Two stars. Rating: R, for profanity and relentless violence
By Derrick Bang
The results of the 2013 Geezer
Action Flick trifecta are in, and the winner remains the first contestant out
of the gate: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who displayed the good sense to insist upon
solid supporting characters and a reasonably logical script in The Last Stand, while poking
good-natured fun at his own advanced age.
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| Let's go do what we do best, John McClane (Bruce Willis, left) cheerfully advises long- estranged son Jack (Jai Courtney). What they do best always involves lots of running, jumping and gunplay, which rarely musses their hair. Ah, the life of a movie star in a laughably stupid action flick... |
Sylvester Stallone remains dead
last, his laughably stiff granite features unable to breathe any life into Bullet to the Head, a tawdry, nasty
excuse for tasteless, tawdry brutality.
Which brings us to Bruce Willis,
only marginally better than Stallone, due to an impressively stupid script that
eschews any semblance of plot logic, while wreaking havoc with the natural laws
of physics and numerous other well-known areas of science.
Hollywood has made an art of
brain-dead displays of mayhem, but A Good
Day to Die Hard may be in a class all its own. I can’t recall ever seeing
so much personal property destroyed during the course of a 97-minute movie, and
I’m certain this display of wretched excess sets a new record for smashed,
crushed and otherwise mangled moving vehicles.
Mind you, the human bodies
involved in all this carnage should be reduced to pulped hamburger dozens of
times over, and yet everybody — good guys and bad — somehow survives
multi-story falls, endless hails of bullets, hard landings within construction
sites, shard-laden plunges through plate-glass windows, and accelerated spins
into the air during highway pile-ups involving multiple vehicles (no air bags
in sight) ... with no more than a few scratches and minor contusions.
Really, Willis should just
acknowledge the obvious and don the blue uniform and red cape. At least that
would explain his character’s apparent invulnerability.
Have you noticed, over time, how
the military-grade weapons used in movies of this nature have gotten larger,
faster and deadlier ... and all concerned still
can’t hit the broad side of a barn? Not even armor-piercing sniper rifles can
draw a bead on Willis’ immortal John McClane, and if that isn’t silly enough,
he’s also able to avoid batteries from Russian Mi:24 and Mi:26 attack
helicopters, as if engaged in nothing more troublesome than a spirited round of
dodgeball.
It reaches a point — rapidly, in
this flick — when all the on-screen carnage just becomes silly and tiresome.
Even for a live-action cartoon, Skip Woods’ mess of a script goes way beyond
dumb.
When one despicable fellow
confronts our hero while smiling and chomping on a carrot — an affectation
apparently intended to display the villain’s bad-ass nature — I honestly
expected him to say “What’s up, John?”
Heck, that would have drawn a
more generous laugh than any of the clumsy lines that pass for humor in this
mess.
The plot, such as it is:
McClane, suffering an unexpected
bout of parental angst, learns that his long-estranged son Jack (Jai Courtney)
has been arrested in Moscow. Assuming the worst, recalling Jack’s younger days
as a juvenile delinquent, John boards a plane after accepting a ride to the
airport from worried daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, in a fleeting and
truly pointless cameo, reminding us of her presence in 2007’s Live Free or Die Hard).
Ah, but John doesn’t know that
his son, far from being a criminal, actually is a CIA operative under deep,
deep cover. Jack has orchestrated his arrest specifically to be imprisoned
alongside Russian criminal-turned-whistleblower Komarov (Sebastian Koch), who
intends to expose and thwart the political ambitions of former partner Chagarin
(Sergei Kolesnikov) during a public courtroom trial.
Chagarin isn’t about to let this
happen, so Jack positions himself next to Komarov, in order to protect the man
when the inevitable assassination attempt goes down. This turns into an
explosive affair, with the courtroom leveled to rubble by massive bombs, and
then invaded by a paramilitary assault team.
And, wouldn’t you know it, John
McClane’s taxi drops him off in front of the Moscow courthouse, just as all this goes down. Every travel
agent in the audience will marvel at such split-second timing.
Somehow, impossibly, Jack and
Komarov manage to flee the building, just in time for the inevitable meet-cute
father/son reunion. It doesn’t go well, and the bewildered John barely has time
to register astonishment — his wayward son, a New Jersey 007? — before being
thrust into a hell-for-leather car chase.
Credit where due: It’s one
helluva sequence, and it just keeps getting more audacious. Jack and Komarov
take off in a fragile Sprinter van, trying to evade the bad guys directly
behind, led by Chagarin’s henchman Alik (Radivoe Bukvic, the carrot-chomper),
who pilots a custom-made MRAP (mine-resistant, ambush-protected) military
vehicle that can flatten anything in its path. John brings up the rear, first
in a Unimog and then — his first ride meeting an untimely demise — in a G
Wagon.
Director John Moore (responsible
for the ill-advised remakes of The Omen
and Flight of the Phoenix, among other
forgettable flicks) and stunt coordinator Steve Davison stage this vehicular
free-for-all, at least in part, on location within Moscow’s traffic-congested
Garden Ring; the authentic setting adds some international flavor to the
overall chaos.
The trouble, however, is that
this is an impressive sequence ...
but it comes early, in the first act. That means Moore will spend the rest of
the film trying to top himself, ergo the subsequently bigger, noisier and
dumber displays of carnage. We just know,
for example, that when John, Jack and Komarov walk into a luxurious ballroom
laden with gorgeous chandeliers and huge windows, that everything soon will be
blown into bits of flying glass.
Subsequent plot developments
eventually lead to Chernobyl — actually a spooky former Soviet military base in
the village of Kiskunlachaza, abandoned following the collapse of the USSR —
where Komarov has hidden the all-important file that will expose Chagarin’s
dirty deeds. By this point, several key characters have indulged in various
double-crosses, solely to advance an increasingly preposterous storyline.
Since we couldn’t have a star of
Willis’ stature attempting to be heroic from within the face-concealing
confines of a haz-mat suit, you’ll be impressed to learn that the Chernobyl
facility’s dangerous radiation levels are dispelled by — I’m not making this up
— the wave of a magic, misting wand. That way, everybody can shoot at each
other in their street clothes.
Honestly, I haven’t seen natural
laws violated so blatantly since Mariel Hemingway survived being flown into
deep space, without any sort of protective suit, back in 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Just
how dumb and ill-informed do Moore and Woods think we are?
Willis sashays through every
scene with signature smirk intact, as if delighted by the fact that he’s making
so much money on such a dim-bulb production. Woods tries for a bit of
father/son angst when John pouts over Jack’s refusal to call him Dad, but
neither Willis nor Courtney can be bothered to inject any credible emotion into
such exchanges.
Rising Russian actress — and
ranked chess master (!) — Yuliya Snigir supplies some eye candy as Irina, the
daughter Komarov hopes to take out of Russia, in exchange for cooperating with
the CIA. Longtime B-movie stalwart Cole Hauser briefly pops up as Agent
Collins, who manages the CIA safe house where John first tries to conceal
Komarov. (I say “briefly” because no minor character survives long in this
mess.)
Composer Marco Beltrami supplies
a bombastic, shrieking score quite appropriate for all this absurdly
choreographed mayhem, and editor Dan Zimmerman certainly is kept busy,
integrating the multiple camera angles involved in each increasingly frantic
melee.
At the end of the day, though,
the result is more exhausting than entertaining. While this fifth Die Hard entry isn’t as distasteful or sadistic
as Bullet to the Head, it’s even more
hilariously illogical.
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