Review of A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) by Stevenf — 01 Mar 2013

This shouldn't really be included as a Die Hard film, it should really be re-titled as "Bruce Willis goes to Russia and blows stuff up", not John McClane, but Bruce Willis, because this is no longer the John McClane that we knew from yester-year, he is simply a shadow of his former heroic self, and has been replaced by an indestructible action man, he isn't GI Joe just yet, but he certainly plays that part in this.

So we kick off with the main man heading to Moscow, as his son, Jack (Jai Courtney) is now a"007" type CIA agent who is going to prison after attempting to assassinate corrupt official Chagarin.

Why we are suppose to believe that John was only going over to watch his son go down is questionable, but lets roll with it.

So of course, explosions soon start when an orchestrated attack on the courthouse leads to John teaming with his son and political prisoner Komarov to escape the corrupt man's henchmen.

There are plenty of action packed set-pieces to keep the viewer happy, but not nearly enough of a believable story to back them up, they escape from a massive skyscraper building in one of the worst edited sequences, and end up in a dumpster, they then simply get up, brush off and move on.

It simply doesn't stop.

Bruce Willis delivers in his role as usual, but not in the manner of which we seen in the first entry of the franchise all those years ago, his cheesy quips are there, as are his unrelenting tendencies to succeed, but to what end? We still don't know what he is doing here, an average cop going to help son?

Jai Courtney just comes across as a whining child for the better part of the film, constantly blaming his dad for not being there and so on, and emotional depth is carelessly pumped in by a few speeches about children, but it just doesn't work for the pace of this movie, with character development being virtually non-existant and enough plot holes to make you laugh.

A plot twist in the film was just too little too late, by this point its just unclear who exactly the villain is supposed to be, nobody stands out or is remotely relevant to the plot and I was honestly bored and wanted it to be over at this point.

Gone are the days of the good cop being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and we now have an immortal Jason Bourne wannabe seemingly looking for trouble just to cause a few explosions and say some witty quips.

But I still hope they make another, hopefully just to redeem the bumbling mess of this one, to perhaps strip back the superhero part and replace it with the heroic part again. Utterly disappointing.