Runtime: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Rating: R
Director: John Moore
Quick Impressions:
Now that I’ve seen the fifth installment in the Die Hard series, I can’t wait for the next one. In fact, I have a great idea for the title—Die Hard 5.
(My original idea was Die Hard 6: Die Hard 5 Was All a Dream, but that will only remind people of A Good Day to Die Hard’s existence. I really think the most sensible course is to deny the whole debacle and keep going. Sad really. As John McClane’s nightmarish fantasy about bonding with his son, the movie might have worked. All parties involved with this disaster probably would have fared better if the studio had renamed the film Inception 2 and given Joseph Gordon-Levitt a cameo.)
I’ll be kind.
Despite the wide appeal of the franchise, A Good Day to Die Hard is not for everyone. I’m not saying that it’s not for anyone. From where I sit, it ought to be Justin Long’s favorite movie. I know I spent practically the entire runtime thinking vaguely in the back of my mind, The movie with Justin Long was so much better! How often does that happen? They should have called this sequel A Good Day for Justin Long.
Not such a good day for Die Hard fans, though. People who aren’t Justin Long won’t find much to like here. Don’t worry, Bruce Willis is going to be okay, but I do have to wonder what he and the rest of the people behind this disaster were thinking. Watching the movie, you get the idea that the pitch went something like, “What if this time around, McClane is trying to save the one relative who hasn’t been a focus yet—his son? And this time, they’re in Russia!” Then they never developed it any further than that. They were just so eager to get started that they threw Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Sebastian Koch into a truck and immediately started shooting the movie on someone’s smart phone while they drove around in circles, firing machine guns, shouting incoherently, and running over people.
There’s no point in sugar coating this. The movie is terrible and tragic in its baffling wretchedness. Next time around—and, please God, let there be a next time because the franchise cannot end like this!—John McClane should take down the people responsible for A Good Day to Die Hard. If I see a worse movie this year, I sure hope Bruce Willis isn’t the star again. (I probably should skip the next G.I. Joe.)
Statements like these may not seem all that kind, but trust me, I’m being kind to people considering paying money to see this movie. If you despise Bruce Willis and spit on his McClane legacy, then go for it. With distance, the movie is a brilliant comedy. If, however, like me you’re a Die Hard fan, then please save yourself the price of admission and the heartache. A Good Day to Die Hard will only confuse and depress you (unless you’re a struggling filmmaker yourself. Then seeing this might be just the shot in the arm of encouragement that you’ve been needing).
The Good:
Well, the name of the movie is A Good Day to Die Hard. Can’t deny that. It’s right there in the title.
Best Scene:
The Rolling Stones sing in the end credits. When I asked my husband, “Is that the Rolling Stones?”, I thought, I’m probably wrong. I know nothing about music. But sure enough—seeing Mick Jagger and Keith Richards pop up at the bottom of the credits was the most satisfying part of the whole experience for me.
Okay, maybe that is a little too harsh.
I also liked the moment when John McClane remarked to his son, “It’s been a pretty good day.” They should have kept just that exchange and scrapped the entire rest of the movie. I’m serious.
While I’m on a roll admitting to positive stuff, though, I will say that Bruce Willis was just fine as John McClane, and Jai Courtney was well cast as his son. The two have good chemistry, and they look enough alike to make the relationship believable. In fact, the entire cast turned in performances that were perfectly adequate.
As I watched, I found myself wanting to rewrite the movie. I could see the potential. It was a decent concept (the most basic father-son-Die Hard element, I mean) dragged down by possibly the worst screenplay ever and execution so appalling that it made the awful writing seem passable.
I kept thinking, Why? Don’t they know that even if it’s a little tired, Die Hard will still sell tickets as a summer blockbuster if you give it a big enough budget and the creative supervision to ensure that it’s done right? How did this happen? Who let this happen?
But the father-son dynamic was pretty good (not the horribly written, heavy-handed lines about being father and son, but just the chemistry the actors had when onscreen together).
Best Scene Visually:
I wasn’t entirely kidding about the smart phone thing. Seriously, did they shoot this on somebody’s phone? Was Bruce Willis doing the camera work himself, just sticking one arm out as far as he could and trying not to act like he was holding a phone out of frame?
I’ve shot better work, and you can quickly confirm on YouTube that the quality of my videos is appalling.
Why are you going to take the movie to an exotic foreign location (which was a mistake in the first place, by the way) and then make the whole thing dark, grainy, shaky and claustrophobic? Seriously, it’s like Speed 2 meets The Blair Witch Project meets Bruce Willis takes his own picture on a camera phone in the dark.
I’m not all that visually oriented. Mediocre cinematography usually doesn’t even register with me as long as the story is strong. This movie made me want to gouge my eyes out and vomit. Actually, it inspired me to buy a plane ticket and fly to Russia just so I could get a proper look at the place. Mark my words, next time around, real Russians will attack John McClane just because of how poorly this movie represented their beautiful country. (They could actually make a movie like that. Get Steven Soderbergh to do it, and have Julia Roberts do a cameo where she meets up with John McClane who is pretending to be Bruce Willis. Yes, some critics complained about that Tess-pretends-to-be-Julia-Roberts thing ruining Oceans Twelve, but trust me, A Good Day to Die Hard can only be improved.)
Funniest Scene:
If you take a step back, pretty much all the scenes are unintentionally funny. While I was watching, that honestly made me want to cry, but later, when I was describing the movie to my mother, I have to admit, I enjoyed myself.
My favorite part is the bit with the radiation suits—when what’s-her-name announces that it’s okay to take them off now.
But when you’re talking about what you’ve just seen (instead of seeing it), trust me, you’re going to notice that not one element of this movie actually makes any kind of sense. Forget plot holes, the whole plot is a giant pit of quicksand. And if you’re one of the people who thinks that Zero Dark Thirty makes the CIA look bad, then wow, you’re in for a rare treat here. The CIA made a statement against Kathryn Bigelow’s film. I’m not going to risk telling you what they should do to Bruce Willis. (Sure, logically, they should blame director John Moore, but Bruce Willis is the face of the franchise.)
Best Action Sequence:
The early chase scene on the Russian roadways is so funny and disorienting. Here’s the first thing this Die Hard movie does wrong. Unlike most other installments, it doesn’t begin by presenting this story to us from the point of view of John McClane. We need deep point of view to make what happens next work. (Even that, really, might not do it in this case.) But in this movie John McClane comes across as a total lunatic recklessly endangering everyone in his path for no apparent reason.
Also, at the end, as the helicopter is crashing into the building, the two McClanes leap into the air, and Bruce Willis gives the pilot the finger as he’s falling through the chaos. Then the camera cuts away and comes back to show the pair of them still falling at about the same point in the air, but with their bodies oriented completely differently. It’s pretty great stuff.
The Negatives:
I have to think that the CIA is not run by a bunch of incompetent nitwits. Come on now. John McClane never would have found his son (courtesy of a friend in the police force). But okay, let’s pretend he did find him. He never would have made it to Russia in time to cause problems. Maybe his flight would have been delayed. Maybe they would have detained him at the airport. But you can’t tell me that nobody was aware that he might be a problem. I mean, they all seem to recognize him on sight. Everybody sees him and starts yelling out, “Oh no! John McClane!” “The cowboy!” “Yipee-Ki-Yay!” He’s not a magician. He doesn’t have a teleporter. He can’t just appear places without attracting any attention.
And then, Jack wasn’t estranged from his mother and sister, right? Just his dad. (That deadbeat! All that guy ever does is repeatedly save his mother’s and sister’s lives! What a loser! Who wants to have a relationship with him?) Why did Jack not have some plausible explanation in place for where he was? Why would his mother have been looking for him?
The whole premise is just dumb. Throughout the movie, Bruce Willis keeps saying, “I’m on vacation.” The movie would have made much more sense if he’d actually been on vacation and then coincidentally run into his son. (Yes, that would have been improbable, but it’s a movie. That kind of cinematic cheesiness would have worked better than the nonsensical plot we got instead.) Maybe the movie was rewritten, and in an earlier draft, it all went down differently. (I hope it was rewritten because if that story wasn’t tampered with again and again, then the filmmakers are insane.)
And it’s not just the premise that’s dumb and illogical. Everything else in the movie is dumb and illogical, too. It flat out makes no sense.
If this tomfoolery were presented well, you’d question the efficiency of the CIA. But since it’s such a mess, you just question how the movie ever saw the light of day (or more literally, the inside of a theater).
Alfred Hitchcock said that good suspense movies often need a MacGuffin, some unexplained device to keep the plot moving. But you’re not supposed to notice that the movie is doing that. The film is supposed to be so compelling that you don’t care what the MacGuffin actually is.
In this movie, first we’re looking for a guy, then a list, then a file, then a daughter, then a key…
It becomes ridiculous. It makes the CIA look like it’s run by the creators of a daytime soap.
Nothing makes much sense, and none of the characters behaves in a remotely logical way. Jack McClane seems beyond incompetent. John McClane seems insane. Thanks to heavy-handed line delivery by the co-stars, you can see the major plot twist coming from a mile away.
The set-up that leads them to the key seems very weird when you try to explain it to someone else, and the way Bruce Willis steals those car keys later… (So he steals the keys, but he doesn’t know who he stole them from?) It’s funny on purpose, but really, it’s just a little bit too funny for its own good, you know?
Words fail me, to be honest.
I will say that the ending seems appropriate. After the way it begins and proceeds, how could this movie wind up anywhere else?
If you’re making an action movie set in Russia with no coherent plot, then you might as well strap on those machine guns, slip a leather jacket over your sleeveless shirt, and head just exactly where John and Jack decide to go. Radiation be damned! It’s all so crazy it almost makes sense.
Except it doesn’t.
Overall:
This movie is horrible. I don’t understand. It didn’t have to be horrible. Even though the franchise is far from fresh, lots of people love Die Hard, and Bruce Willis still has plenty of fans. With Bruce Willis’s cooperation and the camera on my phone, I’m pretty sure that I could have made a better Die Hard movie than this. I’m not kidding. Why did they release A Good Day to Die Hard? Why didn’t they scrap it and start fresh with decent material (or at least change the title and the characters’ names? Maybe they should have sold it for scrap to the porn industry, added a few co-stars to spice things up, kept the title intact. Even that would have been a better fate for this movie, I think, and that’s just sad.)
Like a lot of people, I’m of the mindset that a mediocre Die Hard movie is better than no Die Hard movie at all. Die Hard is always a good time at the movies, right?
But this is not a mediocre Die Hard movie. If you’re a fan of the franchise, you might even have a better time by actually dying. Don’t pay to see this. It’s depressing. (Unless you’re Justin Long, as I explained up top.)