A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)
½*/****
starring Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
screenplay by Skip Woods
directed by John Moore
by Walter Chaw A Good Day to Die Hard (hereafter Die Hard 5), or whatever the fuck it's called, teaches that the only thing anyone seems to know about what's left of the
Soviet Union is that something happened at someplace called
"Chernobyl," and whatever that something was, it had to do
with radioactivity. (Or Transformers.) It's a film that believes there's a magic
spray that neutralizes radiation; that bringing up father issues is the same
thing as depth; and that commissioning a screenplay from Skip Woods (the
asshole behind Hitman, Swordfish, X-Men Origins: Wolverine,
and The A-Team) is, hey, a great idea! Dreadful doesn't begin to
describe it–and consider that I've liked, really liked, three of the previous
four movies in this franchise, to the extent that the direction the last film
took in suggesting the John McClane character is a Terminator felt to me
pleasantly self-knowing, even brilliant. I wanted, desperately, to like this thing, but by the tenth or eleventh time McClane shook his grizzled head and
muttered "Jesus" gravely under his breath (that is, around thirty minutes in), I checked out for good. Die Hard 5 is also the kind of
movie that has its foreign bad guys speak English to one another even when
they're alone; it features an extended, much-hyped car chase to nowhere with no
sense of space or innovation before finally just settling on a series of
explosions as lazy and disinterested as the way Bruce Willis fires off a
million rounds nowadays. Apathetic isn't the same thing as cool, and Willis,
let's face it, ain't trying anymore.
