A Good Day to Die Hard

Cast: Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch
Director: John Moore

I will officially start this off by saying that I am more amused with the audience's reactions to certain parts of the movie rather than the flick itself. Besides soliciting a few movie theater laughs with the one-liners that are trying to be bad-ass, or the stunts that basically plagued the entire movie, most movie goers with me were entertained. As far as that sounds, that movie was not at all entertaining. It was unstructured, written badly and it felt like it was going nowhere. The entire film was purely explosion, gun firing and more explosion, with Bruce Willis mouthing off ill-written lines to suit an action movie. The ohhhs and the ahhhs of the audience was better than this.

I haven't watched any of the Die Hard movies except the first, so for the chronological reasoning of things, I can only keep up with the first. John McClaine finds himself in a plane to Moscow in order to sort things out with his son, who was reported captured by the Russian police. Turns out Jack works for the CIA and was to recover a file from Komarov, the file containing certain materials about uranium that could be used for terrorism. John caught up with his son and they try to finish the mission, although his son was not too happy with his father showing up.

The movie runs for approximately 90 minutes, and roughly 20 minutes of it was dialogue distributed throughout the action scenes. It was literally an action movie filled with explosives and car stunts. There is nothing to be taken out of it except that it was a poor addition to the franchise. The script was bad - it was horrible. The lines were trying to be witty, but they didn't work. Some of the dialogue was worked into scenes that didn't have the atmosphere of the lines to be said. Even the action scenes - despite all those explosions and some car stunts - were mediocre at its best. I have seen better action movies than this. 

While Bruce Willis is getting back in the game, this is not a good movie to add to his jam-packed action resume. It felt like he was taking a bit of a back seat to the unknown Jai Courtney, but he is the name seller of the franchise. His acting was mediocre; based on the lines he was given, I wouldn't expect it otherwise. The same goes for Jai Courtney, who plays Jack McClaine; he also gave a poor performance for someone who started out strong in the flick. The best appearance of the flick was Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who reprises her role as Lucy, John's daughter.

The movie as well was poorly structured. What started out as a good starting point began crashing down at the next ten minutes. The action sequences were too long, and the plot felt rushed. It was already a hour down and it seemed like nothing was happening. It didn't give a thrill, as opposed to similarly formulated action flicks. The whole CIA part was a bust, the entire mission was a bust. There wasn't enough build up. It felt like the director was simply pushing in the next scene, without giving some clarity, or even a smooth transition. It was literally one action scene to the next. If that was feasible, the father and son duo would have been dead tired from the day and wouldn't be performing as excellently as they're supposed to. 

I don't think the franchise is going away anywhere soon, but I think it needs to look back into the original roots. Think Die Hard, and corporate that into the next installment. It's that, or reboot it to blow people's minds, not to sink into mediocrity. Have more substantial dialogue, and don't limit the action sequences into three/four big explosion scenes. Even this installment needs a much better reboot.