“A Good Day to Die Hard”: Bruce Willis smirks the Russians to death
After Arnold and Sly's recent flops, Bruce is back with the latest idiotic but action-packed "Die Hard" sequel
Topics: Movies, Action movies, A Good Day to Die Hard, Bruce Willis, Die Hard, sequels, Russia, Rolling Stones, john moore, max payne, Entertainment News
So Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis – with 188 years of life on the planet between them — have all released new action-adventure movies within the last month (pairing themselves conspicuously with younger co-stars), and God help me, I sat through all three. Willis is the baby of the trio at 57, and it’s reasonable to expect that the bewildering and idiotic “A Good Day to Die Hard,” the latest installment of a franchise that has yet to fail at the box office, will prosper where “The Last Stand” and “Bullet to the Head” have bombed. It’s also the worst of the three films, by far, at least if you’re sticking somewhere in the vicinity of old-fashioned ideas about the coherence of plot, characterization and setting, but I recognize that’s irrelevant. (For the record, Stallone’s “Bullet to the Head,” while totally cartoonish, is more fun and better made than the other two.)
“Die Harderer” or “Die Hella Hard” or “Faster, Pussycat! Die Hard!” or whatever it’s called features a killer motor-vehicle chase on the congested highways of Moscow and a dude getting chopped into pulp by helicopter blades. At Chernobyl. Oh, and a fair number of close-ups of Willis, positioning his jaw just so and delivering that smirk, the one that comes with quotation marks or a trademark symbol. What else do you actually need to know? It’s not like there’s some shark that can be jumped in a “Die Hard” movie, some frontier of crassness or mendacity or assholishness that has not previously been crossed. There’s no point in acting all outraged about the fact that the fourth sequel to a 1988 action hit is pretty much three well-staged action sequences strung together with the dumbest imaginable connective tissue.
Still, I can’t help observing that the aggressive stupidity of this movie is impressive. It’s not just that it’s an ugly fantasy of masculine dominance aimed at 11-year-old boys – or, more precisely, at adult men who wish to cling to the 11-year-old joy with which they first encountered this kind of movie – it’s also a fantasy that rests on the idea that you’re better off not knowing anything about the outside world because there’s nothing to know. Willis’ character, John McClane, who is still supposedly a New York cop, goes to Russia in search of his bad-seed son, Jack (the impressively muscled Jai Courtney, of TV’s “Spartacus: War of the Damned”), who turns out to be a CIA agent who is trying to spirit some evil rich dude out of the clutches of some Moscow government minister dude who is even more evil. We can tell that about the second dude because every time we see him he’s walking at normal speed and talking in Russian on his phone and then, whoosh! he slows into super slo-mo, with ominous music playing. Evil!




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