By Geno McGahee
One of my favorite films of all time is DIE HARD. I actually consider it more than a film. It was an event. It was a different sort of action film where the star, John McClane (Bruce Willis), was a normal guy going above and beyond to save the day. He was far from unbeatable but used his wits and guts to overcome huge odds. DIE HARD 2: DIE HARDER was the follow up and that was almost as good. Instead of a high rise, we had an airport and McClane stirred up a lot of shit there too. It was worthy of the DIE HARD name.
The series began to lose it with DIE HARD: WITH A VENGEANCE, the third entry in the series. This time, McClane is teamed up with Samuel L. Jackson, and the duo has to do a bunch of mini games in order to figure out the terrorist plot and stop the bad guys. This movie was pretty shitty in comparison to the first two. It looked like the magic was gone, but where there’s a will, there’s a way, and where there’s money to be made, there are sequels to create and that’s when we saw LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD, a full 12 years after the third one. This fourth entry was a relative pleasant surprise. I had planned to watch complete shit but it turned out to be a fun film that overcame the very low expectations.
DIE HARD 5: A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD didn’t have a lot of buildup. There wasn’t much expected on the studio’s part with this…I don’t think. Willis resumes his role as John McClane and hears that his son, Jack (Jai Courtney), is in trouble and he’s in Russia. McClane asks “prison or morgue” and his buddy says “worse.” It was sort of strange. What’s worse than the morgue? Perhaps he was a religious man and believed that Jack was burning for an eternity in hell and that would make sense.
McClane goes to Russia and things begin to blow up and there are car chases and then things blow up again and then we get another chase…30 minutes gone. If you are a dummy and just like watching things blow up, this 30 minutes will give you wood.
Jack isn’t happy to see his dad and won’t even call him that. He is in the CIA and is transporting a Russian guy that has a file. What kind of file? What super important stuff does the file contain? It doesn’t matter and the movie drives that point home by never telling the audience what the file is. Just calling it “the file” sounds so cool.
The film goes into high gear…more chases, more explosions…more of nothing. I wonder if the screenwriter just wrote “car chases” and “explosions” and they ran with it. This film is just about the visual portion. It’s not here to make you think or make you walk away saying that you learned something. This is most certainly not a DIE HARD movie either, but amazingly, it was written as a DIE HARD movie. This film was written with the purpose of being DIE HARD 5…amazing.
Outside of the script and the meaningless action sequences, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, problems of the movie is Bruce Willis. He plays the role with a smirk the entire time and obviously did not want to do this movie. His heart was not in it and it became more and more obvious with the little bit of dialogue that he was given.
His son plays his role without any emotion either. So you have two monotone and dull characters and a whole lot of action. This is really too bad. McClane is known for his wit and fun factor and that is absent here. Willis had signs of not caring in the fourth entry of this series and a lot of his recent work shows that he’s not doing this for the love of the art anymore. He should hang them up and stop making DIE HARD movies. DIE HARD is bigger than any one man and we should not let Willis or anyone else take a dump on the series.
A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD is garbage. It’s got some of that “so bad it’s good” in it, but if you were to watch the series from start to finish, you would wonder what happened to the character of John McClane and what happened to the good writing, and why the fuck is McClane smirking all the time?!!! I’m sorry. I’m a die hard DIE HARD fan and this movie is a disgrace!
Rating: 3/10 – Stop smirking you fucking prick.
