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.
