Typically, in a movie review, I’d quickly go over the movie at hand and explain some brief plot points that give you an idea of what type of movie it is. I’m going to forgo that approach and, instead, give you a quick re-telling of the first and last forty minutes that I saw of A Good Day to Die Hard. This is the fifth installment in a long, irrelevant franchise and the results are… well I think you’ll understand as we go.
The first scene in the movie, which is usually a good opportunity to hook viewers into the story they’re about to craft, is of an unnamed character watching the news as a list of forgettable names are blabbed about – from this, we’re expected to make the connection that this movie takes place in Russia. I would think a new film in a series that’s latest entry was criticized by fans would attempt to put those issues to rest by focusing the first few scenes on what made the series great in the first place – but that’s just me.
After an utterly pointless scene between two personality-devoid characters, the film treats us with a montage of random events that could not possibly be understood without a script while simultaneously feeding us those action movie clichéd lines such as “make the call,” and “it’s time.”
A little while later, we get introduced to John McClane and it is explained that he’s looking for his son with about as much subtlety as a wrecking ball has when it collides with a closed-down Blockbuster. McClane is dropped off at the airport by his daughter, Lucy McClane, who is played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead in the previous film. This time, she is played by a domesticated cow wearing a Mary Elizabeth Winstead costume (or the same actress with unfortunate camera angles, sorry).
Their touching moment is about as believable as two North Korean captives trying to smile at a camera to prove that they aren’t being starved to death. After a conversation that makes a high school dance seem graceful, John McClane ventures off to Russia (I can call the wrecking ball if you forget why).
McClane meanders around Russia for a while and eventually finds himself in front of a courthouse where one of the personality-devoid characters (named Yuri, which is up there with Boris for incredibly distinguishable Russian names) from the beginning of the movie is on trial. An explosion sabotages the trial and Yuri escapes with another unknown man.
These two run into John McClane purely out of coincidence (a pillar of strong storytelling) and it turns out that unknown man is actually Jack McClane, John’s son. Crazy how he found the one guy he was looking for within five minutes of being in a nation with 143 million people in it. What a country!
John, Jack, and Yuri get into a crazy car chase with police, while gangsters are also trying to kidnap Yuri. This sequence is intercut partly with shots of cars driving on roads and partly with a camera being tossed down an escalator. There’s very little geometrical consistency so whether the actors are in Russia, New York, a studio set, or all three at once doesn’t really get in the way of the flashing images that wipe cognitive reasoning from your brain.
These pretty flashes contain occasional one-liners but the absolute paramount landmark of humor is reached when John McClane takes a phone call from his daughter while mid-car-chase. He fumbles with the phone and tries to shrug off the imminent danger he’s in before suggesting that he’ll “call her back.” Not since deleted scenes from Scary Movie 4 has this avenue of humor been fully explored by the talented people in Hollywood.
I got a little further into A Good Day to Die Hard before calling it quits. The appearance of a villain who eats a carrot while mocking the protagonists and the implication that the Chernobyl meltdown was the result of nuclear weapons trafficking was a little too much for me to bare. Claiming a nuclear power plant can be used as a nuclear weapon is like saying a pencil can be used as a bullet because they both have lead in them.
There’s a load of problems I could rattle off that make this movie bad but the more poignant fact is there is nothing good I can say. It’s not funny. It’s not cool. It’s not entertaining. It’s not good. I’ve walked out of a handful of movies out of the thousands that I’ve seen and I’m sad to say that A Good Day to Die Hard is the latest entry on that list.