Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate.
Jean-Paul’s rating: 1/5 stars
a.k.a. Die Hard With a Paycheck. a.k.a. A Good Day to See Any Other Movie.
“You’re going to pay me how much? Let’s do this thing!” Those are the words that I assume Bruce Willis said to the producers after rejecting the script.
Say you are John McClane’s son, an undercover CIA agent that spent three years in Russia building a cover within the various underground crime syndicates. Say your master plan is to attempt to murder someone so you get thrown in jail so you can rescue someone from jail who has secrets the CIA wants. Say, through massive suspense of disbelief, this plan succeeds. Why in the world would you be doing all of this under your real name and not under a cover name with a solid back story. Oh, that’s right, how else would John McClane know that he should travel to Moscow to, I don’t know, witness your trial I guess. Either that or this is the reason why it took us so long to find Bin Laden. “Hi, I’m Jack McClane, CIA agent, can I join your illegal gang? Oh, crap, I shouldn’t have told you I was a CIA agent. We’re still cool, right?”
So begins “A Good Day to Die Hard”. To say that the script is as coherent as a raving lunatic is horribly disparaging to raving lunatics. The rest of the movie continues apace. Jack rescues Komarov in the nick of time and John accidentally screws up the rescue. Feeling really bad about his poor relationship with Jack, John decides to save Jack from people who are trying to make him dead. This leads to an incredibly silly chase scene where, at one point, John decides to drive off a bridge down to the traffic below so he can catch up with Jack when there is an on ramp clearly visible in the background.
Through a series of zany hijinks and double crosses, the McClane clan finds themselves driving to Chernobyl to stop the really boring bad guys. The conversation goes something like this: “Chernobyl?” “Yes, Chernobyl.” “The place with all the radiation?” “Yes, the place with all the radiation.” “Shouldn’t we be worried about that?” “Yeah, but what are you going to do?” “Ok, let’s get us some bad guys because that’s what McClanes do!”
I wish I were kidding. So now the McClanes are in Chernobyl radiation suitless and all the bad guys have radiation suits. It’s not good cinematics to fight the main bad guys when they’re in radiation suits so enter the special de-radiate spray! They spray one room and all the bad guys take off their suits completely ignoring the fact that they have to, you know, leave the room at some point.
Why? Why was this movie made? Maybe if they tried harder to make this a bad movie it would have actually been a good movie. You know, like “Hudson Hawk”. But nooooo. I see a great future for this film in Riff Trax.