Feb. 20, 2013 - Issue #905: DOA No more - Trading in punk for politics

A Good Day to Die Hard

It's tough to take an action film beyond all the explosions and make it stand up on the strength of its characters. Die Hard did it in 1988 by introducing Detective John McClane as a relatively normal guy—at least in contrast to the other action heroes of the day—and letting Bruce Willis play him as a man who takes a beating and is worse off for it. The next three films in the series amped the stakes upwards and piled on increasingly ridiculous levels of action, but even in their worst moments they worked by keeping McClane's character at the heart of the stories. So, really, all A Good Day to Die Hard had to do was root itself in that character and then let hell break loose around him.
That's not what happens, though. This time out, the film takes McClane out of the US and lands him on Russian soil, where it turns out his son Jack (Jai Courtney) is a CIA agent working to get a hold of ... whatever. It really doesn't matter. Even a late-game plot twist barely registers, coming across as random and pointless beyond offering an excuse for a few more big explosions.
There's no character development in sight. Pale inside nods to the past films (McClane grumbling "I'm on vacation" or his son  insisting "Your thing is killing bad guys") pass quickly and with barely a comedic ripple, and the only things that come close to an effort to sketch some new lines into the character are either odd—an exchange with a Russian taxi driver where McClane grins condescendingly at the cabbie's Frank Sinatra impression—or awkward—a series of parenting tips that feel like they could have been lifted from a how-to-be-a-good-parent pamphlet.

The film wastes no time getting to the first explosions, and from there on it doesn't bother with either a sense of space or character, content to fall into a predictable pattern of fast cuts and snippets of wannabe-snappy dialogue. None of it works. Whereas the series has up to now given Willis something to chew on as McClane, here he has nothing at all, left with little recourse but to grit his teeth whenever the camera does rest on him for a moment. For the first time in the series, it would be a simple matter to change the character's name and cast another actor in the role without losing anything. This is a Die Hard film in name only, but it's a terrible movie right down to the bottom of its very shallow soul.
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