Monotonous and uninspired, A Good Day to Die Hard relies far too much on audiences’ love of Bruce Willis’ always irreverent, seemingly-indestructible John McClane, and puts far too little effort into telling an engaging story or making any of the other characters in the film even remotely interesting or memorable. Gunplay, stunts, and re-hashed visuals from previous Die Hard films abound in this fifth entry in the series, but there’s no tension or suspense holding any of it together. It’s just a big, loud, dumb mess that will leave you waiting for Willis to say “Yippee Ky-Yay M—– F—–!” so that you can say you at least saw that part before leaving early to spare your eyes and ears any more pain.
Twenty-five years after he saved his wife and a bunch of other hostages from a group of European terrorists-turned-thieves, former detective John McClane is still a crack shot with a gun, he’s still a wise-ass, and he’s still having trouble being an attentive husband and a father. In other words, he’s pretty much the same guy, just with a lot less hair on his head. Only one of his two kids, his daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, reprising her role from Live Free or Die Hard), is even speaking to him these days. The other kid, John Jr. (Jai Courtney) is apparently a screw-up who’s just gotten himself arrested for shooting someone in a nightclub in Russia.
Yes, you read that correctly: Russia. You see, it couldn’t just be trouble like a DUI arrest or getting in a bar fight and needing bail money. No, this is John McClane’s kid, so the trouble he gets into that Daddy has to bail him out of has to be something truly daunting.
So McClane gets it into his head to fly to Russia and see what he can do to help his prodigal son. Only it turns out that John Jr, or Jack as he prefers to be called, isn’t a screw-up at all, or even in any real trouble. Turns out instead that he’s a CIA operative trying to help extract from Russia a political prisoner (Sebastian Koch) who has an incriminating file on corrupt officials poised to take over the leadership of the country.
As you might expect, McClane’s attempts at “helping” Jack immediately muck up the operation, and the rest of the movie is more or less the two McClanes getting on the same page and re-bonding as they team up to survive a few double-crosses, kill all the bad guys, and save the day. Yippee Ky-Yay.
Unlike the last Die Hard sequel, which at least had the benefit of veteran action movie director Len Wiseman (Underworld, Total Recall) at the helm to keep some sort of balance between action and dialogue, the team behind A Good Day to Die Hard seem wholly uninterested in anything resembling characterization or drama beyond building up the body count. The script by Skip Woods (The A-Team, Swordfish) just keeps McClane and Son running, jumping, and shooting their way from Moscow all the way to Chernobyl (yup, they went there), either chasing or being chased by armored cars and helicopter gunships at every turn. Director John Moore (Max Payne, Behind Enemy Lines) shoots everything through a filter of grey that’s easy for us Americans to imagine colors life in cold, ex-communist Russia, and makes sure that just about every frame of film that doesn’t feature an explosion or a stunt has John McClane’s signature smirk front and center, because he knows what his real audience draw here is. The result of this unholy collaboration between bullets-over-brains film auteurs? Exactly what you might expect: a loud, light on logic and heavy on set pieces mess of a movie.
Now, someone more forgiving of the film might argue that these men were, in fact, trying to make an action film in the 80’s style, which of course favored carnage over coherence. But if that’s your argument for defending A Good Day to Die Hard, remember one thing: the reason why the original Die Hard was such a success was that it was a departure from that very sort of brawny, brainless action film schlock. It was compelling and suspenseful because it was well-conceived and well-executed by cast, director, and crew and it was the antithesis of the films that Willis’ action hero contemporaries, Stallone and Schwarzenegger, were churning out at a feverish pace at that time, movies like Rambo: First Blood Part II and Commando. Yes, those are movies action film aficionados love, but they love them in part because they’re dumb. People who love Die Hard, on the other hand, love it because it was smart.
So there’s real irony in the possibility that this sort of mindless, generic cinematic dud could (and should) be the final entry in a series that started off with something so well put together. It’s a bad joke, but clearly it’s a joke that was over both the writer and director’s heads.
It shouldn’t have been over Bruce Willis’ head, though, because we know he’s capable of much better.
Score: 1.5 out of 5
Another Day to Die Hard
Starring Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Rasha Bukvic, Cole Hauser. Directed by John Moore.
Running Time: 97 minutes
Rated R for violence and language.