John McClane and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad, Die Hard Day

You know what today is? A good day to … skip the new movie at theaters.

It hurts writing that when the Die Hard series has been so much fun over the years, even when it’s so bad, like the last entry, Live Free or Die Hard, that was stupidly mediocre but so over-the-top that you had to appreciate its action-packed bombast, like when that hover-jet did barrel rolls through a D.C. freeway stack. The jet could have threaded a needle when it wasn't raining hellfire onto our national infrastructure.

But now here is A Good Day to Die Hard, Die Hard 5 if you’re counting, and it’s just awful. Like really awful. So awful that it makes the one that Renny Harlin directed — the impossibly dense Die Hard 2 — look like a Louvre masterpiece. Renny Harlin for heaven’s sake!

Supercop John McClane always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hopefully he has a dog that picks up his morning paper, otherwise ninja commandos would spring from the hedges when he trundles out in his bathrobe. That's every day for McClane, whose cop pension is probably calculated by number of days spent not shooting things in the face. This time McClane flies to Moscow to find his delinquent son and — wouldn’t you know it! — he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. What he ever intended to do in Moscow is never really answered, but there he is interrupting a jailbreak from a courthouse.

Turns out his son, Jack McClane, is a CIA operative in deep cover in a Russian crime syndicate. Dear ol’ dad shows up and messes everything up, though clearly the film messes things up all on its own. There is a confusing bit with rotating villains, including one who we only see talking to the other villains on his cell phone. In one curious shot, he’s walking in front of hundreds of priests or judges, but this shot’s significance is ignored. Is he a lawyer, an extra in a priest-themed movie, a Kremlin high official — the movie never releases that secret. I thought this was the main villain, but there are three others, each with their own henchman, including one guy who fights shirtless in the post-Chernobyl nuclear winter. All these villains are single-mindedly pursuing Jack, whose doughy, blank-faced scowl should be enough to earn him the Genarro last name — "She's his kid," McClane would say about Holly, marooned from this movie's madness.

After a number of shoot-outs, chases and helicopter attacks, the movie moves from Moscow to Pripyat, the Ghost City directly outside of the Chernobyl site. This sequence had real potential, with all the radiation and that creepy Ferris Wheel that was abandoned so many years ago. The opportunity is squandered, though, when the film plods along with absolutely no wit, no ambition, no inventiveness, until the next gunfight can start. I'm pretty sure McClane just stops aiming his gun, knowing that this is the part of the movie where the body count needs to swell until it flips a switch in some macabre Rube Goldberg Machine that begins the final countdown to that "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" line. Here he says it, with no punctuation and no fanfare, like it's any other line in this lame-brained script. As for Pripyat, it's nothing more than a prop for McClane to shoot at. Even the radiation — neutralized with Ghostbuster backpacks, apparently — is an afterthought, like when John takes a dip in the famous public pool with no fear of radiation sickness. "Us McClanes are hard to kill. Besides it's just rainwater." Really?!? Why even go to a highly irradiated location if you're just going to treat it exactly like a non-irradiated location? 

Bruce Willis returns to play McClane, the New York cop who can’t stop telling bad guys he’s shooting that they’re ruining his vacation, except that he’s not on vacation; he’s there to rescue his son, a point established in the second scene. Jai Courtney plays the younger McClane, and the poor kid needs some career advice; acting seems to escape his net of talents. Between the two of them, the film flops around with no real direction. They frequently walk into ambushes, as if some internal timer within the film required another surprise shootout that holds no bearing on the plot. And a million gold stars to the person who can explain to me why a female villain turns up on a motorcycle and promptly disrobes. 

Willis sleepwalks through much of this macho shoot-fest, but only at the amateur level, whereas director John Moore (Max Payne, Behind Enemy Lines) has gone full-on pro sleepwalker. I’ve never seen a movie so poorly constructed. Never. This is one of the worst. It even out-boggles Battle Los Angeles, the pinnacle of bad visual storytelling. For starters, the whole movie is shot in close-up, which makes following the action impossible. Add into that mixture the queasy cam, rapid-cut editing and obscure camera angles and it’s a dishearteningly woozy endeavor to undertake.

The best way to describe it is like this: imagine you’re at a three-ring circus with a thousand other people around you in the stands under the tent. Now blink your eyes rapidly, like hummingbird's wings fast, and imagine that every time you open your eyes again you’re seeing the action from another person’s viewpoint. The view goes from high to low to underneath to overhead to distant to close. Sometimes two adjacent cutaways complement each other, but other times they’re from competing angles that undermine our perception of the action. Visually, it’s a mess and it flies in the face of more than 100 years of visual storytelling.

Now let me put it into perspective within the film. The first action scene involves a chase scene on a Moscow freeway with Jack in a van, John in a truck and the villains in a big six-wheeled tank. Because everything is shot in super close-up, there are few establishing shots — the establishing shots that are present are punctuated with this annoying zoom effect — making it impossible to know where all three vehicles are within the film’s spatial scenario. Sometimes it looks like they’re all bumper to bumper, but other times it’s as if there’s a quarter mile between each. And because the camera constantly switches angles, sometimes to opposite sides of the action, it’s difficult to comprehend who is doing what to whom. Compounding the problems are the way cars within the chase turn one direction off the screen, disappear for awhile and re-enter the action from the opposite side. These sound like small details, but your brain will notice them because you’re smarter than the movie. 

Even the most basic and rudimentary moviemaking techniques — continuity, cinematography, editing — are failed in A Good Day To Die Hard. And don’t tell me that the movie is an escapist thrill and not a “serious movie,” which somehow means it doesn’t need to be fluent in the language of moviemaking. Don’t forget that the original Die Hard wasn’t simply a great action movie, it was a great movie movie.

It had a terrific plot, interesting performances, fully realized action set pieces, a memorable group of villains, and the characters made decisions appropriate to the scenes. When John McClane wraps a fire hose around him and leaps from the top of a building we know it’s because the stairwells are guarded, a helicopter is patrolling the skies and a bomb is about to decimate the roof. His jumping wasn’t just an excuse for a stunt, it was necessary for his survival. And director John McTiernan knew how to show us that stunt without making our heads spin.

The original film also had subtext. It was about bad guys check-mating the LAPD, but never the NYPD-bred McClane who was tougher than any other cop on that side of the Mississippi River. It was essentially an East Coast vs. West Coast cop battle. It was also a divorce fantasy, about a man being edged out of his family who is given a chance to prove how capable he is as a father and a husband by saving a building full of people from armed terrorists. What man in a failing marriage wouldn’t want to prove how awesome he was in such spectacular way? The subtext of A Good Day to Die Hard is twisted and weird. It’s essentially John and Jack, father and son, bonding over the killing of others. At one point they seem to agree, “Finally, something we both like.” And then the movie falls back into mindless, brainless, soulless action of the lowest order.

Die Hard is a perfect action movie. A Good Day to Die Hard is a perfect failure of an action movie. Please avoid it if you want to keep your good day good.

Pacino-Walken duo ponder life, death, steak

Near the end of Stand Up Guys, Christopher Walken turns to his partner in crime and shrugs, “Tomorrow became today,” he says. It’s just three words, but it brilliantly sums up the finite trajectory of our fragile lives. It is not the first nor the last time this movie surprised me.

I went into Stand Up Guys thinking it was a crime caper, and I found myself frustrated when it was not delivering on those expectations. It was a lot of old guys talking. I couldn’t find the hook. Then this wonderful film, with a subtle and oh-so-gentle nudge, veered me into its melancholic and sentimental look at getting old and — no spoiler alert needed — dying. My expectations were not met, and I’ve never been happier. 

The film, directed by occasional actor Fisher Stevens and written by first-time screenwriter Noah Haidle, is an end-of-life allegory that is surreal, often bordering on the absurd, though it starts fairly straight. Doc is picking up Val on the day of his release from prison. We pick up little pieces as we go: Val served a 28-year stretch. Doc was present for the crime but never caught. The duo were rough-and-tumble crooks in their day. Now they’re a bit creakier and a bit crankier as their career options have dried out, though now they can eat off the senior menu at Denny’s. And look, AARP magazine in the mail!

Walken is the Doc character. He’s pathetic: hunched over, in an outdated suit and with a wooly haircut that dangles over his ears. In one scene, we can see Walken’s loafers as he sits at a table and they’re a size or two too big. Is this a mistake on the costume department or is this the character shrinking in his own shoes? Al Pacino plays Val, short for Valentine. He’s quiet and subdued, but prone to those classic Scent of a Woman outbursts. He’s also hungry, sniffing out any action that’s left on the street after all those years locked up. This also explains why he chomps on a whole bottle of Viagra, or guzzles Doc’s cologne. Pacino and Walken’s storied careers have sideswiped each other, but never overlapped. Because they’ve lived tough lives in an array of tough films, they’re appearance in Stand Up Guys is appropriate. Their characters could have been called Chris and Al and it would have just felt right.

The movie is a series of mini-adventures that all take place within one night. It resembles, in many facets, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours in the way that Doc and Val’s late-night quest veers dangerously close to anarchic fantasy. They rob a pharmacy, make repeated visits to a prostitute, steal a car, break into a suit store, bust their retired getaway driver from a nursing home, attend a funeral, rescue a kidnapped woman and dine at a late-night restaurant, where Val eats something like half a cow in steaks. They’re living it up big because by the next morning Doc must kill Val on the orders of a crime boss who holds a very long grudge. Val doesn’t run because, well, Doc is all he has left.

The film has an exceptional understanding of life and what it might all mean. “We live life so that others may witness that we existed,” Val says at the funeral. He points to the ground, “There is one less person on this earth who knows our names and who we are.” He goes on to tell us that we all die two deaths: “One when we take our last breath and another when the last person who remembers who are is gone. Then we’re nothing, my friend.” To hear Pacino, himself 72 years old, say these prescient and poetic nuggets of truth is even more devastating.

I liked what this movie meant, and the way it broadcast its themes. I didn’t always like the acting, which felt forced and uninspired in certain scenes. When Walken and Pacino are on, they’re on fire. When they’re not, it’s noticeably dimmer on the screen as the two greats go through the motions. They do have some inspired scenes, though, that are quite beautiful, including the funeral with its flawless bits of dialogue. About halfway through Alan Arkin turns up as their retired getaway driver. He’s very funny, but mostly as an afterthought to Doc and Val. I think the character would have been better suited to someone not as noticeable and famous as Arkin, who we latch onto with fleeting results.

About midway through the writing of this review I turned to the internet to see if any other writers had taken better notes during the funeral scene. I was shocked to read so many negative reviews. Many of the reviewers seemed to struggle with my first hang-up: Stand Up Guys was not a very good crime caper. Duh, because it’s not a crime movie. This is a movie about so much more. I could say it’s about getting old and dying, but it’s more than that even.

It’s about being a witness to another person’s existence in this great big universe of ours. It’s about our name and what it will mean to people after we’ve passed. It’s about dying with dignity on our own terms. When a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise? Certainly it does, and the other trees take note and mark its passing. Here is a story of two very old trees who refuse to ignore the crashing of greatness.

And you thought your OkCupid date was bad

The world is ready for a zom-rom-com. That's zombie romantic comedy. It sounds more like an identity crisis, but just roll with it; Warm Bodies will surprise you.

Just when I thought our civilization couldn't hold another piece of the as-yet-to-take-place zombie apocalypse — from video games, comics, podcasts, books, movies and TV's rapidly decomposing Walking Dead — George Romero's famous genre, with its lumbering living dead shuffling around for braaaaaaains, has come up with something fresh, downright charming even.

The film begins with narration that casts a non-judgmental eye on society's deteriorating state: Here is the world now. Here is the chaos. Here is a zombie. Here is a zombie eating someone. "And, oh, by the way, I'm a zombie." The narrator is R — just the letter R — because he's been dead so long that he can't really remember the rest of the letters. Though he speaks to us with wit and a splendid self-deprecating sense of humor, R can only manage a grunt or two within the world he inhabits. He does have interests, though ("Yeah, I'm a hoarder"), and even a zombie friend who stands next to him at a demolished airport bar and grunts during their daily bro-date.

R's wandering zombie routine is interrupted when non-zombie Julie is sniffed out in a nearby pharmacy. Against R's primal zombie instincts, he saves Julie (after munching on her friends) and walks her back to his curio-stocked zombie lair on an airplane, where he tells her in one-word sentences that she'll be safe until the roaming undead scatter. She, of course, is mortified of him — his cold skin, his hazy eyes that often stare uncomfortably at her, and a gaping chest wound that she created in a fit of panic — but then he starts forming rudimentary sentences and they struggle through conversation. The movie doesn't throw her into his arms; he really has to work for it until he earns her admiration. "You're very different than all the others," she says. What she doesn't know is that her warmth and compassion are healing R's cold, dead, mucus-y zombie heart.

There are other moving parts to this machine, including John Malkovich, playing Julie's father, who is hunting for a zombie cure yet finds it unbelievable that R might be curing himself with his daughter's affection. Another subspecies of zombie also turns up: the bonies, super-feral creatures that have un-evolved even past their undead counterparts. These are the film's real villains, and Warm Bodies must have had a tight budget because the CGI models for each one are identical, as if only one were created and then ctrl-v'd in the background. The subpar effects are noticeable, yet also forgivable once you start getting attached to R and Julie's Romeo-meets-Juliet-in-a-cannibal-kitchen romance.

R is played by Nicholas Hoult, who played the curious little boy sharing the screen — correction: owning the screen — around Hugh Grant in About a Boy. He plays a convincing zombie with an impeccable shuffle and his taste in vintage vinyl is noteworthy. Julie is played by relative newcomer Teresa Palmer, a lovely actress whose job, falling for a decaying corpse, is a grueling task that she pulls off with heartwarming believability. I loved these two and their awkward moments.

Warm Bodies, a title that sounds more like a late-night feature on Cinemax than a quirky horror-comedy, takes some zombie liberties that purists will grumble at — "Zombies can't open doors! Blasphemy!" — but considering the film is so richly humorous I think the zombiephiles will forgive some of the genre-bending sequences as they did with the last original zombie movie, Shaun of the Dead. And just listen to all the fantastic music: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Chad Valley, M83 and many more. Each song fits the scenes they appear in perfectly. In one sequence, R puts on "Patience" by Guns N' Roses, a playlist choice so fitting it's as if the whole song, sad whistling and all, existed to prop up this scene. A gag with a Roy Orbison song and a Pretty Woman reference also turns up with a rewarding payoff.

The movie is directed by Jonathan Levine, a young filmmaker with a knack for movies about young people — alive and dead — treading their own path in complicated worlds with rules dictated by others. His 50/50 and The Wackness are exceptional films that showcased his unmistakable skill for the language of filmmaking. Warm Bodies is more of Levine having fun and letting loose, and I enjoyed the places he took me.

Warm Bodies asks a lot from its audience, but don't all zombie movies? Certainly if you can accept a movie where the dead rise from the earth and start eating people, then you can also accept that perhaps, just maybe, a zombie and a human can put aside all that bitter violence to fall in love. It's not that much of a stretch, and Levin guides you to that point with careful cleverness. This is the first hit of 2013, and it could not have been more unexpected.

Zom-rom-com will not be alone long, though. I predict a zombie opera before long. A zopera. Or maybe a zombie western. Hey, the more the merrier.