A Good Day to Die Hard

I can’t wait any longer, I have to finish “Die Hard month” off before the day is done or else I will go crazy. We now arrive at the disappointing finale to the “Die Hard” series, “A Good Day to Die Hard,” which came out at the beginning of this year. According to the “Die Hard” wiki page, John McClane killed a total of 58 people up to the fourth film. That doesn’t sound correct, but let’s not nit-pick at it and just go with the number.

Since the first film, when McClane flew over to see his wife, Holly, and ended up taking on a gang of German terrorists, led by Hans Gruber (who I believe is one of the greatest villains), singlehandedly, he has killed nearly 60 people, and upset hijackers and terrorists. On top of that, he’s an alcoholic, he’s divorced from Holly, “he has sustained more injuries than all starting quarterbacks in the NFL put together,” according to the great Richard Roeper, and he has “experienced enough violence to be a first-ballot entrant in the cinematic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Hall of Fame,” also said by Roeper.

You would think that McClane’s children would at least cut him some slack for not being there all the time with them, but in “Live Free or Die Hard,” it was a cyber-terrorist attack that made him reunite with his daughter, Lucy, once again played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead in this latest addition. Now in “A Good Day to Die Hard,” McClane has to fly all the way over to Russia to fight another batch of terrorists and their henchmen just to help out his son, John “Jack” McClane Jr., played by Jai Courtney, whom he has not spoken to in years.

Roeper was funny in his review when he said, “Yippee-ki-yay, absentee father.”

Now you would not have guessed that McClane and Holly would get back together in the first “Die Hard” without Hans breaking into the Nakatomi Plaza. However, John McTiernan had given one of the best action-packed films of all time that is a classic to this very day: the perfect film for Bruce Willis to showcase his smart-guy but vulnerable character. “Die Hard” worked because we were able to know McClane and the villains before the body count started.

A quarter-century later, McClane has all of his traits of making him a three-dimensional character sucked away like he was put into a vacuum cleaner and vomited back out. Roeper even says, “We feel as if we're watching Bruce Willis in a Bruce Willis movie in which Bruce Willis can survive anything while taking out the villains, video-game style.” That’s not a bad thing, but “A Good Day to Die Hard” hits the ground shooting, and never gives the viewers a moment to know the characters in the least bit, including Jack, who keeps reminding “John” (which is what he calls his biological father) that he was never there when Jack needed him, even when they team up to take on the Russian villains. Sheesh guy, talk about someone you just want to beat up.

McClane thinks that he is going to Russia to save his son, who is charged with a serious crime, but 15 minutes after McClane arrives, Jack has messed up an undercover mission.

You heard right, Jack McClane is working with the CIA. Somehow McClane, who’s well-known for solving difficult missions since the second film when he was waiting for faxes at the Dulles airport, had no idea that his own son was an undercover spy.

Who cares though? Roeper commented, “Director John Moore is clearly a fan of Explosion Porn, filling up the screen with great fanning orange flames and crashing helicopters, blowing up buildings and engineering multiple slow-motion scenes in which John and/or his son fly through the air like superheroes without wings, crash through windows and bounce off conveniently placed scaffolding, never sustaining so much as a broken rib or a fractured ankle.” This feels more like a mindless action flick. Even Iron Man would be seriously injured after going through all that action.

For some reason, I feel as if I over-hyped myself for this movie. Roeper himself admits that he’s a huge fan of the original, as am I, and like Roeper, I have enjoyed the sequels, even “Live Free or Die Hard.” Since this film is rated R again (“Live Free or Die Hard” is the only PG-13 in the series), it pretty much means that this film wasn’t going to hold back on the obscenities and quality kills. It’s very nice to see where John McClane is in the year 2013.

Turns out he is back with the NYPD, where he has been since the mid-1980s, minus the years that he was in suspension and other delays. However, he still hasn’t forgotten his signature “Yippe-ki Yay” line, which is wasted badly in this film.

You would think that McClane would be retired from the force by now, perhaps enjoying all of the honor and wealth that he would receive for fighting off four different terrorist attacks over the last 25 years. Not in this one he’s not.

Similar to the Bond series, the “Die Hard” series succeed on brilliantly written villains. In this film, we don’t even know who the main antagonist is. The villains in here are ex-billionaire Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch) and his daughter, Irina (Yuliya Snigir). I think Roeper said it best himself, “The script is filled with heavy-handed dialogue about parents and their children, framed by well choreographed but generic action sequences.”

Apparently there is one more “Die Hard” film in the works. You would think that after years of putting certain franchises away, like Rocky, Rambo, Transformers, G.I. Joe, Ninja Turtles, Garfield, Alvin & the Chipmunks, and “Die Hard” to name a few, that have come back and have been awesome and we want to see more, this one would be a treat. But it’s not. It’s just a pain to sit through, and I would have to give this film a 3. Here’s hoping that whenever they work on the sixth in the series, which will be the last before Willis officially retires the McClane character, it will be much better than this disappointing sequel.

Well, that “thankfully” ends “Die Hard month.” Not to say that I didn’t enjoy it, but it’s a shame that I had to end it with this abomination of a sequel. Stay tuned for more of my reviews soon.