‘Die Hard’ disappoints

It’s pretty telling when the best parts of an action movie are the scenes without any action.

A Good Day to Die Hard is a disappointment, less because of poor quality and more because it shows hints of being a better movie. The fifth film in the Die Hard franchise, it is a passable action film, but falls far short of the bar set by its predecessors.

Most of the movie takes place in Moscow, where John “Jack” McClane Jr. (Jai Courtney) is deep undercover as a CIA operative. Jack is arrested as part of an operation to free Russian political prisoner Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch), which gets the attention of his father, former NYPD Detective John McClane (Bruce Willis).

Unaware Jack is a spy, McClane heads to Moscow to help his estranged son out with his legal troubles. Unfortunately, this thrusts McClane right into the middle of Jack’s operation, and soon father and son are forced to put aside their differences in order to prevent global catastrophe.

I went into A Good Day to Die Hard with modest expectations.

Although the first Die Hard film is a classic, and the third is very good, the second and fourth installments of the series are simply solid and entertaining action films. That’s what I was hoping to get out of the new Die Hard, a fun and bombastic action movie that, while being far from great, would certainly be fun.

Unfortunately, A Good Day to Die Hard raised my expectations in the first 20 minutes, only to dash them.

When I started watching this movie, I felt like I might be seeing the beginning of a truly great Die Hard.

Like the first movie, it begins with a slow burn, and there’s a lot of good character development in the opening scenes. I thought this might be setting the stage for an engrossing action film, where real stakes and tangible emotions drive and enhance the action. Then the action actually started.

The action scenes in A Good Day to Die Hard can best be described with one word: bland. Not boring, not awful, just bland. While they do a decent job keeping you engaged, there’s nothing exciting or innovative here, and some of them are just too long.

Of course, some run-of-the-mill action would have been perfectly acceptable if the story had been better.

Unfortunately, all of the promising character development and plot threads that appear at the beginning of the film never pan out.

The main reason for this is that Willis and Courtney have dull-as-dishwater chemistry together and never really develop an entertaining rapport. The character of John McClane is also not utilized well.

Gone is the sense of McClane as a panicked, struggling everyman who nevertheless manages to be a wise ass, even in the face of certain death. Instead, McClane is presented the same as any other generic action hero, smoothly rising to every challenge he’s presented with.

The plot itself is a hot mess, full of gaping holes that keep on getting larger and larger as the film goes on, and it does a terrible job at maintaining dramatic tension. To top it all off, the movie is probably half an act too short, which really shows in the ending.

To be fair, I am being a bit tough on A Good Day to Die Hard, as it is a decent action movie that will entertain any action fan that buys a ticket for it. But the Die Hard franchise has, until this movie, represented films that are better than that.

The original Die Hard is a truly great movie that expertly combines plot, action and character development. It shows action movies can be as good as films from any other genre. And while its sequels varied in quality, all of them had the distinction of being among the top action films of their years.

That’s not the case with A Good Day to Die Hard. It’s straight-up average, preferring to rest on its name, rather than living up to it.

Action movies can be so much more than just a bunch of mashed together car chases and gun fights. They can be engrossing, exciting and fundamentally human stories. Once upon a time Die Hard showed us how this was done.

Posted by Bera B. Dunau on February 21, 2013. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Columns,Movie Reviews,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry