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.

Live Free or Die Hard

We have now arrived at the fourth Die Hard movie, “Die Hard 4.0,” also known as “Live Free or Die Hard,” released in 2007. So far the series has given us scenes of civil aviation hijack, skyscraper attacks with bodies falling down with them and a New York plagued by explosions. It wasn’t anything unusual back in the days before the scary 9/11 with the grand-scale civilian terror was a pin Hollywood pleasure. “Die Hard with a Vengeance” showed Manhattan office workers eating popcorn while taking a look at the destruction in the streets. In this type of situation, people obviously took terrorist attacks more personally than that, both in the moment and when dealing with the fight. Inspired by an article in WIRED about the threat to homeland security from systems hacking, “Live Free or Die Hard” happily utilizes the grim possible consequences of such ‘soft strikes’ plans, yet proposes the particularly September 10 solution of an individual hero – and reserves on its audience when they are reaching for their popcorn, like back in the day.

Once again we see Bruce Willis reprise his role as NYPD detective John McClane, in the usual position: being at the wrong place at the wrong time. This time he is divorced from his wife, in Washington D.C. on Independence Day, just as the forces invisible scheme to shut down the security and transport systems of the city and its neighbors. Chaos follows and McClane gets himself ready to save the day with blood ‘n’ grit, this time working with a young hacker named Matt Farrell, played by Justin Long. On the other side of McClane are Maggie Q as Mai Linh, Timothy Olyphant as Thomas Gabriel, director and producer Kevin Smith as Frederick ‘Warlock’ Kaludis, Justin Long as Thomas Gabriel, Cliff Curtis as Miguel Bowman, and Jonathan Sadowski as Trey. McClane’s teenage daughter, Lucy, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, is also running around.

Just like in the other “Die Hard” movies, a hero who once declared that “progress peaked with frozen pizza” is inclined against complex systems being abused by knuckleheads with delusions of dignity, though McClane is now harder to accept than ever as an everyman figure: once bleeding and battling alone, he is now successfully a superhuman with a sidekick whose theatre has expanded from the boundaries of an office block to the entire eastern seaboard. Ben Walters of Time Out says, “McClane’s yen for remote communication with his foes now benefits from video conferencing and the series’ long-standing soft spot for pornographic explosions is ratcheted up a few notches too – as is the scale of the action sequences.” If the collapse of the US capital’s social and civic transportation doesn’t gives enough of a punch, you also get a fighter jet facing off against a juggernaut.

Len Wiseman, who directed the “Underworld series,” handles many of the set-pieces with style and tension: a mass pile-up in an underpass is very successful, and there’s a real sense of panic to the city’s awareness that it’s under attack. But if the film recognizes the increased conceivability of such violence, it’s only to use the audience’s fears. If the series’ diehard bad feeling is treated here more than ever, so is its silly corniness: national meltdown, it insists, is simple next to a father’s violent love for his daughter.

I would give “Live Free or Die Hard” a 9.5. Ironically, I rated this series from best to worst the same way as I did with the “Indiana Jones series.” But how does the fifth film turn out? Will it be the best one, the worst one, or somewhere in the middle? Find out next week when I finish off “Die Hard month.”

Die Hard With A Vengeance

Now we come to my personal favorite in the “Die Hard” franchise, and one of my favorite movies of all time, the 1995 classic, “Die Hard with a Vengeance.” Roger Ebert had said, “There was a time when the James Bond movies started with one sensational stunt sequence, and we were grateful for it. Now there are movies that are essentially nothing but sensational stunt sequences, one after another, each one a feat of staging, until we're reeling in our seats from input overload. "Die Hard With a Vengeance" is the kind of movie where, toward the end, you start looking for the kitchen sink.”

Once again, Bruce Willis reprises his role as Detective John McClane, this time in New York, suspended from the police force, borderline alcoholic, and not on speaking terms with his wife. There’s one scene where the chief takes out McClane’s badge and throws it across his desk. McClane asks, “Does this mean I’m back on active duty?” Ebert commented on that moment, "I heard knowledgeable chuckles in the audience from those who appreciate the fine old traditions, such as that all hero cops are rogues who are either under suspension or heading for it.” I’m not going to lie, the line's pretty funny.

Literally a minute into the movie, a Manhattan department store is realistically bombed, which will give you a scare, and McClane gets a phone call from the bombing terrorist, Simon, played by the most over-the-top actor in the world, Jeremy Irons. Simon tells McClane to stand on the corner of a Harlem street with a sandwich board that says a certain racist word that no one would want to wear around their neck. Luckily, McClane is saved by store owner Zeus, played by Samuel L. Jackson, who gets added to Simon’s sick, twisted game of Simon Says.

The movie follows its usual pattern of a series of stunts along with violent action sequences. Simon seems to be some sort of a God, since he knows everything that is going on. He sends McClane and Zeus around Manhattan putting their lives on the line with these strange missions that could not be in any "Mission: Impossible" movie. One of the missions is driving a cab down the sidewalks of Central Park. Simon seems to plant the bombs in every conceivable location in the city – subway train, at first, then in a school.

Simon is not only a bomber, but he has a reason why he is having McClane do all these missions, and having a private army at his command. He apparently is the older brother to Hans Gruber from the first Die Hard movie.

Willis and Jackson dominate this movie, making it more like a buddy duo. Their dialogue seems to be heavy on the required racists talk, but they don’t show that they have racist feelings toward one another. Maybe using the N-word makes the action heroes like Macho Men. As actors, they play well off of one another. Ebert describes it as, “Jackson's observant detachment a good counterpoint to Willis' manic desperation.” It’s interesting to note that when Simon gives them the missions, Zeus seems to be the one who solves it. Ebert comments one of the missions, “although I was not quite clear how they used the three- and five-gallon jugs to measure out exactly four gallons of water; a fourth grader can probably enlighten me.”

Near the end of the movie, expect a scene where one of the bomb squad members is sweating over the bomb that has a digital countdown. He had to decide which wires to cut. Ebert mentions, “The motivation behind Simon's plan is ingenious, and I will not discuss it, except to say I am a little hazy about how the trucks got to Canada.” Jeremy Irons as the villain joins British actors who have played villains: Anthony Hopkins, Alan Rickman, Gary Oldman, and Tim Roth. Irons uses a type of speech which makes him sound bitter.

Irons’s performance and the rest of the supporting actors fall into second place to Willis and Jackson, who go on “Fear Factor” activities: slide down a cable from a bridge to a ship, a wall of water chases a truck on a canal, a subway car travels out of control through a station, and cars fly into the air like airplanes. Ebert describes this movie as, “basically a wind-up action toy, cleverly made, and delivered with high energy. It delivers just what it advertises, with a vengeance.”

Here’s a tidbit: this movie is based on urban bombings which will make you remember the Oklahoma City tragedy. Willis addressed at the press conference of “Die Hard with a Vengeance” not to ask him about Oklahoma City because he didn’t want to underestimate that tragedy by discussing it with the movie. Sounds like a smart thing he did.

Overall, you should watch this movie if you like the “Die Hard” series. John McTiernan is back as director, and he does an even better job on this film. I give this film a 10+, it is that good. Stay tuned next week when I continue “Die Hard month.”

Die Hard 2: Die Harder

After the success of the very first Die Hard movie, out came “Die Hard 2: Die Harder” in 1990. Bruce Willis reprises his role as John McClane, and this time he enters in a marathon of brutal violence, one after another. Like every main action hero, he places first in everything. He wrestles with guns, jumps on conveyer belts, ejects from cockpits, leaps onto a plane’s wings while it is in flight and fights with the authorities.

Roger Ebert describes: “This is one of those thrillers, like the "Indiana Jones" series, that I categorize as Bruised Forearm Movies, because when the movie is over your forearm is black-and-blue from where your date has grabbed it during the moments of suspense.”

Why is Willis Grade A in this franchise? It might be because he blends together looking physique enough with also having the look of an Everyman. The title of this movie gives you the basic plot: McClane is a man who will not give up, not admit defeat, and single-mindedly keeps moving in the face of danger. These types of dangerous obstacles he faces would intimidate James Bond, but for this tough, tenacious cop who is about to go bald, he has no choice. On top of that: “My wife is on that plane!” Just like in the first movie, he is a cop who is on vacation. This time, he is in Washington’s Dulles Airport waiting for his wife, Holly’s plane to land so he can spend Christmas Eve with her in this packed airport. In that same airport, at the same landing time, a military jet will land, bringing a South American drug fiend in. A group of terrorists, led by a former CIA operative, plots to take over the airport operations by electronically dodging the control tower. They turn off the airport lights and leave a bunch of airplanes in the air and one of them crashes, as a warning. What they want is a spare plane with full tank of gas, ready to take the dictator to freedom.

McClane, who has an Owl’s eye for a cop, sees one of the terrorists, follows him to the baggage-claim and finds out about their plan. He can’t convince the airport chief, played by Dennis Franz, who basically brushes off a cop that doesn’t have jurisdiction in the state. After a murder and several other hints (including that plane crash) the security chief finally sees that there is an attack being planned. But does that stop McClane? Of course not, and by the end of the movie, he has single-handedly takes on planeloads of terrorists one by one.

Because “Die Hard 2” is so well put together and well-directed, it has a momentum that carries it past handful of authority gaps that might have sunk a lesser film.

For instance, look at the part where the tower tells the circling airplanes that they’ll be out of radio contact for a few hours, and the jets keep going in circles? Why can’t those planes get in radio contact with other ground receivers, and be given an alternate airport? Because then Holly wouldn’t be in the airplane and in grave danger, that’s why?

This is what Ebert had said when he said a real-life trial about this movie: “A more serious problem involves the whole rescue operation itself. When Manuel Noriega was taken captive and returned to the United States to stand trial, there was little serious effort to save him: At the end, he was a refugee in his own country, reduced to seeking asylum in the residence of a Vatican diplomat. Would anyone have the means, the money and the will to mount such a vast and complicated terrorist operation simply to save one drug-connected dictator? Even if he does bear an uncanny resemblance to Fidel Castro? I doubt it.

“But on the other hand, I don't care.” “Die Hard 2” is as unlikely as the Bond movies, and as much fun. During the summer when violence and mayhem are allowed to replace for imagination and good writing, this is an especially great movie. It tells a story that we can relate to, it has a lot of interesting supporting characters, it handles the action scenes with calm precision, and it has a couple of scenes that are worth writing home about.

One of those scenes is the plane crash. Ebert says, “Not everybody's favorite image, I'll grant you. (This is a feature that will be severely edited before it becomes an in-flight movie.) Watching the plane burst into flames on a runway, I knew intellectually that I was watching special effects, probably a fairly large and detailed model photographed in slow motion.”

No matter. The plane crash is scarily convincing.

Another shot, more fun, is harder to describe without spoiling the movie. But it involves putting the camera’s eye so far up in the air and then propelling Willis up until his nose is about to touch the lens before he begins to fall down to ground again.

Ebert says, “Not only is this shot sensationally effective in terms of the story, but as a visual it is exhilarating: I love it when a director finds a new way to show me something.”

The director of “Die Hard 2” was Renny Harlin, who was well-known for directing the fourth “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie and the Andrew Dice Clay movie, “The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.” Like Paul Verhoeven, “Harlin has taken Hollywood commercial moviemaking, shaken it and given it new energy,” says Ebert.

Given the great success of the first “Die Hard,” producer Lawrence Gordon and his partners must have prayed hard to make sure this was success before handing it over to a fairly inexperienced director.

But they did the right thing: this is fairly entertaining. I would give this film a 9.

Harlin picked really great actors to portray the terrorists in this movie. They are believable and really act the part out great. The actors are: William Sadler, Franco Nero, John Amos, Don Harvey, Tony Ganios, Peter Nelson, Robert Patrick, Mick Cunningham, John Leguizamo, Tom Verica, John Costelloe, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Mark Boone Junior, and Ken Baldwin. Also, expect another cameo appearance from Reginald VelJohnson in here.

Look out next week when I look at the best film in the “Die Hard” franchise. I hope you all are enjoying “Die Hard” month.

Die Hard

For this month, I will do a review on a great series of action movies. Since I had done the “Lethal Weapon” series back in July, I think it would be appropriate to look at another great action series, “Die Hard.” Today let’s kick it off with the first film released in 1988, “Die Hard.”

This film was directed by the great John McTiernan, and it becomes more like one of the classic action movies of the 80s, the epitome of the word “action.” Dave Kehr of the Chicago Tribune wrote, “From its trailer, ``Die Hard`` looks like a typical action movie of the `80s: a sweaty, bare-chested, all-American hero battles swarthy, heavily accented terrorist villains, accompanied by lots of high-tech explosions, vast sheets of breaking glass and enough sophisticated weaponry to account for the Pentagon`s budget overrun.” He also called this film, “Sleekly engineered, impeccably staged and shrewdly dosed with humor and sentiment, ``Die Hard`` has everything but a personality.”

You could say that this movie is a beast of its own, and it was a giant success the summer it was released. Jeb Stuart and Steven E. De Souza handled the screenplay, and they blended this movie in with other classic action movies. Think of it as a scientific experiment, where it combined films from “Alien” to “Robocop,” and they were all put together very nicely.

Now the story takes place on Christmas Eve and inside the giant Japanese building of the Nakatomi Corporation, the workers are having their party. Faster than you ask “where is the action,” a group of German terrorists barge in the building and go up to the 30^th floor. They hold the guests hostage as they try to crack the code of seven electronic devices that holds up to $670 million in bearer bonds in a safe.

Luckily, New York policeman John McClane, played by one of the greatest action stars ever, Bruce Willis, has just flown in to spend the holidays with his two children and wife Holly, played by Bonnie Bedelia, who he has a rocky relationship with. As the FBI is helpless outside because they cannot find a way in, it is up to McClane to fight the Germans inside the Plaza. He doesn’t have any shoes on, he damages his foot really bad, and he is shirtless in the last third of the movie. Willis had to work out on the days that he had to be shirtless. McClane swings through elevator shafts, crawls up the ducts and sneaks around the rooftops to kill the Germans off one by one.

McTiernan was fresh off of making another action movie that he will forever be known for, “Predator,” when he made this movie. As he was always well-known for, he puts together the action very well, uses Jackson DeGovia set of the building very well, which in it of itself, it also becomes a character. This needs a sense of scale which, since its wildly uneven to its actual content, can’t help but impress.

I’m not saying that McTiernan completely ignored his actors. Willis is still making a transition from TV to film in this role, but he still does a really good job in this film. He was not the first person to be considered for the role of McClane. He was way down the line, but he was selected and turned this into one of his famous roles that everyone will remember for. The actor that steals the show, much like how Nicholson stole the show in Tim Burton’s “Batman,” is Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber. Rickman made his film debut in this role, since he is well-known for his British stage performances. Gruber is one of the best villains in any action movie. Even Kehr states, “Small, slinky and well-spoken, Rickman`s Hans Gruber has the silkiness of Claude Rains and the smiling dementia of ``Gilda`s`` George Macready.”

Still, the film’s subtext made it a success, though it’s also really disturbing. Just like with the “Rambo” movies, “Die Hard,” despite that it operates with more difficulty and detail, is driven by almost buried, blind anger.

This anger embodied by McClane is focused instead toward feminists (Holly left him to focus more on her job), yuppies (Hart Bochner appears as Harry Ellis, who is heavily addicted to cocaine snorting), the media (William Atherton as Richard Thornburg, a TV reporter much like the one in “Manhunter” and “Red Dragon”) authority in general (the FBI and L.A. officers are shown as complete idiots), and every single foreigner, more on the Japanese and Germans. Also, if you were a fan of the TGIF sitcom, “Family Matters,” Reginald VelJohnson, who played Carl Winslow on that show, appears in here as Sgt. Al Powell, who is helped by McClane.

Even though you could easily shake off the camp appeal of “Rambo,” “Die Hard” is not a film that you will be able to shake off. Kehr said, “It`s Morton Downey Jr. on a big budget-a piece of entertainment, but also a symptom.”

Overall, I rate this film with a solid 10. It’s one of the greatest action movies of all time. I could probably consider this one of my favorites. If you haven’t seen it, go out, rent it, buy it, watch it on TV or Netflix, but you have to watch this.

Well, now I have to take time off until next Friday since I overworked myself last month by doing reviews every single day. I haven’t done that before, but I didn’t know it would be this tiring. Before I burn myself out, I will prepare myself to review “Die Hard 2” next week. Yippie-kai-yay (you fill in the rest, this blog will be swear free).