It’s a rarity for franchises to make it through five installments. It’s an even larger rarity for the back end of the five installments to be any good. So we should expect nothing less than mediocrity from this “Obnoxious, over the top and often dull” (Claudia Puig) sequel whose “value is on the wane” (Steven Rea).
It’s truly unfortunate that a promising franchise from the late 1980’s that all had the cleverness and nuance we could ever want from a series of action films got caught up in the perils of its own perpetuations. John McClane (Bruce Willis) will always be a badass, so casting him as the gun-toting protagonist (even in his fifties) is not nearly as dangerous as casting Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones as expecting him to make stunts look legitimate. However, Live Free or Die Hard mired the fourth installment into silliness and made New York City and McClane more akin to Gotham and Batman than it drew us closer and made us root for the blue-collar McClane.
A film set in present-day Russia that reunites the estranged McClane with his CIA operative son is a lame attempt to keep this franchise running, set under the guise of parent / progeny bonding.
The most damning evidence against this film’s quality is its February release. The rest of the Die Hard films have been released in the summer months, a standard time for blockbusters that won’t grab nominations at the end of the year, but are overall pretty good at what they are (the semi-exception here is Die Hard with a Vengeance, which was released in May).
Movies released in February (Silence of the Lambs excepting) might as well have been typed by sloths, filmed with cameras propped by chairs, and edited via meat grinder. Ironically appropriate for A Good Day to Die Hard: February is the Northern-most part of Siberia for films relevance.
Some other gems from the current reviews:
I don’t think it knows where it’s going. I’m not even sure it cares – Xan Brooks
McClane has been stripped of any real traces of an actual three-dimensional character. We feel as if we’re watching Bruce Willis in a Bruce Willis movie in which Bruce Willis can survive anything while taking out the villains, video-game style. – Richard Roeper
No one expects Good Day to replicate the excitement of the original Die Hard, but this assembly-line product doesn’t even live up to its immediate predecessor. – Josh Ball
To say this is the worst of the series doesn’t give its unique level of awfulness justice. That’s largely because the franchise hasn’t had a stinker up to this point, but this is the ‘Rocky V’ of the beloved franchise and it reeks. – Jeffrey Lyles
