A Good Day to Die Hard

I was away from the blog yesterday due to some March Madness, and today I am back with a little more madness in the form of A Good Day to Die Hard.  I am kicking myself a little, because in the last week or so I have seen a few movies that have not been the most enjoyable, and this movie keeps with that trend as it drags along the Die Hard franchise that is on some very tired legs at this point.  When Die Hard first came out, Bruce Willis gave us a stubborn and normal guy who was battling against some well-dressed criminals.  Willis’s portrayal of the protagonist, John McClane, was one that could win over the crowd as he was a little pit bull that took a beating and just kept plugging forward.  He was the action fan’s version of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Yes, the first movie was improbable and McClane was able to perhaps take a bit too much punishment, but there was a playfulness with the film that was able to distract many viewers from questioning such things.  In the latest installment of the series the improbable becomes more and more frequent and the character of John McClane loses the charm from earlier movies.  During the first half of the film I had no care for his outcome or success.  I am not saying that I cared when the second half of the movie came around, because I didn’t.  I think I was just a bit numb by that point.

McClane is supposed to be a bit abrasive, but ultimately he is a person who gets the support of viewers for his charisma, persistence, and underdog status.  He has now travelled from saying some fun lines, as in earlier films, to merely spewing out the flat script that was provided by Skip Woods.  His keen mind is replaced by an aloof presence at times, as he stands amidst a violent attack and seems baffled that his son is trying to flee from it instead of standing around to talk.  In a way he feels like just a reminder of what the character used to be, and being this far removed from the original has diluted the product and left us with just a walking, talking reason for a sequel.

While the script is not good at all, bordering on awful at times with an insistence to dive into the convoluted, it is far from the only issue with the film.  The directing from John Moore never established anything that I could really find harmony with, with the pacing of the cuts and the style of the camera work acting as a barrier to connecting with the movie.  It was primarily in the action sequences where there was relentless assault of fast zoom ins, some shaky camera work, and continual cuts to characters calmly giving ‘witty’ one liners.  Whenever the film started to get any kind of flow to it, it was quickly able to lose the magic time and time again.

The movie was not all agonizing, as I was treated to a few moments of fun action.  There was one vehicle pursuit in particular that had beautiful and gratuitous amounts of cars getting crunched, crumpled, spun around, and flipped with screeching tires and broken glass strewn about.  The scene as a whole was not spectacular (because of the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph), but it had some great execution in its stunts and was a real treat for the eyes.  I am not sure if all of the money from the budget went into this sequence, because by the end of the film the special effects where replaced by not-so-special effects.

I really wanted to like this movie, I really did.  I have such fond love for some of the films of this franchise that I really had such desire that I would be treated to a closing bow of fist pumping excellence and mayhem.  I named my cat John McClane for crying out loud, that’s how much fun I had with Die Hard.  Perhaps that is the problem I have here; my love for the franchise came from the movies having a certain playfulness and personality to them, a factor that is replaced by sterile dialogue and disjointed action sequences.

Rating – 1.5 out of 4 stars