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This Film On

• Internet Movie Database (IMDB)
• Rotten Tomatoes

A Good Day to Die Hard

(2013)

98 min. 20th Century Fox. Director: John Moore. Cast: Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Rasha Bukvic, Cole Hauser.

True story: A Good Day to Die Hard did worldwide box office amounting to upwards of $304 million. Like most movies, it made a major cash grab in its opening weekend, then steadily declined, but obviously hope springs eternal for Die Hard fans—despite all evidence to the contrary. Cassandra-like, reviewers were ignored in their warnings. For those, like me, who found the fourth entry a disspiriting mediocrity unworthy of its predecessors, Die Hard was already all but dead when the fifth film came around. Catching up with it on home video is to understand that Die Hard is dead, reanimated only as a rotting zombie shade of its former self. Die Hard director John McTiernan languishes in jail (yes, literally: look it up), while director John Moore freely commits the atrocity of A Good Day to Die Hard? Is there no justice?

So this time, John McClane (Bruce Willis) flies to Russia to try to get his son Jack (the charisma-free Jai Courtney) out of trouble—specifically, standing trial for his apparent involvement in an assassination. So, actually, Jack is an undercover CIA agent tasked with securing a secret file in the possession of co-defendant Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch). So when corrupt Russian official Viktor Chagarin (Sergei Kolesnikov) bombs the courthouse, John is there to get in the way of his son's plans and those of the bad guys. Oh, yes, there will be father-son bonding. It's a "very special episode" of Die Hard. Except that it isn't. The first third of the movie is little more than a bit of foreplay and one big clanging car chase, prefiguring the movie's disinterest in its own plot. That the chase—and, indeed, the entire movie—is poorly shot and edited does no one any favors; the action geography is unclear, and worse, there's no motivation to try to follow what's going on, as the characters are anonymous action figures or, at best, assholes.

And therein is the rub of A Good Day to Die Hard. Setting aside its utter narrative indifference, dull ineptitude, numbing lack of wit and creativity, and generic and lazy style (all CGI and sickly green, yellow, and blue filtering), this movie manages to turn McClane from a mouthy hero into a mouthy asshole. Maybe he was always an asshole, but he was our asshole. Here, he just acts like a jerk: getting in the way, piling macho horseshit on his son, and acting condescending at best and xenophobic at worst to every Russian he meets. "Do you think I understand a word you're saying?!" he hollers at one (to be fair, there's only one good Russian in the movie, so one might say screenwriter Skip Woods is the real asshat). Once blithely acceptable as American id, McClane's become the archetypal American idiot. On its own merits, the movie sucks, but as a sequel, it's a tragic comedown. And no amount of lame callbacks to the original film ("Yipee-ki-yay..." or "When's it not about money?") can mask the stench of failure.

A plot twist here, a plot twist there (none of them surprising or of any import), endless machine-gunning and explosions, waves of stupid dialogue ("We need this file!"), and you get off the ride nauseous. Woods and Moore wouldn't know a funny joke if it exploded in their face (their best effort hasn't been funny in at least a decade: the old cliché of an elevator that's piping in "The Girl from Ipanema," indifferent to the supposedly high-stakes circumstances). The only gag the movie comes close to making work is the subtext of blowing up Russia—and, specifically, in the climactic stretch, Chernobyl—being like a game of catch for this meathead father and son. More than once, McClane tells John McClane Jr. "Attaboy." There might have been some amusing social satire in the notion, but instead, Moore plays it for tough-guy heart. Swing and a miss.

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