Let's go ahead and kick off what will (hopefully) be a regular feature on the ol' blog here, movie reviews! Although maybe I should have waited and started with something a bit more promising...
Went to the movies this weekend and saw the latest Die Hard installment for my brother's birthday. I was fairly excited to give John McClane another chance even given the generally negative reviews the movie has been attracting so far. The fourth film was entertaining as hell and I thoroughly enjoyed it so I had at least decent hopes for this one.
Entertaining was about all that can be said for this movie and that's still stretching it a little bit. I'm glad we had a gift card to throw this on and for those of you yet to see it, if you can't see it for cheap then either wait for the Netflix/Redbox rental or the cable debut.
If you haven't seen any info on this you probably don't have a TV or the Internet so I'm kinda surprised you're able to read this at all. Anywhoo to sum up, John McClane travels to Moscow to help his son who's been arrested and is being sentenced to some horrible gulag for who-cares how long. (What he expects to be able to do in a foreign country to help his son beat a murder rap is a bit of a mystery but that's by far the most plausible part of the movie, which can only tell you where it goes from there.) After the initial breakout it becomes one action set piece after another, with some random conversation sprinkled in for flavor, that sees father and son argue, bond, and then kill waves of faceless bad guys. This culminates in a climactic gun battle in (I-shit-you-not) Chernobyl where the McClane boys stop the terrorists while realizing their family bond is stronger than they first thought.
So having read that description I'm sure you're all already thinking "Oscars 2014 baby!". But even with all that, the movie was fairly fun. Bruce turns in his usual McClane performance and you can't help but have fun watching it. The much needed return to the R-rating for this one allows him to toss out as much foul-mouthed and fun lines as you remember from the earlier entries. Jai Courtney as the younger Jack McClane is pretty good, although given the action vehicle he's in and his pseudo-supporting role to Willis, you don't get much of a chance to really see what he's got. Still he holds his own and doesn't drag the film down at all. The chemistry between the two isn't the strongest but they seem to at least be inhabiting the same film and space, you get the impression that there's some give and take between the two.
Really where the film fails the most is the overall story and direction which of course falls to the director (not even gonna bother looking him up cause I know I wouldn't recognize him or care to). There's almost no plotting whatsoever, you're left to figure out who's trying to kill whom via brief breaks in the gunshots and explosions. Still given it's a Die Hard flick, I'm not gonna begrudge it that much. What really lowered the bar was the utter insanity of what they decided to put on the screen. Had I known how powerful a Mercedes SUV was, I'd have been recommending them to anyone shopping for a new car for years. This thing plows off a bridge onto the top of a semi trailer stuck in stopped traffic. From there is proceeds, Sherman tank style, to drive over all of the stopped cars in front of it crushing roofs and generally treating them like a set of bumps in the road. Then after it gets back onto the road and into the chase, it somehow manages to ram off another bridge a fully armored APC-like vehicle before crashing. Yet it leaves McClane with barely a scratch to show for it. This is but one example of the kinds of crazy this movie just seems to toss out there.
Now I'm normally the first to defend a movie when it comes to the suspension of disbelief, especially to the missus when we're watching an arguably shitty movie that I enjoy. So these initial eyebrow raising moments are a bit much and it's ok so far. But even I had to repeatedly roll my eyes at the end of the movie in Chernobyl. Hazmatted baddies are stalking the perimeter but the McClanes are invincible enough to stride into the irradiated buildings with nothing more than a leather coat and tactical vest respectively? Are you fucking kidding me?! I'd have actually been happier if no one had the suits on cause then at least you could have explained it away with something like "Well the radiation has dropped to acceptable levels" or "We sprayed all that radiation neutralizing mist over everything so it's safe now". (Yeah they actually had a mist gun thing that sprayed out some magic chemical that made it safe to walk around in the buildings. Guess the Russian government just hasn't got off its lazy ass to take care of that themselves yet.) But nope, there's clearly a fallout risk here but the McClanes are just such American badasses who only care about stopping the bad guy that they're not too concerned about a little cancer.
So I'll admit there's a decent amount of griping above because this is one of those movies where it's easy to find the flaws, but overall I'd reiterate that for what it's worth the movie was a fun time. This is the type of film you just shut your mind off, cheer on the good guys, and enjoy the carnage. For the Die Hard fan it probably falls right around Die Hard 2 levels of quality but it certainly scratches that itch. And at 97 minutes it's just the right amount of mindless fun. Just make sure you aren't paying full price for it though.
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