Review: ‘A Good Day to Die Hard’

This is what we were all afraid of, this is the exact thing that everyone doesn’t want to see happen, yet here it is, it has happened, it is in our face and all we can do is take it because we are all suckers. When people turned out in droves for the summer blockbuster, PG-13 rated and preposterously titled “Live Free or Die Hard,” certain people’s eyes lit up, as they saw they could still squeeze quite a bit of money out everyone’s favorite New York City detective perpetually in the wrong places at the wrong times. So here is some more squeezing, this time an R-rated non-blockbuster but still a new “Die Hard” movie, still featuring an ever-aging Bruce Willis, and still getting worse than ever as a franchise.

It takes a lot to make one yearn for the glory days of “Die Hard 2,” yet here we are, as “A Good Day to Die Hard” has darkened our doorways and threw a mess of a hyper-edited, shaky cam action in our collective faces like so much burning acid. In the latest installment of “Crazy Things Happen to John McClane,” this time we find McClane going out of his way to find trouble. Oh boy. What will he do next? Basically, the movie starts with McClane getting word that his son Jack (Jai Courtney, Jack Reacher) is in a Russian prison, strung up on murder charges, so McClane decides he has to go to Moscow to straighten things out himself.

Actually, that’s not true. The movie does not start with McClane getting this info. The movie starts with about 8 minutes or so of a bunch of people we don’t know setting into motion a plot about multiple groups of people looking for some “file,” along with the nightclub shooting that landed Jack McClane in prison, and the fact that this 97-minute movie took so long to introduce John McClane is indicative of the rest of the movie and how poorly it is made.

First off, how did Bruce Willis read this script and say “Yes, yes, this is it, this is a great Die Hard script,” because the guy has been around the block, he knows what makes a good movie and what doesn’t, and he’s smart enough to know that having a Die Hard movie in which the plot, the driving force of the story, the reason for the whole thing to exist, only tangentially involves John McClane and even then only because the character interjects himself into a situation that he has no business being around in the first place is an absolutely terrible idea. Did they really just make a movie about McClane’s son, who is a CIA agent by the way, a fact given away in all the trailers, and then just have daddy tag along for the ride, being there to screw things up only to turn around and save everyone from the shitstorm he created? Because that’s what they did. This is not a “Die Hard” movie. A legit “Die Hard” movie has not been made since the 90s, and this did not stop this horrible trend.

“Die Hard” is a fantastic movie for many reasons, and one of the central reasons is how great the character of John McClane was and how humanized he was between all the actions scenes. In an era in which the steroid-riddled he-men Schwarzenegger and Stallone were dominating action movies and Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal were playing characters with inordinate martial art abilities, Willis played McClane exactly as he was written, which is to say, a real person. He was well-meaning, sincere, a bit of a lunk, stubborn, we’re introduced to him trying to reconnect with his estranged wife, they get into a fight at her company Christmas party and he’s immediately remorseful, he comes across as a real person. And then BOOM! they put him in an extraordinary situation and he improvises his way out of it and sure it there are the big, dumb, typical “Hollywood” moments in the movie, but we’re talking about an action movie that features it’s hero picking shards of glass out of his feet and crying while asking someone to tell his wife he’s sorry for being a jerk because he’s scared that he’s going to die and hell, he MIGHT die, because at that point he is injured, out manned, out gunned, and out matched, and he manages to save the day anyway (twenty-five year old spoiler alert!), but it’s thrilling because he was taken to the edge, and the whole time reacted like we could imagine ourselves reacting. He got frustrated. He cursed. He made mistakes. McClane wept. He was an actual, fleshed out character in “Die Hard,” which built up enough good will to carry over to “Die Hard 2,” which is just a copy cat movie anyway, and “Die Hard with a Vengeance,” which doesn’t live up to the original obviously but still knew how to use the McClane character and craft a movie around him and his characteristics, giving us more of what we wanted but in a slightly different way (more so than “Die Hard 2” anyway).

We’re just going to skip over how “Live Free or Die Hard” set a precedent for how not to treat this character, because really, “A Good Day to Die Hard” just gets the same things wrong, but in more glaring and horrible ways, so we’ll just focus on this one piece of shit we have here in front of us right now. Remember that McClane who was crying into walkie-talkies and picking glass out of his feet? Well the McClane that is roughly 20-30 years old is now a wise-crackin’ superhero. Within his first fifteen minutes of screentime, he gets into two massive, bone jarring car wrecks and he gets hit and knocked over by a third car, and he walks away from all of it with no problems. This is a movie that features McClane jumping out of a building blind without knowing what’s out there, and then he later jumps in to a different building, only to then jump out of said building. And these superhero traits are now genetic because his son Jack can get a nice steel rod pierced deep into his lower abdomen, and he can just yank it out and walk away and not be bothered by this massive wound again for the rest of the film (which all apparently takes place over the course of one very long, very drawn out, very boring day). The McClanes are no longer real people. They are comic book characters.

Making things worse is the poor action cinematography, in that here is another film in which the filmmakers felt like the best way to convey action is to shake the camera violently and to hyper-cut the images together so that we can’t tell what’s going on. Because that’s what every says they liked so much about the original “Die Hard,” right? Like that shot of him jumping off the exploding rood with a firehose tied to his waist. Everyone loves how that camera was all shaky and kept zooming in and out and kept cross cutting between John’s face and the explosion and the helicopter and the FBI agents’ faces and John’s face and the explosion and more cutting and zooming and shaking. Right? That’s what we all loved?

Or did we love this? A simply shot yet exciting sequence, shown with still cameras that were optimally placed to actually capture the action and make it presentable, making for indelible and striking images.

There were exactly two moments in “A Good Day to Die Hard” in which the on screen action was not the ridiculous shaky cam variety, and one of those two moments was a very CG-heavy shot anyway that probably barely involved real humans in front of a camera. The other moment in the movie, a random shot during the final action scene, is a nicely framed slow-motion shot with a camera that barely moves, no shakes, no quick edits, just a shot in which we can see Jack McClane running across a rooftop while an errant helicopter blade chops up the edge of the building, and it’s a great shot, almost spectacularly so considering all the indecipherable crapola that came before it, but alas this moment lasted about four to five second max, and then back to the shakes and the quakes. So this is incredibly frustrating because this means that director John Moore (Behind Enemy Lines, Max Payne) has an idea of how to actual take the time to present some decent looking action, but stylistically chose to go in the opposite direction and give us a disgusting post-modern action mess. And considering that this movie is essentially three large action sequences strung together by a terrible story, it is not a good thing that the action is so shoddy.

Speaking of said story, it’s just awful. McClane hears that his son is in Russian jail on murder charges. So he flies to Russia to do…what exactly? He just shows up at the courthouse, apparently with no plan whatsoever. And of course he shows up at the courthouse at the same moment his son is taken inside for his trial, which coincides with a much more high profile case (the one that drives this piece of shit plot), and he really is just in time to see a group of people show up, blow up a bunch of cars and then bust into the courthouse to kidnap the other guy on trial. But Jack McClane takes this opportunity to make off with the Russian dude and he’s off to his preplanned rendezvous to get extracted out of the country and oh shit! his dad shows up and he has to literally stop what he’s doing to handle this dad, and then by the time he gets back on the road, he loses the window for extraction and has to stay behind in Russia and stay at a safe house.

Okay so first off, his dad showing up blows everything to shit and ruins the extraction, putting his son’s life in further danger all because John is a dipshit. Secondly, Jack’s plan hinged on a bombing of the courthouse by a third-party, one that he didn’t know would pull off such a bombing? And third, without spoiling too much of this hunk of garbage, a bad guy’s plan only works because Jack McClane misses his extraction, which only happened because John McClane shows up, which absolutely no one knew would be showing up. The plotting and story really are just awful, which you can’t say about the first three “Die Hard” films, which do get more preposterous with each new sequel, but still all keep a semblance of actual coherence, whereas this movie features a story that is a dull, boring, predictable and pointless mess. There are also a bunch of “nods” to the original “Die Hard,” which pisses me off even more because that means John Moore and writer Skip Woods (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Hitman, Swordfish) know that the original film exists, and they may have even seen it, and may even profess to be fans of it, yet neither of them exhibit any signs that they may possibly know why everyone else likes it.

So yeah, how many times does it need to be said? “A Good to Day to Die Hard” is a bad day for all, except I am sure for Mr. Willis’ accountant, as this movie hopefully made it easier for him to balance Bruno’s books.