A Good Day to Die Hard: The Review

Probably a good day to end the series to be honest….

I think I’ll start off this review that way I usually do… with my underpants off and my bollocks resting on my spacebar… writing any more than this is putting in WAY more time than everyone else did for this film, but I suppose we’ll SHTART!

A few weeks ago, I expressed some concern with the title “A Good Day To Die Hard”.
Besides me imagining a man dying in full boner form on a sunny good afternoon( Die “HARD” geddit?), I found the name cleverly coaxes you into thinking its going to be a “fun” movie and that you are going to have a “”””””””good”””””””” time. The fucking GAWL of it all!!

A Good Day To Throw Bricks At Producers has the colour palette variety of Spanish grass and I know this often sounds like a minor complaint in a movie which is supposed to be gritty and rough, but I often feel like stapling my arse cheeks together when a film doesn’t vary it’s look once in a while during it’s runtime ( Which is mercifully short by the way).
I find it VERY noticeable… like waking up and GO TOBANN you notice your wife of 10 years is actually a man named Derek and NOW he’s stealing all your soap…
To give you an “out there” example the 80s Tron gives me a fucking headache. Tron looked like a slightly more colourful technical graphics junior cert project from a one-armed blind child who couldn’t reach the desk on the day. Like a disabled child though Tron was let down only by it’s technical and physical limitations. A Good Day To Buy A Rope looks like someone decided to put it through a BORING filter in post production.

I have reviewed The House at the end of the street and Battleship and I summarised that if these movies were dreams then you would be having a double cheese related nightmare, BUT AT LEAST we all KNEW those were going to be Xmen: First Class bollocks before watching. Generally If you’re going for number 2, you expect shit if you catch my drift.

I have experienced disappointment a few times in my life but nothing compares to this horse meat( And they say my reviews aren’t topical..).
This disappointment level is like being promised Disney World for your birthday but when the day actually comes it’s 1943 and the gates of auschwitz are shut behind you (Quite an awkward moment actually)

Next point: The Plot is shit and THAT shit is badly directed.
I’m not really sure what to give out about first here. The script is woeful, that much is
crystal-mazingly clear. John goes to visit his son in Moscow, his son is a spy and John gets involved in his son’s anti-terrorist mission to his son’s disapprovement or something like that…I couldn’t really pay attention the movie was shaking so much I thought it was waving at me.
So should a good director REALLY be expected to make a GREAT thing out of something with the movie subject matter equivalent of fisting a dog for your lost car keys? I should confess that after this movie, besides taking a long look at myself in the mirror to check my face didn’t get jammed in the how-could-you-do-this-to-me post-rape face forever,  I re-watched Die Hard 3.….with a vengence (………Shoots self). Die hard 3 though had some excellent action set pieces and clever writing and it doesn’t take too long to work out why it’s much better. One of the major reasons is the characters and their relationships.

In A Good Day To Get High On Calpol, the relationship between the 2 leads is
balls-to-the-wall balls. Between him and his son their relationship can be summed up in 3 words…… DADDY WASN’T THERE!!!!..This is exactly the same in Die Hard 4.0 with his daughter but I really think a relationship like this works better with a girl and father especially when you use the tough/moody/over-protective father angle. In A Good Day to Winge About The Past In Inappropriate Circumstances his son just comes off as a whiny fuckbag with all the charm and grace of something you would pick out of your pizza because you didn’t order it in the first place…. His son is supposed to be a spy so hearing him bitch at John for not being a better father in the middle of a a Russian gunfight ISN’T contributing much and he does this about 10 fucking times! Imagine if Batman pulled this shit everytime someone asked him about his relationship with his parents…

In A Good Day To Play an Erotic Game of Buckaroo Instead there are a few twists in the story and characters, but even THAT is so overdone it falls into Emperor Palpatine Star Wars syndrome i.e. Ya sure Palpatine… You planned everything from the start and it wasn’t bad writing?.. sure sure….. In Die Hard there is no way the bad guys could have this planned out from the start. It’s all WAY too circumstantial, but everytime you have a chance to think about a plot failure the movie dangles something shiny in front of your face as if you are a possessed cat.

On the lead, Bruce Willis couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag in this and he doesn’t seem to care too much in many interviews about it either. TAKE IT AWAY BRUCE!

It all screams of him being contractually forced to do the movie doesn’t it?

The 15a rating bothers me a lot too just like it did in the 4th installment. John can’t even say his own catchphrase for fucks sake!

And in Problem #45(I’ve ran out of space on my abacus):
The dialogue is embarrassing
Example: John is looking for a special important file with important information YADI YADA… so we cut to a shot of john looking out at a large group of machinery on a roof and he says this wooper..
John:
“Wow that’s a lot of hardware for one file”
There is also an extremely awkward Taxi scene at the start with a Russian driver that is frost-bitingly unfunny and I think is supposed to mirror the similar discussion John has with the black Limo driver in Die Hard 1, but fuck it’s like a plane crash between 2 cars.

Conclusion:
I find this movie hard to review, because it was so forgettable.
Very disappointing. Barely worth talking about to be honest…. I believe it’s doing quite well at the box office too which makes me a sad panda for future action movies…

SKIP IT!

I’ll give this movie a 3/10 on the chainsaw scale:

/10