Dir. John Moore
97 Minutes
Rated R
Once you get to the fifth film in a franchise, either it is part of a pre-determined saga (like Harry Potter or Star Wars), or it is simply an attempt by studios to milk a brand name for all its worth. Sometimes films can rise above the producer's intentions and create something different and artful, but most of the time it's a hastily put together complete piece of shit. A Good Day to Die Hard falls in the latter category. This doesn't even feel like a movie. It feels like the amalgamation of every action movie convention vomited on screen with no real reason behind it.
The plot this time around brings ol' John McClane (Bruce Willis) to Russia in his first adventure outside US soil. He leaves home in an effort to help out his son (who was never mentioned in any previous film), who John heard was on trial. Unbeknownst to John, Jack McClane (Jai Courtney) is an undercover CIA agent out to stop a plan involving nuclear weapons. You see, before all this there were two feuding Russian guys; Chagarin (Sergei Kolesnikov), a corrupt politician, and Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch), a political prisoner who has in his possession a secret file. Chagarin believes therein lies evidence against him, so he sabotages his courthouse trial by blowing it up, but Yuri and Jack escape. Oh yeah, that's because on an unrelated note, Jack is also on trial in the courthouse for killing a guy. Then John McCalne joins his son and this secretive Russian on the run. That's all in the first five or ten minutes. Personally I found it pretty convoluted and confusing - I tried to sum it up as succinctly as possible, but it's just sort of a mess and never gets better (I just kept watching in vain, hoping that the story would 'click' and make sense).
If you cruise around the internet as often as I do, you might have found diagrams that group together all these movie posters and show how similar they are to each other. For action films, blue and orange are used all the god damn time because those two colors juxtaposed together is a "quick fix" for our eyes because they're complimentary on the color wheel or some bullshit (excuse my language). Anyway, this film takes that concept to the absolute EXTREME. Literally, LITERALLY, the entire film was comprised of blue and orange. The color palette stayed that same level of bland consistency for all but two shots. Once I noticed this I could not stop thinking about it. Clearly someone made this decision. This was no accident. Scenes that should have been just neutrally colored were washed over with orange or blue. Possibly a nitpick, but just goes to show the lengths they went to to make it a generic mess.
The key to this film working out was the relationship between John and Jack. I was hoping the film would have done something interesting there, especially because I think we're short on great father/son stories nowadays, but it simply goes to the absolute bare-minimum. They just do action-y stuff and in between they exchange badly-written dialogue in an effort to show "bonding." The story involving Yuri does lead to some unexpected twists and revelations, but about on the same scale as National Treasure (there are also some lines in here that come close to "I'm going to steal the Declaration of Independence").
I do feel the need to talk about a certain aspect of a particular scene because it just rubbed me the wrong way. One of the bad guy's henchmen named Alik (Rasha Bukvic), who held one of the most charismatic performances in the film, almost saved one terrible scene, but...during this very important exchange where he's pretty much got Jack and John in a corner, toying with them before an inevitable execution, the writers (or somebody) decided to give him a carrot. Like the vegetable carrot. To chomp on after a huge shootout. I all but wondered if he would say 'What's Up Doc?' in a wiseguy New York accent. You look at say, Quentin Tarantino's films, and he uses food in extremely powerful ways. The Big Kahuna Burger in Pulp Fiction or the strudel/milk in Inglourious Basterds were more than food - they were made into objects of power through the art of cinema. Compare that to A Good Day to Die Hard. Where this henchman is nibbling on a carrot, in a place where carrots don't belong. I believe the filmmakers were trying to pull off something similar to my Tarantino examples, but as they did with nearly every aspect of this film, failed miserably.
Obviously what the masses want in a film like this are big, grand action scenes. Besides a solid car chase towards the very beginning, the whole movie was just Expendables-level dreck. None of the action was inspired whatsoever, and the over-use of bullets and explosions and CGI just grew tiresome. This is a film where you could easily leave to go to the bathroom, take your time with the result of the Chinese buffet you woofed down before the movie, come back and have not lost anything in the process. The set pieces weren't even as good as mid-tier video game cutscenes and most of the bad guys were generic and boring. All the Bruce Willis half-smirks in the world couldn't have saved this film. And the final shot is astoundingly bad; it rivals that of Broken City (to all one of you who saw that). It's a good day for this series to die.
Rating: D+
(And yes, I know, Die Hard 6 is on the way)
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