For the record, it's English. I was born in Tilbury, Essex, made temporarily 
American citizen?"
Contrary to popular belief, no film reviewer goes in to a film wanting it to be bad. Like everyone else, they love the movies and want to be entertained and to be able to come
out and declare what a fun time they’ve had. If you look for something negative hard enough you’ll always find it, but it’s much more satisfying to give a film the thumbs up and explain why everyone else should go.
Like most, I’ve loved the Die Hard films of the past. Forget the other action heroes, John McClane (Bruce Willis) is the guy; the everyman NYPD cop who just happens to be at the right place at the wrong time, every time. In 1988 has saved the
you know what I mean): and after a lengthy absence, in 2007 he saved the nation’s computer system. After all that, if there’s anyone who deserves our attention it’s John McClane. Now, six years later comes the new Die Hard, A Good Day to Die Hard, and like many, I was excited, even elated that McClane was returning. In fact, I can’t think of a movie franchise
that has ever excited me most. So, what happened?
In this new incarnation, John McClane is on his way to
there,” he is warned before boarding the plane. From the moment McClane steps out of the
airport, dazzling, head spinning mayhem and non-stop explosive carnage on a ridiculously enormous scale ensues, with no apparent concern to the consequences of innocent bystanders – and I’m referring to McClane, as well as the bad guys - and it doesn’t stop, literally, until the film’s conclusion almost two hours later. For the most part I had no clue what I was watching.
The first thing that strikes you about this new entry into the series is how different the film looks. Unlike the previous, widescreen adventures with glossy, high-production values that you could actually absorb, it’s obvious that director John Moore has decided to go a different visual route. A Good Day to Die Hard appears to have been influenced by the continual handheld camera approach annoyingly pioneered by Paul Greengrass in The Green Zone and the last two Bourne movies, and that rough-around-the edges look that Kathryn Bigelow employed so well in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Moore has cut the widescreen down to a standard ratio, automatically making the film look visually smaller than its predecessors, used handheld cameras throughout that zoom in and out and edited at the speed of lightning – I can’t imagine how this thing looks on a giant IMAX screen - and shot the whole thing on what looks like low-grade film stock. The end result is that the project looks terrible.
The artistic decision to make the new Die Hard look intentionally rough and chaotic, perhaps reflecting McClane’s inability to fully control his foreign environment, may have sounded
interesting in the planning stages, but by ignoring all the high-production values and elements that made the series popular in the first place, not to mention creating a story that’s not particularly worthy in the first place, the filmmakers have created the ultimate sin committed by the James Bond team; they’ve just made their Quantum of Solace, only worse.
The screenplay is by Skip Woods, and it’s awful. Under director John Moore’s frenetic style of direction, the film is one long high with a single low somewhere in the middle – it’s a scene where McClane actually has a moment to talk to his son – and it gives audiences enough time to catch their breath and try to work out what they’ve just witnessed. There’s no villain, at least not in the way that Alan Rickman almost stole the first Die Hard back in 1988, and I swear, from the moment you leave the theatre trying to stop the ringing in your ears from the cacophony of continual, destructive noise, you won’t recall what happened or why. All you’ll recall is that things crashed, machine guns fired and things blew up.
The stunts are spectacular, even if you never have the opportunity to enjoy them, and those odd moments of slow motion are welcomed if only for the fact that it gives you an extra second or two to take in what you’re watching, but my goodness, what an absolute, nonsensical mess A Good Day to Die Hard really is. It’s the most disappointing time I’ve spent at the movies in a long time.
MPAA Rating: R Length: 110 minutes Overall Rating: 4 (out of 10)
