John McClane (Bruce Willis) doesn’t like to die, he is, unsurprisingly very hard to kill. So much so that he has been avoiding death the hard way since the eighties and he’s back for one last hoorah with his son, also unsurprisingly, named John Jack McClane Jr. – how original.
In his latest outgoing, John McClane Snr. hears that his estranged son has got himself into a spot of hot bother in Moscow, worried his son may have got himself in with a bad crowd and could be looking at a lengthy spell in prison, John flies out to Moscow for “a vacation” and discovers his son, rather than being a drug addict or a criminal is in fact a CIA agent and has been working on a sting to acquire a top secret file relating to nuclear weaponry and the Chernobyl Disaster.
Soon after John land’s in Moscow, he finds his son hotly pursued by some heavy-firearm wielding baddies and he joins in (of course) for a car chase of ludicrously epic proportions, involving a rocket launcher, hundreds of commuter cars crushed and side swiped and oddly not a single police car shows up to see what all the fuss is about.
Much of this film relies on a certainly level of suspended disbelief, and to be fair if you’re going to watch the fifth instalment of a Die Hard movie you can’t expect anything other than ludicrous. It’s action-packed, has an earth-shaking number of explosions and features one of my favourite slow-motion scenes in any film ever – as the two McClane boys jump from a building to avoid a helicopter crashing into them – it’s jaw-dropping stuff.
As for the “story”, the scriptwriters must have knocked this out over lunch. Bruce Willis says about three lines in the whole film, albeit repeatedly to pad out his script a little: “I’m on vacation” gets tired after the eighth use, “This doesn’t feel right”, and the timeless classic “Yippee Ki-yay Mutha F….*Insert explosion*”. And his Son, the brooding CIA Agent with absent-dad issues, played by Jai Courtney is as tough as he is oak wooden. The inevitable token femme fatale Irina played by Yuliya Snigir is hot but also doesn’t have much to say for herself either.
But despite the lack of dialogue, the main thing that bothered me about this film was the pacing and scale of this film. It felt like there were four actual scenes in between the shootouts, pursuits and explosions and for me it didn’t really go anywhere. When it ended, it almost felt like it had barely even begun, in other words there was a beginning, a melee of explosions and shootouts, and then an end. Leaving the whole thing feeling a bit hollow.
That said, you know what to expect with this kind of film – Action and it certainly delivers. Expect little from A Good Day To Die Hard and you will most probably have fun watching it. Most probably.
A Good Day to Die Hard is in cinemas now. Check out the high-impact featurette, ‘Take Back Manhood’, which ends with a pretty funny disclaimer stating that this film “may cause an unsafe rise it testosterone” LOL:
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