Review A Good Day to Die Hard

Like every other breathing human male in the world, I love the original Die Hard. 25 years and four sequels after its debut, it is still the greatest action movie of all time and in my opinion it’s laughable to even debate this declaration. But somewhere in that time period, the essence of Die Hard and more importantly the essence of John McClane have been lost. In the immortal words of Michael Scott, “…John McClane was just this normal guy. He’s just this normal New York City cop who gets his feet cut and gets beat up. He’s an everyday guy. In Die Hard 4 he is jumping a motorcycle into a helicopter…in the air. He’s invincible. It just sort of lost what Die Hard was. It’s not Terminator.” If Michael Scott could see A Good Day to Die Hard, he’d probably start retooling Threat Level Midnight into Die Hard 6 immediately because it might just get the big screen treatment. A Good Day to Die Hard begins with John McClane (Bruce Willis) in search of his prodigal son, Jack (Jai Courtney). McClane tracks Jack down on the eve of his trial for a murder in Russia and immediately heads overseas to provide any help he can. What he doesn’t realize, however, is that Jack is actually a CIA operative and soon father and son are caught up in an explosions-filled trek across Moscow in an effort to protect Russian businessman Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch) and the secret file he keeps. Shenanigans ensue.

I am 95% confident that A Good Day to Die Hard did not start out as a Die Hard movie. It reeks of a script written to be a throwaway action movie that was ill-fittingly converted into a Die Hard movie in order to (hopefully) get it streamlined into production. Perhaps this assumption is just my naïve hope bleeding through into this review as it pains me to believe that someone actually wrote this movie with John McClane in mind. Regardless, among its many sins, the biggest issue with A Good Day to Die Hard is in its inexplicable and callous disregard for everything that John McClane has stood for over the last 25 years. McClane is a regular Joe, a man with a handgun who happened to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and whose greatest moves came in his use of packing tape and a sharpie. He is brash but not cocky, funny but not silly, and hard but not unbreakable. You could see the transition from anti-hero to superhero in 2007’s Live Free or Die Hard but I think the core idea at the heart of that film was the clash between old school and new school, a subject that suited McClane well. This movie is a horse of an incredibly different and unappealing color.

A Good Day to Die Hard holds nothing in common with any of the previous Die Hard films other than the title and the name of the leading character. It is rife with epic, explosive violence that serves to fill the holes leftover by the paper-thin plot and bland dialogue and while I enjoy a good action movie as much if not more than the next guy, this one seems to be cobbled together with the spare parts leftover from a myriad of mediocre 90s movies. I half-expected Wesley Snipes to pop up at some point. It’s a bad script by Skip Woods (the genius behind Wolverine) and the direction of John Moore (of Max Payne fame) is abysmal. Moore seems to have no control over what anyone is doing on screen, least of all Willis, and his dramatic timing is nonexistent. Moreover, neither of these men  have any idea of what the Die Hard franchise is supposed to be. In fact, the company that cut the trailer for this film displayed a much greater understanding of the mythology of this series than those actually involved in the making of the film. Maybe those guys should be given a crack at the sixth installment.

For their parts, Willis isn’t awful in his role, though he’s definitely in this for the paycheck more than the legacy, and Courtney isn’t a bad companion to McClane. And if none of this had anything to do with Die Hard, if it could be looked at as a Mission: Impossible knock-off instead of an extension of a tremendous film, I might concede that it has enough enjoyable parts as to remain at least watchable if not entirely worthwhile. But since the studio behind this film decided to drag the Die Hard name through the mud, then I find it necessary to point out that A Good Day to Die Hard is big, dumb, loud, and faceless, all adjectives that the real John McClane would never stand for.

A Good Day to Die Hard Director: John Moore Cast: Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch Rated: R (language, violence) Recommended For: Fans of big, dumb, loud, faceless action movies, 14+

In Home Viewings: The Cold Light of Day

While vacationing with his family in Madrid, Wall Street trader Will (Henry Cavill) makes a routine trip into town to make a phone call. When he returns, his family has disappeared and the sailing boat they were staying on has been ransacked. Before he knows what’s happening, Will is waylaid and only avoids capture when his father, Martin (Bruce Willis), comes to the rescue. It turns out that Martin doesn’t have the cushy embassy job he’s talked about for years but he is, instead, a special agent. Soon Will is caught between two groups of intelligence troops, both after a briefcase Martin recently passed off and both threatening to kill his family if he doesn’t get them what they want. The Cold Light of Day is the sort of movie that reminds you that if everyone is saying something, it is probably true. When it opened to less than $2 million dollars and a horrid rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I had this misguided feeling that it couldn’t be as bad as people were saying it was. I mean, Bruce Willis is involved so it can’t be all that bad, right? Man oh man, was I wrong. Within the first two minutes of putting the DVD in my player, I knew I had made a mistake and my punishment for such an egregious error was to sit through the next 90 minutes and try not to yell and throw things at the TV. I barely made it.

But what makes The Cold Light of Day so bad, you ask? In a word, everything. LITERALLY. Everything. Its star, Cavill, gives absolutely no indication that he is capable of taking over an iconic character like he will in Man of Steel. Will is a bumbling fool and Cavill’s attempts to make his foolishness appealing are dreadful. Repeat: Dreadful. In fairness, he gets very little support from the established actors around him, partly because they all have limited screentime and partly because it’s very clear that all of them only came to the set because their agents couldn’t find a way out of their respective contracts. The narrative is as paint-by-numbers as you can get as almost any viewer could predict exactly what is going to happen and when right on down to the final line of the movie. Scott Wiper and John Petro must be very proud of their work on this script. And Mabrouk El Mechri provides direction in such a way that I began to wonder if he never wanted to make an American movie again and therefore sabotaged himself. It’s that bad.

If The Cold Light of Day has any redeeming quality, it is the fact that it is mercifully short. IMDB has it pegged at 93 minutes but it’s much closer to an hour-twenty and if I’m being honest, 93 minutes might have been the death of me. At least the filmmakers got one thing right. This aside, however, The Cold Light of Day is devoid of entertainment value of any kind and I pray you’ll learn from my mistake and just stay away.

The Cold Light of Day Director: Mabrouk El Mechri Cast: Henry Cavill, Bruce Willis, Sigourney Weaver Rated: PG-13 (violence and language) Recommended For: People who hate Henry Cavill and want to see him suffer