"A Good Day to Die Hard,” the fifth movie in the prophetically titled series, is not the crushing disappointment it would have been had it been “Die Hard 2.” That’s not because it’s a good movie, but because it’s the latest in a series that has, with each installment, delivered diminished thrills and reduced expectations. Going in, I wasn’t expecting much, and that’s what I got – not much.
Do not mistake my lack of vile for “Die Hard 5” to mean I accept it for what it is, and consider the occasional money shot worth the price of admission. Far from it. Rather, to give the movie the “Die Hard” moniker, and to call the character Bruce Willis plays John McClane, is to sully the name of one of the best action films ever made.
The original “Die Hard,” released 25 years ago, remains a perfectly polished gem of a movie. Willis was at his best playing a character with the vulnerable everyman quality of a Chicago cop and the physicality needed to bring down a gang of terrorists. The script was clever and funny in equal measure, and tightly written. Alan Rickman had all but given up on acting before landing the role as villain Hans Gruber, and what a loss that would have been. His performance as the heartless and calculating Gruber is one of the big screen’s all-time best. Moreover, the direction by John McTiernan was spot on. They could make a dozen “Die Hard” sequels, and never recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle brilliance of the first movie.
But they could at least try.
In “A Good Day,” it doesn’t feel like anyone is trying, especially the guy who wrote the script, which is riddled with poor logic. The set up: McClane learns Russian authorities have arrested his son in Moscow and charged him with murder. A fellow cop hands him the arrest report, which is in Russian, and McClane reads it on the plane to Moscow. Never mind how that piece of paper came to be in Chicago, or that McClane doesn’t understand Russian – there’s a plot to be advanced!
Once on foreign soil, it’s clear McClane doesn’t know what to do next, unless taking a taxi to the courthouse where his son is being tried and looking like a lost tourist is part of a well-laid plan. Fortunately for him, all hell breaks loose while he’s standing around, and his son and another prisoner escape.
The chase that follows is so poorly conceived, a film professor could use it as an example of how NOT to shoot an action sequence. There’s no sense of geography, you can’t tell where one vehicle is in relation to another, Willis shouts at people who aren’t there, jarring cuts in the action make it appear as though the director forgot to shoot certain shots, and there’s an over-the-top quality to the stunts, like a bad superhero movie.
How do you think the Russian police would respond if a real life McClane drove a truck over the tops of dozens of cars stuck in a traffic jam, risking the lives of the drivers inside of them? Or if any American, for that matter, started hijacking cars on a busy Moscow street? Willis even pummels an innocent driver at one point, steals his vehicle, and then yells at the man for speaking Russian.
Appalling.
“A Good Day” gets worse from there. For starters, the villains are boring and lack motive. Worse, of the three bad guys, there’s no clear boss. One wants to become a powerful government man, but another has a file that could damage his reputation, so blah blah blah, and then everyone is at Chernobyl, and…
And what? I’d lost interest by that point.
I’d even stopped paying attention to the stunts, although I was watching closely enough to roll my eyes when a helicopter pumped a Chernobyl structure full of white-hot slugs and McClane ran through the barrage, untouched.
I also caught the terrible one-liners Willis was given to say.
The one thing that worked, and only barely, was the bonding of father and son. They start out having not spoken to each other for seven years, but end up on better terms.
Plans for a sixth “Die Hard” movie are being laid. My advice: Wait until McTiernan gets out of jail for making false statements to the FBI in a wiretapping case and tap him to direct, bring back the original screenwriter, and give Willis a building, a reason to be there, and a clearly cut villain to stop. It won’t be lightning in a bottle, but it will at least recapture some of the magic that made the original a classic.
Rated R for violence and language. One-and-a-half stars out of four.