What would be the perfect new movie to see on Valentine’s Day? There are plenty of choices this year and there is no real answer to this question since it would be depend on the couple involved and every couple is different from each other. While there are many new movies opening this weekend, it is a sure bet that “A Good Day to Die Hard” will emerge as the box office champ by the time all the smoke clears.
The fifth entry into this action series finds John McClane (Bruce Willis) heading to Russia to support his son, Jack (Jai Courtney) who is caught up in a political trial going on there. What John doesn’t know is that Jack is really a CIA operative and all hell is about to break lose. Father and son must team up to stop this new group of bad guys. Complicating matters is that Jack totally dislikes his father.
How does this movie rank among the other Die Hard movies? For starters, it is the shortest. The guns are bigger and so are the explosions. They certainly crammed as many action sequences as they could in this under 100-minute movie. There is a car chase at the beginning that starts off pretty lame, but gets better at the end and that sums up how this movie plays out as a whole.
John Moore directed “A Good Die to Die Hard”. He comes in with the weakest resume against the other directors of the franchise and ends up doing the weakest job. It would explain why many of the action sequences are not as good as they were in the other movies. Moore is not the only weak link here; Jai Courtney is hardly impressive as the man who is the son of the famed John McClane.
We saw in the last movie, “Live Free or Die Hard” that John McClane’s daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), did not care too much for her father either, yet it is pretty interesting that Jack McClane chose to follow in his father’s footsteps by choosing a career in law enforcement. Apparently John Moore’s only direction to Jai apparently was “Okay, you hate your father. Got it? Great! Aaaaaaaaaand… ACTION!” An actor needs more to go on than that. Jack is so resistant to his father’s help he actually gets angry and upset when his father saves his life. Moore’s clearly not an actor’s director because any time he attempts a tender moment between father and son he comes up short. Even Bruce Willis appears to be just going through the motions when the movie first begins. The intensity we are used to seeing from his character is noticeably absent until half way into the movie.
After going with a PG-13 rating its last time out, “A Good Day to Die Hard” returns with an R rating. The violence and the language are revved up once again, which is a staple in the franchise many fans have come to love along with exaggerated sound effects. As for the bad guys in this movie, some of them are interesting while others come across as rejected James Bond villains.
It’s not all bad news for John Moore. He does a good job on many of the action sequences and he does not always succeed at building tension, but he does not always fail either. You have to suspend your disbelief more than you ever have before in a Die Hard movie. Still, “A Good Day to Die Hard” delivers what you expect from it. It could be argued that this is the worst entry in the franchise, but even at its worst, “A Good Day to Die Hard” is better than many other action movies out there.
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