By Kevin Cook
“A Good Day to Die Hard,” the fifth and unfortunately only second-to-last film in the Die Hard franchise, is as tired and uninspired as the original “Die Hard” was hip and fresh. Bruce Willis reprises his role as John McClane, the once-everyman-turned-action-superhero whose penchant for getting into trouble acts as the narrative catalyst for all five films (and the punchline for at least a half-dozen bad jokes in the new one).
“Good Day” is directed by John Moore, the guy responsible for “Max Payne” and the 2006 reboot of “The Omen,” and this is pretty standard fare for him. Armond White, formerly of the New York Times, was wholly accurate when he said that Moore’s “images are richer than his plots.” This film has a number of rich images and sequences. True to form, it has no plot or might as well not have one.
The fault for the incoherent, haphazard attempts at a narrative probably lies more with writer Skip Woods than with Moore. The Austin-based screenwriter’s earlier work includes “Swordfish”, “Hitman” (the movie adaptation of the video game franchise), and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” and you won’t find a good script among them. Merriam-Webster defines “shlock” as a product that is “shoddy or inferior,” and it’s for describing precisely this sort of work that the word exists. Woods is a purveyor of shlock, and “Good Day” is one of the worst scripts I’ve seen make it to the big screen.
Practically every spoken line was a lazy allusion to an earlier movie in the franchise, a perfunctory grunt, or a hammy cliché, and it was telling that more than a dozen times, large proportions of the audience at the screening shouted out the lines before they were spoken.
Willis is all smirking, smug swagger here and no heart. In “Die Hard” (1988), John McClane is a fish out of water, a lowly New York detective who travels out to Los Angeles on his vacation to try to win back his estranged wife, Holly, now going by her maiden name. In the first film, McClane is startlingly human, spends the
movie running around shoeless, and his wisecracking comes off as somewhat tragically heroic.
This time around, McClane is a grizzled superhero, and his smug, haughty demeanor doesn’t suit him the way it did in ’88. Detective McClane isn’t the underdog anymore. He’s the overdog, and it’s a disappointing twist on the narrative. The film shifts incoherently and seemingly at random from location to location, inexplicably winding up in Chernobyl, where Woods insults the memory of the legitimate and devastating tragedy that occurred there by co-opting it as just one more nonsensical plot point. “Good Day” suffers from Bond-itis, a term I’m coining here (with apologies to the 1968 comedy of the same name), meaning that it feels compelled to showcase numerous, exotic, exciting locations in order to be a legitimate action film.
It’s worth noting that the first “Die Hard” took place in an office building. It was one, single building, and McClane and Co. never left the confines.
Bond-itis stems from the supposed audience expectations built by the James Bond franchise. Bond, of course, famously travels to several different sexy locations per film. In the minds of writers and directors, audiences have come to expect this from their action films, and “Good Day” trips over itself trying to oblige, while in the process insulting moviegoers with its inexplicable and frustrating attempts to jam the various locales into its narrative and insulting the memory of a Russian national tragedy.
The movie is — in a word — insulting. At one hour and 50 minutes, the film is at least 45 minutes too long. The chase sequence in the first act is almost torturous. The action shots and gun battles are meticulously shot, and like Armond White would admit, are in their own way “rich.” But the uninhibited, orgiastic action is at best a cheap thrill, and there’s absolutely nothing going on underneath the surface to justify the length or the $92 million price tag for the film, which was recouped (and then some) by a big opening weekend.
And the profitability of the enterprise is the ultimate explanation for why audiences can expect to be subjected to more of the same. The formula works. Willis is regrettably signed on for another reprisal of the McClane role in a sixth “Die Hard,” and it will get made.
And people will watch it, and pay for the privilege of doing so. There is nothing new under the sun, and Hollywood seems almost gleeful in all that it does to confirm this. Give “Good Day” a pass, please, and be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem.
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