Logline: John McClane travels to Russia to help out his seemingly wayward son, Jack, only to discover that Jack is a CIA operative working to prevent a nuclear weapons heist, causing the father and son to team up against underworld forces.
Cast: Bruce Willis, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch
Directed by: John Moore
I mean, I feel like I shouldn't take this review lightly. This is another entry into what has been a gamechanging franchise. Die Hard is one of, if not THE best action movie of all time. It set the bar for the genre and I think it's safe to say that this movie can't be reviewed without comparing it to the first four. That being said, the choice to hire an average screenwriter to helm this project has confused me. His credits to date include X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Hitman, Swordfish, and The A-Team. I'm not going to knock this writer and say that his films aren't successful, because they are. Most of those movies actually made good money. I just feel like they were destined for box office success to begin with. Each of those movies is considerably flawed with Wolverine leading the heap. It was so ridiculed by fans that they've already made a replacement film to it coming out this summer. Anyway, I wasn't going to pass on this film for that reason, considering I've watched all of the others. I was hoping they'd keep the franchise going strong, but it was impossible to avoid all of the negative buzz surrounding this when it was released.
Did it deserve the hate? Read on.
Review
This is what I mean't when I said I wasn't sure if I should take this review lightly... How am I supposed to critique this story? There wasn't a story. It's hard to talk about something that hardly existed.
John and his son follow this Russian terrorist, Komarov, who is a high priority threat. The reason for doing so is because Komarov knows the location of this file that everyone is looking for. No one really knows what's on the file, but we're supposed to assume it's important. He needs to get his daughter first, so they go and find her, she turns out to be working for other terrorists, so she takes her father captive. They end up in Ukraine, there is no file, just a bunch of bombs that Komarov had set up. His daughter wasn't against him, she just needed to free him from the Americans. John and John catch up, they stop the party before it can start. And that's it.
The only cool thing I can mention about this entire film is that the action scenes are mint. They definitely didn't chince out on the budget. This movie has to hold some kind of record for wrecking the most cars in film history. It seems like the director, John Moore, didn't want to leave any traces that he made this pathetic excuse for a Die Hard film, so he blew up every set they went to. It was comical, really.
Comedy is subjective, but there is a taxi cab scene and I can't picture ANYONE laughing at it. It was ironic, actually, so I kind of laughed on the inside. The cab ride in the first film was funny, it developed some back story, and it's actually a memorable scene from the film. Think of it this way... imagine if that scene didn't exist. Would we even know anything about John? We're given the scoop which makes scenes later on more tense. The franchise has taken a complete 360.
Topic of the Day
You can look at this movie and use it as a "how-not-to-write". I feel like this was a first draft. There is no excuse to have such vague plot. Everyone is looking for this file. Yeah, really cool... Why? What file? Why is it important? Why are John and John Jr. not aware that Komarov is a high priority terrorist that can't be trusted? There wasn't even a file to begin with. Just a bunch of bombs. This was one of the most thinly plotted action movies I've seen in a long time. Not even John McClaneisms could mask the films gigantic flaws.
Conclusion
I have to apologize for this review, because I felt there was very little to talk about. So many things were wrong I didn't even know where to start. I'm also pretty late to the party and many critics have already blasted the hell out of this one. If anything, the blame is all on the studio. It seems like they rushed this, chose a writer who didn't put much effort into it, and threw a ton of money at Bruce Willis. The pain of it all? They made 200+ million on this mess. There were some cool action scenes, but nothing else.
3/10
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