Review of A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) by Shawn S — 27 Sep 2015

A Good Day to Die Hard is one of the worst, if not the worst action film I've seen in a long time, and probably THE worst I've seen on the big screen other than Ghost Rider 2. Certainly not worthy of the Die Hard name, A Good Day to Die Hard suffers from two huge problems - Skip Woods and John Moore.

Skip Woods has been a part of gems such as Hitman, the god awful 2007 video game film adaptation, the boring and insulting X-Men Origins Wolverine, the horrid A - Team film with Liam Neeson miscast as Hannibal, and Sabotage (which is an incredibly boring movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger).

Then we have John Moore, who provided us with the surprisingly bad Max Payne film which starred a whiny Mark Wahlberg as the titular character in a film based on an action game... Yet the film has barely any action.

See, I wouldn't mind this film if it managed to get two things right - the character of John McClane, and decently done action sequences, but it doesn't even have those going for it. What A Good Day to Die Hard lacks is just about everything that is enjoyable about the first four films. There's no sinister villains, no really witty one liners, no great action scenes, and worst of all, no heart. Director John Moore seems more concerned about explosions and shaking a camera than anything coherent in this film. The plot from the get go makes not one lick of sense.

Jack, John's estranged son, has landed in some trouble in Russia somehow... so we find out. John goes to bail him out (I guess), but it's revealed that Jack is working for the US government or something. You know what, lemme just put it simply - this movie doesn't make sense, and Skip Woods' writing is so bad that even I could probably write a better Die Hard script, and John Moore manages to misdirect this movie into its own grave. Do not expect quality from this film. The trailer was the best part of it.

By the way, John McClane constantly keeps saying that he's "on vacation" when that is never said to be the case. That gag is constantly played throughout the film and it's not funny the first time. I swear no one proof read this script.

I won't lie, I thought this film was decent the first time I saw it on the big screen, but after seeing it a second time on DVD, boy was I disappointed.

I give a single star out of five to this movie. A Good Day to Die Hard doesn't even work well as a time waster, or popcorn movie, it's just shamefully bad. Live Free or Die Hard at least felt like a Die Hard movie (even if softened up a bit for PG-13), especially looking at it now, but this fifth installment is just unbearably bad. Not even so bad its good bad, its simply a bad movie.