A Good Day to Die Hard [2013]

It’s sad to see your favourite characters and movies mangled into milking cows, and alas, poor John McClane suffered this fate along with this latest installment of the Die Hard franchise. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good action movie, with some scenes that I have never seen done before, and a pretty decent story, but for a fifth part of McClane’s shenanigans I expected more, much more. Maybe because the fourth part was so fucking good, but the logical step in the franchise was to diversify and spread across the world the destruction and mayhem that John leaves in his wake. So I was thinking Taken, G.I. Joe and instead we got a couple of budget locations, and a phenomenal special effects, worthy of the legend, especially towards the end of the movie. The chemistry between John and his son is quite good, Jai Courtney was a great choice, he is really talented and I can see the kid taking the franchise over. And this is the reason, I think behind the downplayed role of real John McClane.

 John McClane is looking forward to his vacation, tired of all the mess that has happened to him over the years, but that will have to wait since he gets the news that his son Jack got arrested in Russia. So he decides to pack up (I am guessing guns and ammo) and head to Moscow where his son will be facing charges for murder along with one of the most powerful people in Russia Yuri Komarov. Komarov refused to give the file that implicates himself and the most powerful man in Russia Viktor Chagarin, in some very shady business, so now he will stand a “fair trial”, followed by an execution. What both of them didn’t know is that the McClanes are here in Moscow and are about to fuck shit up…

Received with relatively negative reviews, A Good Day To Die Hard made two mistakes that cost it its glory:

1. The people – First there was a floor full of people, then an airplane and an airport, after that New York city and finally the entire fucking United States. You can clearly see that in all these instances an increasing number of people witnessed John’s attempts to foil the bad guys plans, while number five is much more spy and covert.
2. The threat – Again, dozens of hostages – some killed, hundreds of hostages – hundreds killed, thousands, well you get the picture. And while threat in this one is very real and extremely dangerous we simply know that everything will be ok.

One big cataclysmic event at the end of the movie would have saved it for those drunken nights were you just wanna see a good movie, still there are three good ones, and no one can take that away from you.

Writer:  Skip Woods

Cast: Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Rasha Bukvic, Sebastian Koch

Fun Facts: Filming of the Mi-24 Hind helicopter firing scenes took place at a military shooting range where Major Peter Simon, Air Operations Commander of Szolnok Helicopter Base, Hungarian Air Force (the pilot of the helicopter in all scenes) operated the gunship’s Gryazev-Shipunov GS-30-2k (30 mm) auto-cannons and S-8 (80 mm) rockets with live ammunition to make sure the shooting effects will be as realistic as possible. Background and targets were applied in post-production.

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IMDb Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1606378/