Film Review: A Good Day to Die Hard

Director: John Moore

The fifth installment of the Die Hard franchise sees Jack McClane (Bruce Willis) travel to Russia to help out his son John (Jai Courtney) who is awaiting trail for murder. It opens up the script for some reasonably witty father-son remarks about how Jack was a bad father and why the McClane's don't hug each other. Aside from that it's a pretty tired format of someone not wanting to spend time with another person but being forced to so they can both survive. But then the Die Hard franchise is 25 years old so its not surprising it is a little tired.

John (Bruce Willis) and Jack (Jai Courtney)

Jack is asked to testify against political prisoner Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch) by Viktor Chagarin (Sergei Kolesnikov) who is a corrupt Russian official that wants a secret file from Komarov that has incriminating evidence against him. Jack is able to escape when Chagarin blows up the court house to hopefully kidnap Komarov but Jack takes Komarov and runs into his Dad John, from there they try to escape Russia.

A film with elaborate action sequences that overall as a film becomes more implausible by the minute, the plot tries to be too clever when actually it is seemingly obvious. In the age of impressive CGI, the action is engaging and visually impressive but overall it lacks the wit and political subtext of the previous, more successful Die hard films. Although some of the action scenes were a bit messy in how they were sequenced and were hard to follow exactly what was happening.

John and Jack with Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch)

None of the acting in the film is really worthy of merit, Willis is clearly too old to be plausible as an action hero anymore yet he keeps getting similar roles. The other Die Hard films were a cut above the generic action movies that are produced year in, year out but for its fifth and realistically final time it fails to distinguish itself which is a sad ending for an impressive movie franchise. Contemplating the film after it finished it made me think how few redeeming features it had overall.

1/4 A good day to watch something else