Directed by: John Moore
Starring: Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney
It's official. John McClane is no longer a flesh and blood man caught up in situations where he has to waste bad guys. He is now a cartoon character who is seemingly indestructible. I'm not even sure that he even bleeds in A Good Day To Die Hard. It seems that McClane can fall from great heights and even through panes of glass without getting a scratch on him. It's as if the filmmakers didn't bother to make McClane human, but instead like the T-1000 in Terminator 2. He'll take a licking and keep on ticking.
A Good Day To Die Hard is the fifth in the series and now it appears the series has lost its legs. There's plenty of action in the film, but it's by rote and without much energy. The plot is incomprehensible. It isn't made very clear what the bad guy plans to do with all of that uranium he stored in the ruins of Chernobyl. Make weapons I assume, but with all of the helicopters and equipment needed to move the stuff, the whole enterprise becomes an example of the law of diminishing returns.
As the film opens, John McClane is visiting his estranged son Jack, who he finds out is in Russia through expert detective work, I suppose. However, McClane's detective work doesn't reveal that his son is a CIA spy who is rescuing an imprisoned Russian scientist. Everyone wants "the file" from the scientist and it is not revealed what exactly is on this file. Considering the amount of trouble Jack and John go through to keep the scientist from getting killed, including causing a 50-car collision on a Moscow freeway, it would be nice of him to let us all in on the file's contents.
Throughout all of this, Jack calls his father "John", except when he first sees him he says, "Dad?" That is for the viewers who haven't guessed that Jack is John's son. Jack is a resentful man who believes his father was never there for him. Didn't he hear about any of the goings-on in the first four Die Hards? Maybe not. The old man singlehandedly thwarted a high-profile robbery, stopped rogue US Army soldiers by blowing up a plane, rescued the nation's gold supply, and prevented a madman from shutting down the US infrastructure. Considering he did all of that, I'm amazed he can go anywhere in the world without being recognized. Captain Sully landed a plane safely and he can barely stand up straight because of the weight of all the medals he received. You would think Jack would want to cut his old man a little slack.
There are enough breaks in the action so father and son can work out their differences and become an expert killing team. They destroy half of Moscow before heading on to Chernobyl. Yes, that Chernobyl. I can't recall exactly how they figured out the baddies were hiding their uranium there. At that point I think I was texting somebody or went to the rest room.
The final showdown is ludicrous, even by cartoonish action film standards. Plenty of things are blown up and shrapnel and glass fly everywhere, but none of it hits anybody. With all of the explosions and gunfire, it's amazing that no one nearby calls the police. John and Jack destroy the villains and apparently get out undetected. You would think the Russian government would want to have a chat with them first. After all, the Moscow freeway was still in ruins.
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