ON THE SILVER SCREEN: MCCLANE TAKES ON MOSCOW (A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD)

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By Brian Lafferty

February 15, 2013 (San Diego) – In preparation for this film, I spent over six hours of my Saturday binging on the Die Hard sequels (I saw the first a couple of years ago).  The experience was like riding a train careening at speeds upwards of 200 miles an hour.  Following the massive adrenaline rush was an equally intense feeling of euphoria.  It took a few days to recover.

It’ll take a lot longer to recover from A Good Day to Die Hard, but for entirely different reasons, I’m afraid.  After four successful movies, I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone derailed the franchise.  Director John Moore and writer Skip Woods royally screw it up.  It’s like going from riding the aforementioned train to riding It’s a Small World at Disneyland.

In this Die Hard, John McClane (Bruce Willis) goes to Russia to save his adult son from certain execution.  Jack (Jai Courtney) has had a rocky life growing up and has an extensive list of brushes with law enforcement.  What the elder McClane doesn’t know is that it’s all a cover; Jack is actually a spy for the CIA and he’s on a mission to grab political prisoner Komarov (Sebastian Koch) and get him out of Russia.  McClane botches it for his son and now the three are stranded in a non-permissive environment with no help from the CIA and with henchmen after them.

The action sequences are superb.  The three-way car chase between Jack and Komarov, John, and Alik (Radivoje Bukvic) and his colleagues in crime is the antithesis of those lazy, slick, and generic ones that are forgettable even in the moment and are far too frequent.  This chase is rough, unrefined, and old school.  The heavy traffic on the streets and highways makes collisions inevitable.  At one point, the Elder McClane takes a shortcut and uses the tops of cars as pavement.  The camera’s lingering on this slow crushing of each car, as well as each upturned vehicle, collision, shattered glass, and ripped-off doors gives the impression that not only did director Moore have fun shooting these scenes, he relished them.

The shootouts at the office building and the escape amid the lethal helicopter ammo are similarly crude and unpolished, but appropriate for a Die Hard film.  The same goes for the action-packed sequence at Chernobyl during the climax.  Yes, gets ridiculous at times, but it’s full of gusto and rawness.  No fancy pseudo martial arts, no pretentious shootouts with choreography inspired more by ballet than natural movement.

Do know that I just did you a favor by telling you all of the action sequences in the entire film.  I counted four total: the explosion at the courthouse and escape, the escape from the compromised safe house, the encounter at the skyscraper where Komarov is taken, and the showdown at Chernobyl.  Sandwiched between them are too-lengthy stretches of family squabbles, walking and sitting around, and uninteresting talk (more like babble, actually) that’s largely bereft of the humor, emotion, and intelligence that make the Die Hard films what they are, or at least when McClane isn't busy shooting people. 

Too few bad guys get killed.  When they do, there’s no satisfaction gleaned.  None anywhere even remotely close to the same felt when McClane dropped Hans Gruber hundreds of feet to his death, or watching the plane carrying the bad guys in Die Hard 2 explode in the air.  Up until now, Timothy Olyphant’s character in Live Free or Die Hard was the weakest element of the franchise (I couldn’t buy the Justified star as a villain).  Komarov (who isn’t revealed to be the actual villain until almost the end) is by far the worst, underdeveloped, and undistinguished villain of a series known for its formidable and memorable bad guys.

Before this one, the Die Hard franchise was one of cinema’s most consistent film franchises in terms of quality.  No one film was any better than the other.  Each writer and director brought something different each time, and it wasn’t just changing the locations.  From the “Simon Says” game in Die Hard: With a Vengeance to shutting down almost the entire U.S. infrastructure in Live Free or Die Hard, they wouldn’t settle for retreads.  A Good Day to Die Hard recycles material not only from the franchise, but also from pretty much every generic action movie.  The action is the best part about it, and I do admire it for the old-school technique, but I wish it was as creative as it was exciting and bold.

On top of that, screenwriter Skip Woods has the audacity to make jokes and humorous references to the previous films.  The last thing such a shell of a grand film franchise, one of the best of its genre, needs is self-referentiality, a reminder it’s seen better days.  Much, much better.

C-

A Good Day to Die Hard is now playing in wide release.

A Twentieth Century Fox release.  Director:  John Moore.  Screenplay:  Skip woods, based on certain original characters by Roderick Thorp.  Original Music:  Marco Beltrami.  Cinematography:  Jonathan Sela.  Cast:  Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Yuliya Snigir, Radivoje Bukvic, Cole Hauser, and Amaury Nolasco.  Running Time:  97 minutes.  Rated R.

Brian Lafferty welcomes letters at brian@eastcountymagazine.org.  You can also follow him on Twitter:  @BrianLaff.

 


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