As a fan of even the fourth entry in the Die Hard franchise, which introduced John McClane’s estranged daughter Lucy, it is my sad duty to announce that A Good Day to Die Hard is not just the worst entry in the series, but one of the worst movies I’ve seen over the last few years – and seeing a bad movie in IMAX only makes it worse.
A good Day to Die Hard opens with a nameless bullet-headed guy shooting someone in a Moscow nightclub and winding up in jail. We only learn he’s John McClane’s (Bruce Willis) estranged son, Jack (Jai Courtney) when McClane (who appears from behind a tight grouping on a shooting range target (possibly the only original shot in the movie) is given a copy of the arrest report by a colleague whom dialogue suggests is his protégé on the NYPD. It’s all in Russian, of course – begging the question of how an NYPD detective would get a Moscow police report to begin with – with attached mug shots.
So McClane takes some leave – we know because the movie calls for him to repeatedly say/wail ‘I’m on vacation!’ like it’s supposed to be his big line this time around – and flies off to Moscow with Lucy’s parting words (‘Try not to make things worse, okay?’) ringing in his ears.
In the meantime, Jack has contrived to get himself into the courtroom where a seeming apparent dissident is being tried. Said dissident, Komarov (Sebastian Koch), apparently has a file containing evidence that would expose the Russian Minister of Defence, Chagarin (Sergey Kolesnikov) as a first-class villain. Chagarin had Komarov imprisoned to prevent anyone from gaining access to said file.
Young McClane, of course, has a plan to save Komarov and get the file – a plan that is partially foiled by the untimely arrival of his father – though it serves to officially reveal that young Jack is a CIA operative.
Mayhem and hijinx allegedly ensue.
From cinematography that looks like it was shot by a particularly hyper pre-teen sufferer of ADD, to effects that are hardly special, A Good Day to Die Hard is a great action flick with all the heart (and exposition) mercilessly hacked out. It could be subtitled Another Valentine’s Day Massacre – though it’s the movie that’s being massacred.
We never learn why John and Jack are estranged – the closest we come is McLane’s line, ‘It got pretty ugly.’ The double and triple-crosses seem to unroll by the numbers (‘we’re ten minutes in – time for a car chase!’). Even the moment when the villain (Rasha Bukvic) talks too much enabling the good guys to get untied and wreak havoc is monumentally pointless – he doesn’t talk about his plans but, rather, about how he always wanted to be a dancer! And he’s not even the main villain! Egad!
In what is supposed to be some kind of parallel development to help us identify with Komarov, he has a daughter (Yulia Snigir) he hasn’t seen for five years because he’s been a political prisoner. Sadly, Snigir is given nothing more to do than look gorgeous (convincingly) and shoot a variety of guns (less convincingly).
Then there’s the trip to Chernobyl – where a technological pixie dust kills the radiation – and the reveal that no one (other than the McClane clan) is who we think they are (though we really know it all the time). And, all the while, the film’s many flaws are being magnified a hundredfold on an IMAX screen (you can almost see Willis losing his last shreds of interest and shifting to automatic).
A Good Day to Die Hard clocks in at what should be a sleek 98 minutes but I found myself checking my watch about forty minutes in – never a good sign and, in an action movie, a fatal one. Worse, I finished my drink before the big action finale in Chernobyl. I have never been so bored at an action movie.
Final Grade: F