Dear Bruce Willis,
What happened to you? You used to represent the best in the action hero archetype. The “everyman” who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time; a man who, when the stuff hit the fan, found a way to save people and make us root for you. David Addison be damned, you were John McClane! You were the best of us. And we loved you.
But now…
A Good Day to Die Hard is a terrible film. There, I can save you time in reading this review, because it needs to be said early and often. Take every dumb cliche; every ridiculous action film notion, and then add terrible editing, a horrible script, suspect directing, and a shaky handheld camera and you get the latest (and hopefully last) film in the decades-running Die Hard film franchise.
Bruce Willis reprises his role as John McClane, and this time he is sent to Moscow to…I don’t know what, actually…with his grown son, Jack, who was called John Jr. in the previous films, (now played by Jai Courtney) who has wound up in a Russian jail for murder. John McClane is neither a lawyer, nor a representative of the U.S. Government, but he is going to Moscow to get his son, a son that shot and killed a man, out of jail and bring him home. Seems legit.
It only gets worse from there.
The story of A Good Day to Die Hard revolves around two old-school Soviet Russian terrorists; one, Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch) is now a political prisoner, the other Chagarin (Sergei Kolesnikov), is now the defense minister with eyes on the premiership. Komarov has a secret file that could doom Chagarin, and the defense minister will do anything to stop that file from seeing the light of day.
Now, take that plot and add twenty minute car chases that make zero sense and are so absurd that your brain will literally give up trying to interpret what it is seeing, stupid henchmen who would rather dance in front of the McClanes rather than kill them, as instructed, and an impervious Bruce Willis who can drive a car off a bridge (twice), fall through forty stories of scaffolding and be launched through myriad plates of glass only to come out with nary a scratch.
None of the characters have an ounce of characterization. Most are just stereotypes. Russian cab driver: check. Stupid henchmen: check. Action Movie 101 graduate CIA handler: check. The list keeps on going. There is a hot Russian girl (Yuliya Snigir), who is Komarov’s daughter, but we are never privy to anything other than that. She has a somewhat big role, but we are never told why she is there. Even Jack McClane is given zero backstory. He is CIA, and not very good at his job, apparently, and for some reason, he hates his dad. We, as the audience, are left to piece together why. Heck, very late in the film, a muscularly cut, tattooed, bald behemoth of a man shows up. He is shirtless (in a Russian winter) and oiled up (for no reason), and all he does is pose twice, sneer a bunch, and die with very little fanfare. I half-expected him to whip out a carrot at one point and ask “What’s Up, Doc?”
The climax of the film (which only runs 98 minutes making it the shortest of all Die Hard films) takes place at Chernobyl. A place vacated in 1986 after a nuclear meltdown. It remains to this day uninhabitable, as there are high levels of radiation still present. Luckily, nobody told the Russian gas company, who still pumps fresh natural gas through 30-year-old lines, because maybe one day a situation would arise where an American cop and his CIA son have need of a gas leak so they could get out (unscathed) from a sticky situation. This alone should tell you how absurd this movie is.
Even if one could overlook all of that, if a fan could find some way to come to grips with the fact that this is a Die Hard film and be happy with at least that, Bruce Willis kills it. Willis is done. I’ve seen actors phone performances in, Willis uses a fax machine from the late ’80s. He is uninspired. He doesn’t want to be there (Willis, not McClane) and it shows.
Through the course of the last three films in the series, Willis’ McClane has gone from that everyman hero to a guy collecting a paycheck. And it’s sad. Old John McClane had poignant one-liners that drove the point home. New John McClane speaks only in one-liners and tough guy machismo, and it comes off insipid and hard to watch. This is the past-his-prime prizefighter going nine rounds with the young world champion. I hate seeing what Willis has done to John McClane. The everyman hero is now a cartoon. A smirking, bald, going-through-the-motions cartoon.
If there was one redeeming quality to A Good Day to Die Hard it is in the fact that there are some inspired stunt sequences that, in a better film, would make me buy a bag of popcorn, only to dump it out because the action was so incredible. Director John Moore (Max Payne, Behind Enemy Lines) has proven he can tell a decent story, but he too seemed to just be phoning it in here. Skip Woods’ (The A-Team, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) script has a few good Die-Hard-Quality twists and turns, but the god-awful dialogue, story pacing, and forced father/son stuff is atrocious and uncomfortable to watch.
And speaking of, if A Good Day to Die Hard had a theme, it would be about fathers and sons. Die Hard has always been a summer blockbuster franchise. The fact that 20th Century Fox did not try to open this movie during the busy and lucrative Father’s Day weekend in late June speaks volumes as to how they, the studio, feel about this cinematic turd.
I’m sure that A Good Day to Die Hard will do decent money on the long Holiday opening weekend and find success overseas where it was shot, and it may even give Fox the idea to make another film in the series. I truly hope that it doesn’t happen. This series is over, and A Good Day to Die Hard is the last nail in the coffin. Leave us with the brilliant first two films, and the okay third, and we can just collectively agree that the series ended there. Can’t we?
A Good Day to Die Hard opens nationwide on Thursday, February 14 and is rated R.
