its way; including character development, ample motivations, or a sense of establishing a clear setting. Did the movie need to be set in Russia? No. Did it have a good reason to include Jack McClane? Not really. Did it have any need to connect with the “Die Hard” series at all? I can’t say that it did.   

                Rather than getting angry at how hollow this experience was, I am more just disappointed by what a wasted opportunity this is for everyone involved. With that said, it’s not that it’s excruciating to sit through, as it is just tediously one-note.  Unlike its 80’s predecessor, it doesn’t test the endurance of its male protagonist by purposely throwing a normal dude into ridiculous situations and seeing how he deals with it. Instead Bruce’s presence is incidental, as this new addition just fetishizes the design of an action set-piece and how tightly it can be edited. Though some of those massive scenes of devastation and demolition are impressively manufactured, in the context of this movie, they serve no real purpose to what little plot there is or raise any interesting stakes for its characters.

                I guess I will give “A Good Day to Die Hard” some props for its tenacity and its energy. However, even as the bass of the house-speakers were rumbling and the screen was blasting forth another shoot out, or a car flipping over, or something else blowing up, in my head I constantly found myself editing my shopping list or preparing my evening, due to how profoundly unengaged I was. Where the first film (and some of its better copycats) drew the audience in through a sneaky sense of humanistic inclusiveness, this film waves it’s arms, barks and squeals so persistently that it unintentionally shuts out the viewer.

Grade: D+  

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2013