A Good Day To Die Hard Movie Review

Posted by Charmaine Blake on Feb 19th, 2013 in Action Adventure, New Releases | 0 comments

A Good Day To Die Hard Movie Review

A Good Day To Die Hard is the fifth installment to the Die Hard film series. It stars Bruce Willis who revamps the character of John McClane as he travels to Russia to help his estranged son, Jack (played by Jai Courtney) who is currently in prison. He finds himself caught in crossfire of a terrorist plot who wants to obtain a nuclear weapon. A Good Day to Die Hard was released in cinemas on February 14th 2013. So how did the critics rate this new Die Hard series? Not so good according to Rotten Tomatoes who gave the film 16 out of 100 and Metacritic rated the movie 28 out of 100. Check out the movie review below to see where McClane missed his mark in this film:

“McClane Misses His Mark In A Good Day to Die Hard

What is it about John McClane—the catchphrase-slinging, glass-hating protagonist of the now 25-year-old Die Hard franchise—that allows him to emerge unscathed, not just from exploding skyscrapers but from the smoking wreckage of a movie as terrible as A Good Day To Die Hard? Few fans of the series would disagree that this sclerotic fifth installment should probably be the last. Yet I found myself hoping that Bruce Willis’ laconic character—who, after a quarter-century of fleeing fireballs down elevator shafts, has not yet worn out his welcome as an action-movie folk hero—gets one more chance to come back and die hard with dignity. (I may find myself forced to contend with the fulfillment of this wish, as Willis has indicated in interviews that he wouldn’t be averse to reprising the role should a sixth script come his way.)

A Good Day To Die Hard, directed by John Moore (Behind Enemy Lines, Max Payne) and written by Skip Woods (The A-Team), takes McClane to Moscow, where he must rescue his son, CIA agent Jack McClane (Australian actor Jai Courtney), from a tangled web of intrigue involving an imprisoned Russian dissident (Sebastian Koch), a corrupt politician (Sergei Kolesnikov), and a rumored stash of weapons-grade plutonium. The absence of a single noteworthy villain is perhaps this movie’s most salient flaw (along with the jumbled, barely coherent editing of a seemingly endless chase through a Moscow traffic jam). Forget about Hans Gruber, the magisterially slimy German terrorist so nobly incarnated by Alan Rickman in the first Die Hard; is it too much to ask for a bad guy as amusing as the anarchist hacker Timothy Olyphant played in Live Free or Die Hard back in 2007? Instead Woods’ script distributes the audience’s antipathy among three or four separate evildoers whose character traits at times seem pulled at random from a villain-quirk generator. One high-ranking Russian thug (Radivoje Bukvic) likes to threaten his victims while munching a raw carrot and dancing soft-shoe, which, if nothing else, gives Willis the chance to utter one of the film’s few unrecycled McClane-isms: “Whoa, Nijinksy.”

A Good Day To Die Hard’s sloppy, slam-bang visual style grabs at whatever action-movie cliché suits the needs of the moment: The stylization of aReservoir Dogs-esque slo-mo shot will suddenly give way to the faux-documentary “realism” of handheld shaky-cam, with a reverse zoom thrown in every now and then just to remind us how excited we’re supposed to be.”

Click here to read the entire review at Slate

Check out the latest “Dead Man Down Movie Trailer” right in this blog

Charmaine Blake loves movies, musical theater listening to music and taking pictures of anything that she finds interesting. She is a voracious reader and writer, and enjoys her time writing for New Movie Launches. Charmaine loves spending time with her pets and currently has a Siberian Husky, a toy poodle and a cat.