Bacon

Not a masterpiece but better than the hacker crap that came right before it

RocShemp

That's exactly what Moore promised for the unrated cut of Max Payne. In the end, all that was added was some CGI blood and maybe one or two scenes (if anything at all). So I guess i'll believe it when I see it.

tylergfoster

Well, it could certainly not be any better, but he really seemed to be saying that it would be much longer, so I guess I hope that's more tangible.

PenguinJoe

John Moore disappoints because I think he's actually a good director he's just a studio sellout to Fox. He has so much potential but for a paycheck he'll do what the studio wants.

JimRochester

I thought it was better than than 4. I enjoyed the action but thought they did try to make him superman a little too much. I ronically the trailer for Gerard Butlers movied played tonight and it seemed like the original Die Hard, but in the White House. Or maybe Air Force One in the White House.

We had a good time. My biggest annoyance was the whole "I'm on vacation". Really!? You want to remind people of Speed 2?

Terrell

You are insane.

stingermck

No kidding. Live Free was my least favorite and then I watched this one.

I wonder if I screwed myself on A Good Day, buy watching the marathon, instead of seeing it by itself.

Nah its still lousy. Interested in a directors cut though.

PenguinJoe

I have to agree Live Free or Die Hard was horrible but I mean after like three movie how much more story can you tell about a cop who dies hard?

Besides the hair Ben Stiller's sketch is kind of prophetic this franchise will get run into the ground, rebooted, then run back into the ground.

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dex14

I can't even believe what I just saw. This was so fucking bad. John McClane...in Chernobyl? Everyone keeps saying its all Moore's fault, but this script was a piece of shit. This was the first one written specifically as a Die Hard sequel and this is what they came up with? Willis doesn't get off either, because he signed off on this. I don't know how he read it and thought this was a good idea.
16 Blocks rewritten as a Die Hard would've made a better sequel. Hell, The Last Stand would've made a better sequel if it was retooled for this franchise. I didn't think it could get any worse after the last one...man..was I wrong.

Patman

This 5th installment in the Die Hard film franchise is basically a live-action cartoon. Physics barely plays a role here in the chase scenes, and the shoot-out scenes, and the scenes in the final act. But if you turn your brain off, and treat it like an amusement park ride, it hits a few Die Hard spots, at least for me.

They turned John McClane into a terminator Dad of sorts, there's no registering of fear or trepidation by John, or of consequence for wanton destruction in the pursuit of his son in Russia in the first act. It's crazy like that. John suffers blows injuries that should have sidelined him with broken hips and torn ACLs from the action, but I guess he's been toughened up by the first four films. The strained character interplay between son and father slowed down the film, the script hamstrung the momentum with too much vagueness. Maybe a different director could have mined the interpersonal scenes better, but there wasn't much on the page, I suspect.

I'd like to have seen more of the Russian gal, they did cheat us out of stuff already shown in the trailer. Weird.

I give it 2 stars or a grade of C, just for embracing the action zeitgest of today without any recriminations.

hanshotfirst1138

"Remember... if you want anything from your films but witless stupidity and loud noises, there's something wrong with you, not the film."

Drew McWeeny, hitflix.com

OK, the 80s can end now. Please? Please?! That sound you hear is the scraping of the bottom of the barrel. Arriving as the latest in the seemingly endless wave of 80s and 90s nostalgia, A Good Day to Die Hard bursts into theaters on Valentine's Day, of all release dates. Why, exactly? Why not? No could've anticipated in 1988 that the original film would be a defining film in the history of action cinema that'd inspire dozens of knockoffs over the years. But as the first film is a proper, self-contained story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, there was no room for sequels. That's never stopped opportunistic studio heads though, and rolling on now to its fifth installment continuing the trend of over-50 action heroes, starring the now almost 60 Bruce Willis and no one else of note, the latest installment rolls into a multiplex near you.

The original Die Hard trilogy, as it was then, was formative during my teen years of little-kid masculinity, Willis' working class hero John McClane was an icon. My friends and I had an debate about the film after leaving, two of use say it didn't feel like a Die Hard movie, while the third opining that we held it to standards too high and that it'd have been enjoyable with another title and star and lower expectations. But what defines a Die Hard film? The franchise has drifted so far from its original premise of the hero trapped in a confined location with the villains that it's difficult to say. Since the third installment, the modus operandi has involved McClane and a sidekick rushing around to stop various machinations of supervillains, generally in control of the environment, facing a serious of obstacles. This time, said sidekick is his son (a reasonably engaging Jai Courtney), who secretly a super-agent. McClane journeys to Russia to reconnect with his estranged son, who turns out to be a CIA operative, and they attempt to protect a Russian prisoner who may have secret information about another key figure in the shuffling economic scene. Lots of cars smash into things and much stuff blows up. I'd attempt to summarize more of the plot, but there's really no point, as the plot, which makes little sense to begin with, beings to collapse in on itself following an utterly nonsensical third-act twist.

McTiernan's original film (What the hell ever happened to John McTiernan?) was a swaggering high-concept action picture with a simple plot and a surprising shot of emotional depth. Having watched it again recently, a byproduct of a golden age of shoot'em ups starting jingoistic macho men, I was surprised by just how well the film holds up. Willis' everyman hero actually feels pain and bleeds, the emotional center of the film involving Willis' relationship with his estranged wife has surprising weight, and McTiernan brings together the few plots twists like a terrific windup toy. The craftsmanship is top-notch (Jan De Bont's scattershot career as a director not withstanding, he's a great DP, and for the love of God, will someone please rerelease Verhoeven's early Dutch work again?), the action sequences shatter glass with a nice punch, the acting is sold all around, the villains are all as fun to watch as the heroes, the film boast genuine suspense, and is a cracking action picture, even a quarter of a century on. The second film was the weakest previous to this mess, Renn Harlin's rather limp sequel with McClane at an airport surrounded by the most incompetent staff in the history of motion pictures. McTiernan returns for the surprisingly fun third film, a cat-and-mouse with a scenery-chewing Jeremy Irons as the super-fun villain. Len Wiseman helmed the fouth outing, a much better than it had any right to be blow'em up that struggled mighty to adapt to the post-Bay world. Though it transformed McClane from a bleeding everyman to a superhero of ridiculous proportions, CG removing any physical weight from the action sequences, it was fun in a preposterous sort way, boasting Justin Long as a nice entry point for the audience as a nerdy computer hacker sidekick,Timothy Olyphant as a serviceable villain, and half dozen ridiculous but highly entertaining set pieces. Adding in sexy Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a spunky damsel in distress worth rescuing, and Live Free or Die Hard was a fun throwback to the olden days, a pleasing blend of 80s machoism and 00s mayhem. Wiseman was a functional metteur en scène, certainly not up to par with McTiernan, but next to John Moore, he looks like Bergman.

The whole of A Good Day to Die Hard feels lazily conceived ("It's in Russia. That's it, everything else can be the same."), from its nonsensical plot twists to its action sequences, from a poorly edited car chase to a ludicrous series of stunts involving a car hanging from a helicopter that recalls Sam Mendes' vastly superior Skyfall. Exactly why Moore thinks that slow-motion explosions are cool in 2001, much less 2013 is a mystery, as the movie seems to think that The Matrix never happened. But while Live Free or Die Hard's PG-13 thrills were hardly suspenseful, they were at least fun to watch, defying the laws of physics in hilarious ways. These are almost uniformly dull, destroying a whole city leading to a showdown at Chernobyl (Between this, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and Chernobyl Diaries, Chernobyl has apparently gone from the sight of a disastrous human tragedy to a cool backdrop for action and horror.), where whole buildings fall down on top of our heroes who get up like nothing happened, the franchise has devolved past self-parody into laziness that has long since stopped caring. It's not just a bad film or a franchise killer, it's something even worse. Like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it's a reminder of how dated this whole thing has become, how it stubbornly refuses to join the Internet age, and worst of all, might even highlight flaws in the original films. I just didn't notice because they were a product of the days before CG and postmodernism and were actually played straight and perhaps even meant straight. These days, the smirk swallows the movie whole, and more importantly, it swallows your money. Unlike the previous films, where the domestic material and the action were split, this installment attempts to combine the two, but almost all of the character beats and attempts at emotional resonance are by-the-numbers. They're there because the screenplay says so, not because of any logical narrative demands. Willis and Courtney sell things as best they can and the audience goodwill towards the franchise helps it limp to the end. But whereas Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey breezed along for its 170 minutes, the mere 97 minutes of Live Free or Die Hard seem to drag.

Only McTiernan has managed to bring any pathos to the Die Hard franchise, but even though Wiseman's action sequences were executed in front of a green screen without any real sense of threat or suspense, at least they were expertly blocked, but Moore's are poorly edited and feel plastic, fake, and by-the-numbers. Put anybody besides Bruce Willis in the lead role, and this would a generic, direct-to-video action flick. By the time McClane gets to his famous catchphrase, this time mercifully uncensored in a R-rated film this time, it feels like the whole thing is just there because it needs to be. As McClane drives over cars with another, we don't feel suspense and wonder if he'll get there in time, we simply look at the number of pixels onscreen the amount of chaos crammed into the frame and think about the blocking and execution. With low enough expectations, the film might be moderately enjoyable for series fans, but the whole thing feels perfunctory, like Fox knew that we'd pay if they put the Die Hard banner above the title, which we did. Moore has already begun work on a director's cut, leading us to believe that this whole thing was simply slapdash and put together because we'd pay for the brand name rather than the movie. Obviously, Fox didn't care if it was an good or even finished. At least Kim Ji-Woon's The Last Stand seems conscious of its roots in the Western and felt old-fashioned in a fun kind of way, realizing that it was a genre piece and enjoying that fact rather than thinking it was above it. This whole enterprise is simply a repackaged by-product of a long-gone era, dusted off and repainted. Maybe it's time for all of us to move on and grow up.

What were 3 & 4 written as? 4 was based on that newspaper article.

dex14

3 was called Simon Says and 4 was WW3.com or something like that. They were retooled as Die Hard movies.

dvdjunkie32

Wow, I checked IMDB and John McTiernan hasn't done anything in 10 years. His resume is pretty solid too. He is just a master at building suspense. Die-hard takes like 40 minutes before action really takes off and then it's a roller coaster ride.

dex14

He's about to go prison.

Ash Ketchum

What, they're blaming this film on him?!

Troy Stiffler

It took this long?

Deftones

It was meh. As an action flick, it was average. But as a Die Hard movie you expect more, but don't get it.

JumpCutz

Yet some people on these boards eat that shit up. And go back for more.

The old adage rings true...there is no accounting for taste.

Shannon Nutt

They'll call it UP AND DIE HARD

RoboDad

Die Hard Up?

hanshotfirst1138

That explains a lot. Wasn't 3 considered as the script for a Lethal Weapon movie at some point?

I don't know how true this is, but it's funny as hell.

Taxes?

Hey, I paid for it too. Look, I don't expect every action film to be the caliber of Die Hard or Wrath of Khan. But I do expect the film to at least be vaguely entertaining. I'm martial arts fan, I've sat through god-knows how many bad DTV films to get to some meat and potatoes. But however hideously inept Tony Jaa movies are, at least the action delivers. Dog Soldiers isn't exactly a movie with strong social commentary or rich character development and subtext, but much like The Raid it was not only made by a fan (which is used to justify many a bad film), it was made by a fan who actually understood filmmaking well enough to make a good film. It was no masterpiece, but it didn't look like it was a slapdash creation, and there was actual talent in how it exectuted itself on a low budget. At least Freddy vs. Jason had some nice visuals and had the damn sense to know how stupid it was. I was actually thinking about this when I got an incredibly rare opportunity to see the original A Nightmare on Elm Street on the big screen. A whole college film class were there, which I found out from the professor's introduction. They laughed manically at every bit of wooden acting, every slightly dated fashion or joke, and any SFX that didn't look like they were made last week. I was irritated as hell. To me, in spite of the clunky script, that movie holds up because it has an actual heart and soul and hangs together thematically, making up for its technical flaws. This cost $90 million, and it doesn't look like it has a heart, a soul, a brain, or a pulse. It's an expensive industrial point. That's the most egregious thing about it. It's not like the filmmakers went into the original film aiming to make a great work of art, but it at least looks like they actually tried to make the film good.

Troy Stiffler

He lied to the FBI to help out a high profile Hollywood private investigator.

The PI is known for working for A-list stars (to assist with divorces, talent deals, etc). The PI got in trouble for wiretapping (and paying off police and phone company employees). It would have been negative and gossipy for a bunch of powerful Hollywood folks, so everyone kept it from being a big gossipy story, and the guy represented himself in court and it went quick (not sure if he pleaded guilty or not).

mdc3000

^McTiernan got him to wire tap Charles Roven's phone, so he could hear if he was talking shit about him, so he was up to more than just lying

Troy Stiffler

Ah, so it was revenge for Rollerball.

Why So Blu?

I thought McTiernan had already done his time in prison. Guess not.