A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

A Good Day to Die Hard
Directed by John Moore
Starring: Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Yuliya Snigir, Radivoje Bukvic, Sergei Kolesnikov, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Grade: D+

For those at the helm of this appropriately ‘dying’ franchise it was a good time to start trying hard, but John Moore’s “A Good Day to Die Hard” is sadly as dumb as most action flicks fobbed off to the public, if not dumber. The action set-pieces have clearly swallowed up a sizeable chunk of the budget, a vehicular pile-up which leaves Willis’ John McClane and his estranged son Jack (Courtney) on the same team a sequence bracing enough to grace an installment of the “Mission: Impossible” series. It’s the only thing the filmmakers can be remotely proud of, every other element of “A Good Day to Die Hard” as lazily conceived as even the most routine actioners.

The plot involving Russian politicians is a laughably cartoonish hark back to the days of Cold War propaganda, while Skip Woods’ script attempts to inject an angst-ridden through-line narrative involving the father and son’s tattered relationship mending itself through comradeship and bloodthirsty identification with one another. The father-son bond is wholly unconvincing, both because Bruce Willis – clearly scrimping around for any buck he can get at the moment – is as bemused with this story as half the audience I saw the film with, and also because Jai Courtney is too old, and too much of a leading presence, to be saddled with the role of Understudy.  As if it wasn't enough to consign Eastern-European politics to a series of sneering, bearded men grandstanding in bare ashen rooms, the film dredges up the Chernobyl disaster to frame the murky motivations of its villain, before McClane Sr. and McClane Jr. somehow manage to leave the nuclear wasteland in a worse condition than they found it. What sort of botched idea of heroism is that?