“A Good Day to Die Hard”

“A Good Day to Die Hard”

By Bob Garver

Lovers of block­busters are usu­ally quick to point out 1988’s “Die Hard” as a per­fect exam­ple of how to cor­rectly do a mod­ern action movie. Sure it has a lot of explo­sions, gun­fire, and cheesy one-liners, but it also has a tight script, atten­tion to visual detail, and char­ac­ters peo­ple either loved or loved to hate. Twenty-five years and four sequels later, it’s time for “A Good Day to Die Hard”. The new film also has a lot of explo­sions, gun­fire, and cheesy one-liners, but the redeem­ing val­ues never arrive.

Once again, Bruce Willis plays New York City cop John McClane. He learns that his estranged son Jack (Jai Court­ney) is in police cus­tody in Rus­sia, so he trav­els there in hopes of help­ing him or at least see­ing him for the first time in years. It turns out that Jack is an under­cover CIA agent in the mid­dle of a dan­ger­ous mis­sion involv­ing a polit­i­cal pris­oner (Sebas­t­ian Koch) and his daugh­ter (Yulia Sni­gir) and their feud with a pow­er­ful, cor­rupt politi­cian (Sergei Kolesnikov). John unwit­tingly inter­feres in the mis­sion, much to Jack’s ini­tial dis­may, but ulti­mately his father’s wis­dom proves to be invaluable.

There are action scenes aplenty. I’m a big fan of the sequences where you lose count of the impos­si­bil­i­ties. My favorite is a car chase in grid­locked traf­fic. With no roads handy, the char­ac­ters come up with some pretty cre­ative sub­sti­tutes. But the action is mostly point­less shoot­ing and explo­sions, much of which is done with uncon­vinc­ing CGI and even more of which is done with ter­ri­bly choppy edit­ing. There should never be this much con­fu­sion as to how well your action hero is doing in a fire­fight. Also, most of the bad guys are essen­tially face­less. The orig­i­nal film saw McClane freak out the bad guys by learn­ing their all names and casu­ally drop­ping them into his threats. Here the only hench­man worth remem­ber­ing is Alik (Radi­voje Bukvic), a West-hating pest who you’ll want to see hurt.

For me, the biggest prob­lem with the film is Jack. The char­ac­ter isn’t inter­est­ing and Jai Court­ney brings zero per­son­al­ity to the role. His chem­istry with the senior McClane is almost nonex­is­tent. I never saw him as any­thing more than an obsta­cle imped­ing Bruce Willis from car­ry­ing this movie like only he can. If the plan is to some­day let Willis retire and hand the fran­chise over to Court­ney, it will be one of the worst deci­sions in the his­tory of sequels.

I feel the need to address the pop­u­lar com­plaint that the film doesn’t have enough to do with the rest of the “Die Hard” series. This is an opin­ion that I do not share. For bet­ter or worse, there is no mis­tak­ing that this is a “Die Hard” film. Bruce Willis plays John McClane, we get a cameo from his previously-established daugh­ter (Mary Eliz­a­beth Win­stead), the vil­lains are sur­pris­ingly greedy, a death recalls a shot from the first film, and McClane gets to say his unprint­able catch­phrase (though he mut­ters it to him­self gra­tu­itously). Are fans expect­ing McClane to take on another mem­ber of the Gru­ber fam­ily? One tacked-on fam­ily mem­ber ruins the film quite enough, thank you.

“A Good Day to Die Hard” is a bla­tant attempt to cash in on the “Die Hard” name and it can’t even do that prop­erly since start­ing the title with a “G” instead of a “D” means that it will for­ever be unable to be linked to the other install­ments alpha­bet­i­cally. Many fans will likely con­sider that a bless­ing in dis­guise. Lovers of block­busters will be quick to point the film out as a per­fect exam­ple of how some fran­chises just don’t know when to quit.

One and a Half Stars out of Five.

“A Good Day to Die Hard” is rated R for vio­lence and lan­guage. Its run­ning time is 97 minutes.

Con­tact Robert Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Feb 18 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.