A Good Day To Die Hard
is the fifth film in Bruce Willis’ Die Hard franchise…and the worst out of the lot. This film is all about father-son bonding, supposedly, between John McLane and his long-lost son (whom we’ve hardly ever heard about in the previous films) and suffers the consequences of deviating from the standard McLane plot. John McLane’s USP is that he’s a good cop in the wrong place at the wrong time: and this is the first rule that A Good Day… violates. McLane purposely flies to Russia to supposedly bust out his son from prison. The screenwriting is mind-bogglingly sloppy, featuring a singing cab driver in Moscow and Bruce Willis wandering clueless outside a courthouse like a septuagenarian suffering from dementia. Probably not far off the mark given his character’s age.
One of the standout features of any Die Hard film are the villains. Every single villain in the franchise has had character, some pizzazz. The fifth is sorely lacking in this respect as for much of its running time the villains are standard henchmen who don’t even chart that high on the scale of diabolicalness, and when the final reveal comes on who the real villain is, it’s utterly predictable not to mention ludicrous what the evil plan is. Even Live Free Or Die Hard‘s villain – perhaps the one with the most ludicrous plan so far – was genuinely menacing. A Good Day‘s villain is a guy who seems to be dying from common cold. Despite all the jumping-onto-F35 action sequences, I actually quite liked Die Hard 4.0. Instead, you have Bruce Willis screaming like a little girl at middle-aged henchmen with atrocious Russian accents.
It makes me sad thinking that Hollywood will probably continue making Die Hard sequels, all worse than the previous ones, with Bruce Willis chugging along a wheelchair perhaps. What a sad end for an everyday superhero.
Rating: 1.5 / 5