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.
 |
| 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.
