By Leigh Forgie
Bruce Willis returns as John McClane, the smart-mouthed New York City cop who moonlights as a human target in this fifth instalment of the action packed Die Hard series.
After learning that his long lost son has been arrested in Moscow for murder, John McClane boards the first plane to Russia in the hopes he can intervene before Junior is sentenced to life in prison, or perhaps worse. However, upon arriving, he learns that the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree and Junior is in fact part of a CIA operation to extract Russian political prisoner Yuri Komarov, who has information that could potentially destroy a high-ranking corrupt Russian official.
It doesn’t take long before the McClanes find themselves wrapped up in an international incident of explosive proportions as the pair fend off squads of Russian hitmen in an attempt to get Yuri out of the country alive.
The plot is wafer thin and even feels rather out of date, holding on to the last remnants of Cold War tension between the U.S. and Russia. At one point during the film, McClane Junior tells dear old daddy that his plan is to simply “wing it,” a phrase that just so happens to sum up how the film’s writers must have approached the storyline.
Amidst what little story there is, the film is strung together with a series of action heavy set pieces that seem more focused on upping the ante of the previous films than being entertaining.
Part of what made the original Die Hard trilogy so memorable was the dirty tactics employed by both the bad guys and the special effects team to make the action sequences so memorable. Anyone expecting the shock value of Die Hard with a Vengeance’s opening explosion, or the glass-shattering grit of the first movie will probably find themselves bored by A Good Day to Die Hard’s mess of a car chase scene, or the heavy use of CGI in the film’s final confrontation.
As much as todays popcorn-munching cinema going public have a soft spot for seeing all of their favourite eighties action heroes being pulled out of retirement, John McClane isn’t the cowboy he used to be. The character has been stripped of his trademark wit that made McClane such a likeable protagonist in the first place, despite there being plenty of opportunities for “fish-out-of-water” humour or friendly banter with his equally tough estranged son.
Similarly, the film opts for rather generic plot twists instead of fleshing out its villains. Whilst the Gruber family have been escalated to cult status as much as John McClane himself, the bad guys in this film are forgettable and lack the personality that made their predecessors so enjoyable to watch.
A Good Day to Die Hard is a film that is torn. On the one hand it so desperately wants to join the ranks of modern Euro-thrillers such as Bourne, Bond and Taken. On the other, it’s trying to re-inject life into an iconic action film series. Sadly it fails to do either and ends up feeling like a run-of-the-mill American action movie, with little style and absolutely no substance. Yipee-Ki-Nay.
Directed by John Moore and starring Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch and Mary-Elizabeth Winstead.
