A Good Day To Die Hard

[AndyDursin]

I think even if this one stinks, as long as it makes back its budget, they need to finish it off properly and have the family reunion. I mean seriously, when he calls her up ON THE PHONE in the third movie -- it was so lame, like they didn't want to pay her or something? I know she's Macaulay Culkin's aunt and all and may have his agent (who might've jacked up the price of a cameo), but just pay her already!

[Monterey Jack]

That's something that always puzzled me about the third film...in the first, McClane and Holly are estranged, but come back together at the end. In the second, they're clearly still in love (McClane even asking her over the phone if they can drop the kids off with her parents and get a hotel room together with room service and champagne), and yet in the third, suddenly they're seperated and McClane is a chronic drunk. What the hell happened between the second and third movies? And without Holly or any sort of family connection, it's hard to buy why McClane doesn't just say "fudge it" and walk away at some point after being put through the ringer time and again by Simon's sadistic games. Yes, lives were in danger...oh wait, Simon was NEVER planning to kill anyone ("I'm a soldier, not a monster"), so that makes McClane's involvement in something that has NOTHING to do with him hard to swallow. Yes, in the first two films, innocent lives were in danger, but having his wife in the middle of both situations made it personal for both McClane and the audience ("My wife is on one of the planes these guys are fooling with, that puts me on the playing field"). Honestly, how much money does Bonnie Bedelia really require? Even if it's just a cameo, get her in there for the sixth and final(?) movie.

[Monterey Jack]

Still no reviews, Jesus...

[jkholm]

A.O. Scott's review is up at the New York Times site. He did not like it.

[AndyDursin]

Just saw this tweeted from Gitesh Pandaya of Boxofficeguru:

"Dont recall a film where Bruce looked so tired. Humor missing too."

[AndyDursin]

Trashed in Variety...

At the risk of sounding ungrateful for a fresh "Die Hard" sequel, Russia needs its own John McClane movie the way Uncle Sam needs a bright red babushka. On the flimsiest of pretexts, Bruce Willis' obstinate hero travels all the way to Moscow to find trouble in "A Good Day to Die Hard," teaming up with his never-before-seen son to stop a generic terrorist from stealing weapons-grade uranium from Chernobyl -- a subpar plot that feels suspiciously like someone tried to plug McClane into a preexisting screenplay. Fox's shaky bid to boost this installment's international appeal could backfire domestically.

..The chemistry between him and Courtney is nonexistent, with the younger thesp, who makes co-star Cole Hauser look expressive, adding so little to the equation, one can only hope the studio doesn't plan to pass the franchise on to him.

Watching this expendable, action-packed sequel, it's impossible not to think in such cynical terms. To Fox's credit, the series is permitted to return to its original R rating, which means McClane can once again cuss freely. (Oddly, cutting back on language, rather than violence, earned the previous pic a PG-13.) Still, the closest thing to a new catch-phrase screenwriter Skip Woods can muster is the exasperated, "Some fuckin' vacation!" -- a line that openly contradicts the reason the film sent him to Russia to begin with. What vacation? If this is McClane's idea of time away from the office, they'd better send him back to work before he hits retirement age.

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117949241/

[Monterey Jack]

Still no reviews, Jesus...

SEVEN PERCENT approval out of fifty reviews on RT...no wonder they kept a tight lid on the film until two days before release. Again, I have a free ticket, so I'm seeing this regardless, but still, so far this sounds like it's going to make Sucks With A Vengeance look like a masterpiece in comparison.

[AndyDursin]

I think it ought to be retitled A GOOD DAY TO WAIT FOR VIDEO myself.

The reviews are just atrocious, as I basically expected over the last day or two. I'll definitely wait now for my review copy to roll in sometime this summer. I admit I had my grave suspicions when John Moore was hired -- while most of the fanboys got all excited because it was going to be R rated, nobody wanted to pay attention to this second-rate hack taking over what is clearly a "B" film with mediocre looking special effects, a European location shoot and nobody in the cast other than a MEW cameo. Add in the 97 minute running time and it's just a check-cashing venture for the studio and Willis. I mean, I realize he stopped caring about quality control a long time ago (have you seen how many direct to video films he's doing now?), but this is DIE HARD we're talking about. You'd think he wouldn't want to soil one of the better cinematic legacies he's been a part of (at least parts 1-2, which launched his career) but sadly he seems as if he'll star in anything if the money is there.

It's also surprising because LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD did well and was an "A" picture with Len Wiseman directing it. I guess they felt they needed to scale back for this sequel, which is, well, an odd move, though in hindsight, the writing was on the wall (Moore, European location shoot, no-name cast, February release, etc.).

[DavidBanner]

The reviews across the board are pretty bad. Truly a shame. It appears Fox went cheap on the production but then tried to gussy up the works in post. Maybe this will, like Star Trek V, inspire a better effort for one more movie. But I have a feeling the ship may simply have sailed at this point.

The one really good movie in the bunch was the first one. The second one has some great lines and one great surprise setup (the plane crash), but it winds up being just a bigger retread of the first movie. The third one actually starts very well and sustains for about 45 minutes. Somewhere around the point that they get to the aquaduct, the movie passes all ability for the audience to think Willis can survive the various antics. But before that point, there are plenty of inspired gags. I didn't have a problem with the estrangement between McClane and his wife, as they made clear he was back up to his old stubborn tricks in New York, and I enjoyed that they really shot the heck out of New York City. The fourth movie was an odd animal in that it didn't feel much like a Die Hard movie in its premise or execution. The PG-13 rating also hurt it, in that McClane sounded muzzled. And it very quickly got into fantasy territory. The unrated cut on DVD at least sounds like a Die Hard movie.

For myself, I'm glad to have the first movie and the first 45 minutes of the third movie on Blu-ray. Don't really need anything else.

[John Johnson]

On a side note.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar ... rview.html

[AndyDursin]

Doesn't look like all the bad reviews will curtail people from going out to see it, at least initially:

http://www.deadline.com/2013/02/die-har ... midnights/

‘Die Hard 5′ Opens To Big $840K Midnights

THURSDAY 11 AM: Yes, I know: that should have been $840K in midnights for A Good Day To Die Hard. and not millions. That’s a nice Valentine’s Day present for Twentieth Century Fox and the fifth installment in its franchise.

[AndyDursin]

Thinking about this today, and again, I keep going back to what a mistake hiring Moore was. There are some younger guys out there doing a good job making action movies -- Justin Lin being one of them. The last FAST AND FURIOUS film was as exciting a genre film I've seen in years -- my guess he was just too expensive for Fox's tastes so they went in-house, saved money and here's your result. Moore also is an executive producer on this film along with writer Skip Woods, whose credits read like a litany of garbage (HITMAN, A-TEAM, X-MEN ORIGINS WOLVERINE), also all of them made for Fox.

Come on guys! UGH.

[AndyDursin]

This writer gets it -- totally agree with his write-up on the prior 4 movies:

As far as action movie franchises go, the Die Hard films hold up pretty damned well. The first one is obviously a classic: Grierson summed up its enduring charms quite well over at IFC. But the way the movies worked never seemed a proper fit for a franchise. The greatness of Die Hard lies in large part in its randomness. This guy really isn't supposed to be here today; it's just John McClane's bad luck that he happens to be in this building during a massive heist. Then it turns out to be Hans Gruber's bad luck, too.

It was telling that what was new and fun about Die Hard—that it had an unlikely hero trying to escape an enclosed space—became movie-pitch shorthand: Die Hard on a bus, Die Hard on a train, Die Hard inside a cow. Die Hard was so different and smart that it could only copy itself, and become something worse.

But that something worse was still pretty good. Die Hard 2 was more bloated and more vain than the first film— at this point, Bruce Willis realized he was a pretty big movie star—but it was still probably the definitive sequel: The same story but different, bigger. Die Hard on a plane! The movie keeps the spirit of the original but still brings more to the game, including a shocking plane crash sequence that is still pretty jaw-dropping, 23 years later:

The third movie, Die Hard With a Vengeance, is aggressively stupid and served to essentially end the franchise until we all rediscovered that we liked big old movie stars in our action movies sometime in the last five years. It basically existed so that Samuel L. Jackson could get some buddy-movie heat from Pulp Fiction, thought it is responsible for one of my favorite poster quotes of all time. ("Fun with a vengeance!") It piled on stunt after stunt but lost a ton of the charm of the McClane character and included the most ludicrous scene in the whole franchise, when Willis is ejected from a New York City manhole at exactly the same time Jackson happens to be driving by, saving them both. At this point, the McClane-as-American-James-Bond comparisons stopped; the character and the franchise had run out of gas.

Which was what made 2007's Life Free or Die Hard so fun. Willis, comfortable in his most recognizable role, just has a cheerful good time going insanely over the top, with every possible lunatic action-movie cliché inflated to the goofiest degree. Your favorite might be when a fighter plane chases a truck down an interstate, but for me, it's tough to beat the moment when McClane crashes a cop car into a helicopter.

That movie also had the good sense to have a terrific villain, key for any Die Hard movie: Timothy Olyphant, the best since Gruber himself. Of all the old-action-stars-returning-for-another-lap movies of the last decade, Live Free or Die Hard is my favorite, and it got me excited for one more.

I was wrong to be excited. A Good Day to Die Hard is shockingly lackadaisical, a Die Hard movie that barely notices it has John McClane in it. Here, McClane heads to Moscow to try to save his son from Russian prison, but he's such a bad dad he doesn't even know his kid is a CIA agent. They end up having to shoot themselves out of various predicaments that never feel inventive, well-thought-out or even noteworthy. Willis has been known to sleepwalk through roles he doesn't care about before—which has made his great performances in movies like Moonrise Kingdom and Looper all the more special—but he's never done it as McClane. He seems to know this is junk, though, and his performance is basically him saying, "I'm supposed to be on vacation!" three or four too many times. The movie is basically indistinguishable from those old junk action Willis movies like Striking Distance or Hostage or Mercury Rising, all the ones that devalued his career in the first place. John McClane is supposed to be better than that. Also, Willis is a talented enough performer than you don't ask him to have banter with a stiff like Jai Courtney, who plays his son; Courtney is basically a poor man's version of Sam Worthington, and just typing that I realized that's one of the meanest things I've ever said about a person.

This is clearly the worst entry in the franchise, a movie so lazy and dull that if you simply took the Die Hard out of the name, it might as well BE Mercury Rising. This is a Die Hard movie where no one is trying and nobody cares, which is depressing; even Die Hard With a Vengeance gave a ****. The goodwill accrued with the last installments will probably bring people to the theater on opening weekend, but it wouldn't surprise me if this dreck kills the whole enterprise entirely. It's probably for the best: John McClane is running out of family members we'd never heard about before that he must travel to some far-away location to save. I'll still remember the whole series fondly, but mainly because I've already forgotten about this one.

http://deadspin.com/5984217/a-good-day- ... socialflow

[Monterey Jack]

A Good Day To Die Hard: 3.5/10

Well, at least Sucks With A Vengeance can now rest easy knowing it's the second-lamest film in the franchise. This film is a disaster, rife with hideous shakey-cam action sequences (an early car chase seems to have some impressive stunt work, so too bad the camera operator and editor won't let us see any of it), ugly cinematography, bland villains with a particularly forgettable motivation (I honestly can't remember what they were trying to do just a few hours later...steal thirty-year-old plutonium?), and piss-poor visual effects (there's a CG body double for McClane hanging off a helicopter at the climax that put me in mind of that hideous "glacier surfing" setpiece in Die Another Day ). Pretty much the only good thing that will come out of this mess will hopefully be a reappraisal of the unfairly maligned Live Free Or Die Hard (people complaining about McClane riding the harrier jet in that film should geta load of the helicopter scene in A Good Day...at least in Live Free, it was actually Willis - or at least his stunt double -- hanging on there). For all of the complaints about the "pu$$y" PG-13 on the last film, A Good Day's R-rating is essentially meaningless, with slightly gorier blood squibs and a handful of F-Bombs (and McClane's catchphrase isn't covered up with a gunshot this time). It's like the two Alien vs. Predator movies...the first wasn't great, but it was watchable, but everyone swore a blue streak about the PG-13, so they went fully R-rated for AvP: Requiem, and the result was the worst film in the history of both franchises that spawned it. Thank God I saw this on a free ticket...what a waste of $9.50 it would have been (ticket prices went up fifty cents this week, dammit). As much as I'd like to see McClane get back together with Holly, I honestly don't give a damn about seeing a sixth film if this is the best 20th Century Fox can muster for one of their longest-running tentpole franchise, an entry that looks and feels like a direct-to-Redbox cheapie starring Wesley Snipes.

[Eric W.]

I thought this would be a decent romp although then again: If it's not summer time or holiday time it's usually a bad sign for a movie like this.