“A Good Day to Die Hard”

Just as royal lineages get weakened with generations of inbreeding, so too has the Die Hard franchise been weakened with each new film. If the fifth and latest instalment, A Good Day to Die Hard, were a person, it would have an eye on its forehead and flippers for hands. It barely registers as a movie, let alone a Die Hard flick. It’s more a random assemblage of car chases and gunfire, interrupted by occasional dialogue fragments. Watching it, I felt like one of the dumbed-down denizens of Mike Judge’s future-world comedy Idiocracy, transfixed by heretofore unknown levels of Hollywood inanity and laziness. Instead of taking notes, I should have been picking my nose and masturbating.

For the record, I’m not a huge fan of the original Die Hard, which, if we’re going to be honest, was more influential than good. (Remember the unintentionally homoerotic walkie-talkie exchanges between hero John McClane and his beat-cop buddy? Let me tell you, they rival anything in Top Gun.) The only thing it had going for it, really, was Bruce Willis, who turned a traditional man-of-action character into a likeable everyman wiseass. (Think of how rote it would’ve been if it had starred any of the actors originally sought: Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or, believe it or don’t, Richard Gere.) Through sheer force of personality, Willis made a ridiculous movie funny and almost relatable.

The two gentlemen behind A Good Day to Die Hard, director John Moore (Max Payne) and screenwriter Skip Woods (The A-Team), seem not to remember anything of their source material. They treat McClane as just another invincible action hero, one who thinks nothing of maiming countless innocent bystanders or of diving through plate-glass windows thirty storeys up. And they’ve replaced his old habit of talking himself through mayhem with one-liners about “killing scumbags” and a penchant for addressing his Russian foes with: “Hey, Nijinsky!” or “Hey Solzhenitsyn!” (I kept wanting him to say, “Hey, Yakov Smirnoff!” but it didn’t happen.)

Throughout, the dialogue is so terrible you long for the relief of an action scene, but then you get an action scene and long for the relief of some dialogue. A car chase in the middle of the picture is so long and so repetitive that I actually began to think it might last until the closing credits, and it’s so destructive that all of Moscow would be in ruins by the end of it. McClane hijacks about twelve different people, then attempts to drive a truck over a line of parked cars with people in them: “Sorry ma’am,” he says as he crushes some poor woman to death. Meanwhile, the bland, anonymous villain cackles and shouts “Yes!” every time he sideswipes an innocent bystander. After awhile, so many things have crashed into so many other things that I began to feel I was having a nervous breakdown. Remember how, when you were a kid, you’d play that game where two friends would sit on either side of you and belch into your ears until you couldn’t take it anymore? This is exactly like that.

As for the barely-there “plot,” it concerns McClane’s relationship with his estranged son (Jai Courtenay)–a son who didn’t exist in any of the prior movies but is introduced here as if we’ve always known about him. (I assume the blank, muscle-headed Courtenay is being set up as a possible successor to Willis.) It seems that Junior is mad at his absentee pop and has rebelled, as so many kids today do, by joining the Russian mafia and assassinating a head of state. When a confused McClane flys to Moscow for his trial, he discovers that Junior is actually an undercover CIA agent, which makes somewhat more sense, but still not much at all. (Who paid for spy school?) After the courtroom gets blowed up real good, the two reluctantly work together to save some old Russian dude who possesses some nuclear launch codes or something. This involves lots of running around and lots of dopey quarrels between father and son. “How come you never called to tell me where you were?” McClane asks Junior while firing off ammo. “As if you cared!” Junior whinges while knifing a bad guy.

Incidentally, I would love to know how many hours the 57-year-old Willis logged on set. Whenever he’s not employing a stunt double he’s struggling with a seized-up hip and looking noticeably out of breath. (By the time he gets around to his obligatory “Yippee-ki-yay” line you expect him to have a coughing fit midway through.) And many of his dialogue scenes are shot without anyone else in the frame, all the better for inserting after the fact. Ultimately, Willis isn’t present here in mind, body, or soul, and he doesn’t have the decency even to look embarrassed. If there’s any light in his eyes at all, it’s merely the reflected gleam of dollar signs.

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