Not A Very Good Day To Die Hard As It Turns Out

I love the Die Hard series. Of all the 80's action heroes, Bruce Willis was the closest to an Everyman who got hurt but still came back to kick ass and crack wise. He's also the one, at least on celluloid, who has aged the best. Arnie and Stallone look pretty haggard in their latest ventures but John McClane, though he obviously looks much older, still seems like he could blow a few people away and run several blocks before using a bazooka to take down a helicopter. Much of that is probably down to acting skill, since Willis was also always the action hero with the highest acting pedigree. So Willis is still game and not a problem here. What is a problem is pretty much everything else, though Jai Courtney is nice to look at (especially during the opening credits when the camera follows his ass pretty closely for a minute). Let's start with the script. Every Die Hard film, even the 2nd one which I absolutely hate, has to begin with a killer plan. Not so here. Even before the opening credits stop rolling we're embroiled in a Russian political plot which seems ripped out of Delta Force thirty years ago. There isn't much of a plan to speak of, except that there are lots of disposable bad guys looking for a political prisoner whom McClane's son Jack is supposed to be protecting. Willis arrives in Mother Russia looking to see his son and is instantly stealing cars, causing fifty car pile-ups on major highways, and shooting his way out of identical looking buildings. All of this might be acceptable if it had any subtlety or verve, but a summary scene of Willis' NYC cop at the beginning of the movie speaking with a young upstart (who calls him "Grandpa" yuk yuk) is all we get to suggest McClane has any kind of life outside of his cartoonish ability to jump out of 12 story windows without getting hurt. My feeling with outlandish action set pieces has always been this: If I am into the movie and the action has built up, I can stomach it. But right off the bat John McClane is driving a jeep that flips over 20 times after which he rolls out and jogs 2 miles to follow our pedestrian villians. You can't start at 11 and go up from there unless you're filming a spoof, and several scenes veer uncomfortably close to the Scary Movie version of an action comedy, including one where Willis and son arm themselves with an endless supply of elephant guns and ammo while refusing to bond like a normal father and son. Its also a bad idea to be self-referential, thereby calling attention to just how lame and outdated your own script is. One of the main villians tells McClane after opening a can of whupass on him "This isn't 1986! Reagan isn't even President anymore!" And thats a surprise since most of this movie seems to have been lifted directly from that overblown decade. The previous entry in this series worked so well because the villian/plan/plot was up to date and Willis obviously was not, yet he still managed to say "Yippe Kay-ay motherfucker!" and get the job done (at least in the unrated version *SIGH*). This movie also continues the odd but understandable pop culture fascination with Chernobyl, which often makes me wonder if there is anything else going on at the Russian Tourism Board. At least in a movie like Chernobyl Diaries the site is used to great effect. Here its simply a desolate battleground for numerous explosions and to raise further questions in my uneducated head about nuclear fallout. Like, can several hundred pounds of high grade uranium explode without giving McClane and his son cancer in the next few days? Maybe that will be in the next sequel. I was also scratching my head trying to decide if a substance our stock enemies use to turn a highly irradiated room into a safe area in a matter of minutes was either science fact or science fiction, but I'm guessing the latter. So, what then did I like, if anything, about this dismal entry in the Die Hard canon. Willis is always fun and still has several choice lines even if they simmer over into parody, especially one where his son wants to give up and he offers to take him home and fix him some milk with a little Bosco in it. The direction, though mostly awful, does feature some amazing explosions and gunfire which is always nice in an action movie. We also get one of the best deaths for a villian since the camera slo-moed on Hans Gruber as he began to fall to his death so many years ago. There is also the inclusion of Mary Elizabeth Winstead from Live Free or Die Hard in bookending scenes as John's daughter, which is nice but Justin Long would have made me even happier. So, all in all, not very good. I probably took much longer to write this review than the screenwriters took to write the movie which should say something in and of itself.