I have this idea in my mind that no human being is really an
idiot. There are times however where Wisdom’s evil twin Stupidity takes over
your brain and makes you do and think some silly things. The people who go see A Good Day to Die Hard have had their
brains dominated by Stupidity and poor Wisdom has been locked away somewhere,
screaming, “You’re smarter than this!” Alright, so I’m being over the top, but
this is a really stupid movie. I am using stupid in the literal sense, meaning “lacking
intelligence.” I refuse to accept that anybody with the gift of reasonable
thought can like anything about it. It’s that bad.
There is an early scene where Bruce Willis is in a cab in
Russia. The driver can speak English and they chat for an unnecessarily long
time. Then the driver sings “New York, New York” badly and with a Russian accent.
The scene is not amusing or entertaining in the slightest, goes on for too long
and has literally no point. This then goes on for the entire picture. The movie
is about an hour and a half long and is made up of three extended action
sequences barely tied together by the barest most minimalistic plot possible. Willis’
character is named John McClane, but he isn’t playing the Die Hard character like we know him. It’s more like a bad parody of
the classic action flick, and he seems entirely bored throughout. To say he
phoned in his appearance is an insult to electronic communication.
McClane is joined by his children in this movie in order to
pretend that there is warmth and drama. Jai Courtney plays his son with embarrassing
incompetence, making already dreadful lines even worse with his laughably bad delivery. The usually good Mary Elizabeth Winstead briefly appears as the daughter,
ridiculously contorting her face to emphasize every word. It is not becoming.
There are multiple villains, but who they are, why they are powerful, what they
plan to do and what kind of threat they actually pose is never made remotely
clear. One of the villains has an extended scene that reeks of desperation, as
he munches on a carrot (Remember how Clive Owen did that in Shoot ‘Em Up, that actually good action
movie? No?), tap dances (funny for all the wrong reasons) and even points out, “This
is not 1986.” Dude, we know.
The diehard Die Hard
fans (See what I did there?) will try to defend all this crap by saying that it’s
just carefree fun, but it isn’t fun at all. The action sequences that make up
most of the movie are some of the most boring, least inspired things of the
sort I’ve ever seen. In one, there is lots and lots of highway carnage, as
automobiles get all kinds of crushed and go flying all over the place. This
scene is extremely lazy, as cars are rammed and thrown, rammed and thrown, rammed
and thrown in a seemingly endless cycle that lacks anything akin to creativity
or purpose. Close-ups of characters are scattered throughout, as if to pretend
that something of any relevance is actually going on.
In another scene, McClane and son are being shot at from outside
of a tall building. They both begin running and together, as if it were the
most logical thing in the world, jump through a window without really looking,
land in a slide that drops them to
safety and come out of the whole thing with hardly a scratch. I thought that
was bad enough, but before the end of the movie they end up flying through three more glass windows. These result in
a bandage and a limp, rather than death, blindness, or at least some cuts from all that glass they just shattered with
their bodies. The idiocy doesn’t end there. One main character is shot in
the arm at one point. For one thing, he reacts to this without so much as a
cringe, as if bullets pierce his flesh every day, but after a scene in which he
is declared to be bleeding to death, it is never mentioned again. Seriously,
his arm is fine for the rest of the movie. I can suspend disbelief at the
movies, but not when being persistently bludgeoned with insanity like in this
one.
Those are just the highlights. Literally every second of
this movie is loaded to overflowing with illogical actions, idiotic and
repetitive dialogue, copycat camerawork and editing and countless character
inconsistencies. I sincerely hope that this screenplay was not originally
intended to be a Die Hard sequel and
they just changed a few names at the last minute to cash in on the success of
the series’ reputation. Surely Fox wouldn’t intentionally defecate all over one
of their most beloved franchises like this. Do not watch A Good Day to Die Hard for any reason. It bears no resemblance to
the other movies of the series that you have every right to love and is just
plain intellectual suicide.
Also, the movie never demonstrates how it is a good day to
die hard. When is it ever a good day to die hard?
