A Good Day to Die Hard

McClane's back, say and write what you want. It's still him. Yes, the reconciliation between father and son is hellish and we've seen it many times and better (Indiana Jones IV), but is that what A Good Day to Die Hard is all about? Don't be discouraged by the generally low rating and go see for yourself. What I saw was a pretty honest action movie that I perhaps enjoyed more than the second Expendables (but less than The Last Stand). Imaginative action scenes (the car chase, the helicopter ending, which is better than the fighter jet ending from the last film and is a typical McClane yippee-ki-yay improvisational moment), Beltrami's music, the visual effects, the jokes, of which there were more than I would have expected ("Need a hug"), the charismatic Sebastian Koch, references to the first film in the series (Beethoven, the villain's slow motion fall)... No problems at all. However, Jai Courtney really got on my nerves, and it seems that somebody also hurt the film badly in the editing room, as many scenes from the trailer didn't make it in (especially the taxi dialogue with the cop/lawyer makes me sad). I wish there was a longer version on DVD. Three and a half red stars.__P.S. The longer version was only released on BD, so I'll probably never see it. (23/03/2013)

McClane gives up everything that is so great about him so he can go save his son's ass. That is, he gives up everything so he can spend his vacation trying to get his son to quit selling drugs... And what a great vacation, because of course daddy and son kiss and make up, share a laugh, get a little moist, get a little radioactive. Just a great vacation in the former Soviet Union that can make you go blind. (30/12/2015)

One awaits another instalment with excited anticipation, but in the end, the Die Hard saga only gets disappointing. Bruce Willis is getting old, he’s basically an old geezer now and at the beginning, he couldn’t have looked more like an old geezer. The action is interesting at first and relatively decent, but as time goes on, the movie becomes a load of hogwash. But the stupidest thing of all is the story’s shift to Chernobyl. I mean, that’s simply unreal. The worst thing about it is the fact that the movie looks good in the beginning thanks to the action, but the cameraman gets high on mushrooms after a while and the other cameraman gets all high on dopamine, because they couldn’t have messed up the end result more. The truck just flies across the bridge over to the road and everything explodes insanely. One would think that there’s nothing easier than filming a moving car and letting it all flow without editing, but the scene begins and everything crumbles into twenty thousand sequences, shots and explosions. And what puts the cherry on top is the stressed-out assistant camera operator who probably held the camera for the first time in their life and they shook the devil out of it within the first nanosecond. Awful. Die Hard used to be about humility, a story that used to be realistic, honest and – on the other hand – random since John McClane has always been able to find himself in the world’s greatest mess. But this was just an action flick with special effects and it was downright awful. It has basically nothing to do with the Die Hard saga apart from Bruce Willis. (18/06/2013)

A bad director and a bad screenplay can turn even a good series into a disaster. What's the problem? Well, actually, it's probably everything. It doesn't work from start to finish, unfortunately even from the side of the cast. More: http://www.filmovy-denik.cz/2013/07/smrtonosna-past-opet-v-akci-2013-30.html (31/07/2013)

A masterful funeral of the best action series of all time that can only be accepted at this symbolic level. Putting this material, which for three decades reflected and pushed the possibilities and the nature of Hollywood action films in an original way, into the hands of an average B-movie director like John Moore, with a script that suppresses, if not downright ruins everything that made McClean fun was an idea worthy of immediate defenestration. I can’t be bothered to describe everything that irritated me and I don’t even know why it shouldn’t end at 1*. Maybe out of respect for Willis’s best role and for a couple of solid action scenes, but it’s better to quickly forget about it. (18/01/2020)