Movies – Page 6

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

Argo is an oddly unsatisfactory film for an Oscar winner. Directed by – and starring, in the lead role – Ben Affleck, it’s based on the real life story of how the CIA smuggled out a group of American embassy staffers from Tehran in the 70s under the guise of a Canadian film crew scouting for locations for a science fiction film.

The film is based on an article that Wired magazine did on the incident. The political back story behind the events leading up to the siege of the embassy staffers in itself is fascinating, and something that I’d watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel about many years ago. Sadly, this bastardised Hollywood version lacks in the kind of genuine suspense that both the magazine article and the documentary had. Where I feel Argo fails is that it tries too hard to add suspense to an already-tense plot by resorting to gimmickry of adding imminent danger, and in doing so hurts the story adding elements that are laughably and obviously fake. My other gripe is that although there are scenes where the dialogue is darkly comic, the effect is spoiled by the fact that almost all the money-shot quotes of the film were already revealed in the trailer for the film, thus reducing their comic impact when you hear it back on-screen.

Perhaps my perception of Argo was clouded by my prior knowledge of the incidents in the film. I can imagine that for someone who isn’t in the same position, Argo could be a smart, funny, and dramatic piece of work that is quite unlike the sort you would typically expect from Hollywood.

Rating: 3.5 / 5