A Good Day to Die Hard

 

The Die Hard film franchise turns 25 this year, and to celebrate, we have been given A Good Day to Die Hard, a movie that pretty much stomps on everything that has made the series endure for so long.  Gone are the days when its hero, John McClane (once again played by Bruce Willis), came across as an everyman dropped in an impossible situation.  Now he walks through mindless action sequences like a generic Terminator clone, blasting away everything that moves, while the movie tries its hardest to deaden our emotions by blasting noise on its soundtrack.  What a letdown this is.

The filmmakers behind this one, the fifth entry in the series, have carefully removed the one aspect that made the films so enjoyable - John McClane was vulnerable in the past.  Remember how he struggled to make his way across a floor covered with broken glass in the original movie?  Well, it seems that age has somehow strengthened McClane, so that in this movie, he can drop multiple stories through numerous plate glass windows, without suffering so much as a scratch.  It saddens me to say, John McClane has essentially become a cartoon.  Much like the classic Looney Tunes characters, he can seemingly get blown up or tossed from a moving vehicle, and simply stand up and brush himself off.  The human element behind the character is gone.  Yeah, so he still gets off a couple funny one liners once in a while.  Great, so he's a sarcastic robot now.  This is a soulless, loud, and overly generic entry.  No wonder the studio decided to bury this one in the middle of February, when all the previous films were placed as big summer movie events.

Even the plot itself is entirely standard, and holds little interest.  It revolves around John's adult son, Jack (Jai Courtney), who is working as a CIA agent in Russia.  He has now been arrested for murder and is awaiting trial.  Hearing this, John decides to fly to Moscow to be with his son, and hopefully reconnect, as the two have not spoken in years.  Before John can even get to the courthouse, it is blown up in what appears to be a terrorist plot.  The target of the villains is Komarov (Sebastian Koch), a political prisoner who has a disc filled with inside information that could damage some very powerful people.  Jack manages to escape with Komarov during the chaos, and not long after fleeing from the courthouse, they run into John.  Now he's involved, and the remainder of the film is built around a number of particularly mindless action sequences, while John and Jack have some very lame father and son banter that is this movie's idea of character development.

As the events unfolded, I felt that there was a curious lack of menace.  I was trying to figure out why, and then it hit me - A Good Day to Die Hard does not have a strong, central villain character, like Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber in the original.  Here, McClane and his son mostly fight against faceless thugs who hide behind machine guns at all times.  There is no menace, because there is no real physical threat.  Our heroes are mainly going up against hired goons.  There is a reveal of a main villain in the third act, but by then, it is far too late.  We don't care by that point, and the reveal isn't special enough to make us wait that long.  You know, with all the "retro" action films that have hit the box office lately (The Last Stand, Bullet to the Head), it's odd that the latest Die Hard plays it so modern.  Instead of relying on what made the earlier movies work, this one concentrates on shaky-cam action, and villains who act like targets in a video game.  If ever there was a movie that should have been reaching into the past for inspiration, it's this one.

But then, action movies have not exactly been drawing in the big business lately.  The previously mentioned The Last Stand and Bullet to the Head came and left theaters fairly quickly.  There was also Parker, the latest Jason Statham vehicle - that one was a blink and you missed it, too.  Are audiences not in the mood for these kind of films, or is it just the lack of quality? (Although, to be fair, I did enjoy The Last Stand.) I predict that this movie will do better than the ones that have been released so far this year, but it will fall short in comparison to past Die Hard entries.  It just does not pay respect to the series.  Yeah, it's fun to see Bruce Willis back in the role that made him a big screen star, and he still has what it takes.  The problem is, it's not enough.  This movie is just very generic.  This series has always been about spectacle, and there's very little of that on display here.  Yes, the movie is competently made for the most part, but we expect more with this series.  It never delivers, and it never reaches for the heights of its predecessors.

 

Will this end the series?  I honestly don't know.  There have been worse sequels that made enough money to carry on their respective franchises.  What I do know is that there is just nothing special about this one.  It takes a classic name and a classic character, and slaps them onto an uninspired action script, with some unsuccessful bonding scenes between the two male leads that drag things to a halt regularly.  Should there be another movie, let's hope it brings a little bit of humanity and vulnerability back to John McClane.

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