 Tagline: Yippee Ki-Yay Mother Russia Tagline: Like father. Like son. Like hell! Bruce Willis is back in action - mind-blowing, heart-stopping, rip-roaring action - as John McClane, the heroic New York cop with a knack for being in the wrong place at the right time. John's latest predicament takes him all the way to Russia to track down his estranged son, Jack (Jai Courtney), who has been imprisoned in Moscow. But the mission takes a deadly turn as father and son must join forces to thwart a nuclear weapons heist that could trigger World War III! Storyline: Iconoclastic, take-no-prisoners cop John McClane, for the first time, finds himself on foreign soil after traveling to Moscow to help his wayward son Jack - unaware that Jack is really a highly-trained CIA operative out to stop a nuclear weapons heist. With the Russian underworld in pursuit, and battling a countdown to war, the two McClanes discover that their opposing methods make them unstoppable heroes. Written by Guy from Estonia Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Casey Broadwater on June 3, 2013 -- The now 25-year-old Die Hard series has its ongoing staples—expertly staged action sequences, deranged, Euro-sleazy villains, a smirking Bruce Willis dropping one-liners and busting caps—but what has always made the franchise is its distinct personality and tone. You know a Die Hard movie when you see one. They're fun. They're self-deprecating. They're prime summer popcorn blockbusters, precision engineered for thrill-ride momentum, with lots of wry comedy along the way. The problem with A Good Day to Die Hard—the fifth entry, but probably not the last—is that it feels utterly soulless. Most of the staple Die Hard characteristics are here, but the personality is weirdly gone. Director John Moore (Max Payne) has replaced it with a generic action movie vibe, mixing Bourne-esque shaky cam quick cutting and Bond- like international intrigue. And he does neither of these things particularly well. This is the first Die Hard picture that seems more like one of the series' many imitators—Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down, most recently—than the real deal. This is especially disappointing after the franchise was reinvigorated in 2007 with the surprisingly decent Live Free or Die Hard, which set up the promising possibility of a new trilogy just as good as the first three films. Unfortunately, if you replaced Bruce Willis here with, say, Jason Statham or Vin Diesel, you'd have just another run of the mill, B-level action flick with lots of explosions but no heart. The "no heart" shortcoming is doubly odd because A Good Day to Die Hard is meant to be a family affair, with John McClane shooting his way through Mother Russia with his estranged son, Jack (Jack Reacher's Jai Courtney), patching up their relationship between firefights and helicopter showdowns. The two haven't been on speaking terms for years, apparently, but when John hears that his son is in some sort of dire legal trouble in Moscow, he takes the next flight east. This is the first time in the series that we've seen McClane outside of the good old U.S. of A., but the trouble that always seems to follow him clearly doesn't respect international boarders. Unbeknownst to John, Jack is actually a CIA agent who's been working on putting together evidence to prosecute corrupt official Viktor Chagarin (Sergei Kolesnikov). Through a number of machinations too obtuse and confusing to even bother relaying here, Jack has been set-up to testify at the trial of political prisoner Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch), a billionaire in possession of a file that could prove Chagarin—his former business partner—has been into some shady dealings. (Stealing uranium, selling nukes, transporting WMDs—you know, the usual post-Cold War Russian chicanery.) Chagarin's henchmen bomb the courthouse, but Jack escapes with Komarov and inevitably runs into his baffled father, who comes along on what amounts to a tedious, multi-stage fetch-quest to find this incriminating file. As an action movie set-up, this ain't bad. You have the strained father/son dynamic, the fairly unusual Moscow setting—with its Red Menace-y, Cold War holdouts vibe—and, in the hidden file, a MacGuffin that at the very least motivates the characters to get from point A to point B. Where A Good Day to Die Hard goes bad is how it squanders everything compelling about the premise. The dad/son stuff—summed up by competitiveness, mutual wariness, and the "we're not a hugging family" line from the trailer—feels obligatory and underdeveloped. It's less an attempt to explore a previously unseen part of John McClane's personality than it is a means to take some of the burden of carrying the film off of Bruce Willis' tired, too-old- for-this shoulders. Willis just seems sluggish this time around—bored, uninterested—and while Jai Courtney is reasonably believable as McClane's son, his character is really only a foil, with no life or dimension of its own. The same goes for the film's cardboard villains. There are ultimately three of them —each less interesting than the last, revealed through a succession of already-saw-it-coming twists—and collectively, they pale next to the memorable baddies played in the franchise's past by Alan Rickman, William Sadler, and Jeremy Irons. Most of the fault should probably go to writer Skip Woods (The A-Team); not only are his characters dull, but the plot he's created here is simultaneously convoluted and stupidly simple. The story only serves to advance the action, some of which is impressive, but most of which is merely loud. The film blows its wad fifteen minutes in with a sequence that would be the climax of most movies of this type. The explosion at the courthouse sets off an intense car chase on and over Moscow's main thoroughfares—actually, Budapest doubles here for the Russian capital—with McClane in a Mercedes G-Wagen SUV, Jack and Komorov in a van, and the bad guys trucking along behind them in an armored personnel carrier, smashing through cars left and right. At one point, to get where he needs to be, McClane drives off an overpass and four-wheels it on top of the traffic below. It's ridiculous, but it works in a yeah, John McClane could probably pull this off sort of way. Unfortunately, nothing that comes after this even remotely compares. We get a few routine gunfights, and not one but two sequences that end with McClane and son jumping out of a building in slo-mo to avoid being mowed down by a helicopter's machine guns. It's almost like the filmmakers ran out of ideas. Maybe they did. Note: The disc includes both the theatrical cut and an extended version, which makes some minor changes to the beginning and end of the film. Coming after the well-received Live Free or Die Hard, A Good Day to Die Hard is a big disappointment—a soulless mishmash of generic action movie cliches, with the least memorable villains of the entire series and a plot that amounts to a series of MacGuffins. Are there some cool car chase/shoot-em-up sequences? Sure, but they're strung together with little regard for crafting a coherent, suspenseful story. Plus, Bruce Willis looks like he's constantly on the verge of falling asleep. (John McClane is definitely too old for this shit.) Even as a turn-off-your-brain popcorn movie, A Good Day is only nominally entertaining; we expect more from Die Hard. If it's any consolation, 20th Century Fox has put together a fantastic Blu-ray release—with an hour-long making-of documentary, a great audio commentary, and several other featurettes—which may sway some fans to consider a purchase, if only to complete their Die Hard collections. Trivia:
[CSW] -2.4- I loved all of the Die Hard films except this one. The plot was really thin. There wasn't much, or at least the right kind of chemistry between McClane and his son (it was really bad). That and the really thin plot line made this film fall far short of the great Die Hard legacy. [Added before viewing because of low $$$] Cast Notes: Bruce Willis (John McClane), Jai Courtney (Jack McClane), Sebastian Koch (Komarov), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Lucy), Yuliya Snigir (Irina), Rasha Bukvic (Alik), Cole Hauser (Collins), Amaury Nolasco (Murphy), Sergei Kolesnikov (Chagarin [as Sergey Kolesnikov]), Roman Luknár (Anton), Zolee Ganxsta (MRAP Driver [as Ganzsta Doglegy Zolee]), Péter Takátsy (Prosecutor), Pasha D. Lychnikoff (Cabbie), Megalyn Echikunwoke (Pretty Reporter), Melissa Tang (Lucas). IMDb Rating (10/31/12): 6.9/10 from 43,689 users
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