A Good Day to Die Hard

A Good Day to Die Hard – 98Min – R

There are times when you are in the mood for just one long car chase, story and plot be dammed, just blow stuff up. BOOM BABY!!! Well you can’t go wrong with choosing this movie to relieve that need. It is just what it says it is. Even if the person I went with fell asleep and missed a third of the film it was not as bad I thought it was going to be. When I compare it to the others it’s much better than Die Hard 2 but not as good as Live Free or Die Hard. I have to look at it from that stand point and give it a yellow light at best.

John McClane (Bruce Willis) is still a rough and tumble New York Cop. He uses his police contacts to keep track of his son Jack (Jai Courtney) who is in Russia. He tracks his son down and finds him hip deep in trouble with the Russian terrorists but that’s what happens when you are a spy. Father and son work on building broken relationships as they are breaking faces. Somewhere there should be an eCard with a father and son saying “The family that commits acts of violence together stays together.” Long story short, the father and son team cause a huge swath of destruction across Russia and get the bad guys in the end.

John Moore was at the helm of this film. He did a decent job, but the bar was not set very high. It is an action flick. If you destroy most of what you are filming, you will do fine. I wonder if this is a handoff from the father to the son in action movies franchises? Jai Courtney certainly has the screen presence to handle an action film, but I also wonder if this should be the last in this franchise. Meh, who am I kidding? As long as there is stuff to blow up they will always make this kind of movie, so why not keep the franchise going?

They really enjoyed the fact that they shot this in Russia, because every chance to use a long shot to show off the setting was used, so much show that at one point I was not sure of what I should be looking at. I was looking at a long overhead shot of a Russian urban setting and two small figures running out of a roof access. This was a bit distracting but if I was using a great setting I would try and get as much out of it as possible too.

The touching father and son reconciliation was put into the film almost as an afterthought to appeal to people who need a bit of substance in their action film, but not a lot. If you are looking to this film for any sort of depth of story or complex characters, keep stepp’n because this movie is not going to satisfy you.

Warning Spoilers!!!! Only people who have been cleared by Russian customs are allowed to look under this link!!!!!!!

I do have to give them the credit for the double, double twist I did not see that coming but I have to admit I was blinded by explosion 46 to see it coming.

When the bad guys you are chasing all take time to don hazmat suits, I think your t-shirt and leather jacket is a wee bit underdressed for the visit to Chernobyl where the bad guys have hidden their plutonium. I was reminded of the game Fallout , my mental Geiger counter was clicking like mad.

It’s true that my brother from another mother fell stone asleep during the first third of the film. The shaky camera and the high speed chase were enough to lull him to a sound sleep. That either says something about this movie or something about my brother. Perhaps it says something about them both. He does not do well with just sheer action for action sake. He does need to have some substance to go along with the action, so that, I think, is the real reason he was unconscious.


What was the last action movie you saw that was nothing but action, and do you think that movies like this are fine or do they need to pepper in some deeper story?