A Good Day to Die Hard

The desecration of the Die Hard series continues with this shockingly underwhelming entry, in which Bruce Willis’ John McClane travels to Russia after learning that his son (Jai Courtney’s Jack) has gotten into trouble – with the movie primarily detailing the McClanes’ ongoing efforts at thwarting a nuclear-weapons heist. It’s worth noting that A Good Day to Die Hard gets off to a relatively promising start, as filmmaker John Moore kicks the proceedings off with a briskly-paced opening that succeeds despite its lack of Die Hard-like qualities (ie this stretch could’ve been plugged into any number of contemporary actioners). Moore’s pervasively (and aggressively) misguided directorial choices slowly-but-surely drain one’s interest and enthusiasm, however, with the movie’s uncommonly ugly visuals – ie the image has been desaturated to the point of greyness – compounded by an emphasis on shaky camerawork and rapid-fire editing. There is, as such, little doubt that the film’s various action sequences fare especially poorly, as it’s virtually impossible to tell just what’s happing during the majority of such moments – with an incoherent early car chase emblematic of everything that’s wrong with Moore’s direction (ie the viewer isn’t even entirely sure which characters are in which cars). Far more problematic is A Good Day to Die Hard‘s almost total absence of compelling elements, with the one-dimensional, bland characters forced to make their way through a narrative that’s almost astonishingly underdeveloped. The subsequent absence of forward momentum ensures that the movie grows more and more tedious as it progresses, with the culmination of the mindless atmosphere an interminable and absolutely disastrous third act that is, to put it mildly, somewhat anticlimactic (ie it does, for the most part, come off as over-the-top, context-free noise). It’s ultimately impossible not to wonder just what Willis is thinking with these last two installments, as both films bear few elements in common with their vastly superior predecessors and it is, in the end, clear that the Die Hard series should’ve concluded with the above-average third entry.

*1/2 out of ****