Film Review - A Good Day to Die Hard

I really wasn't expecting much, especially after the last film, although I was hoping that it would at least be an entertaining, if silly action film. While it doesn't exactly fail on that score it's far from great. It's a shame because it actually starts quite well. The initial set up had promise, there's some Russian political skullduggery followed by John McClane finding out that his son is in trouble with the law in Moscow.

Things get going  pretty quickly and father and son encounter each other by chance at the start of a crazy chase across Moscow. They don't get on, which seems fair enough, the chase sequence is substantial, silly, but reasonably entertaining and it has an excellent truck.

Unfortunately things go down hill from that point, father and son discover that they both have a knack for killing people and that provides an instant bond and off they go. The plot gets sillier with each twist and comes to a conclusion in Chernobyl - although it manages to fail at using the inherent creepiness of the location.

As a Die Hard film it's pretty poor, it has Bruce WIllis against the bad guys, but it lacks a decent bad guy and more importantly it lacks the tension of him being alone against a superior force and the feeling that he's managing by the skin of his teeth to make an impact. Here he's just a gun wielding hero with no real sense of peril. On the bright side there's a few half decent wisecracks and of course the infamous line.

As an over the top action film it's not terrible, but there's better films out there to get your action fix, like the original Die Hard perhaps.

Iconoclastic, take-no-prisoners cop John McClane, for the first time, finds himself on foreign soil after travelling to Moscow to help his wayward son Jack. With the Russian underworld in pursuit, and battling a countdown to war, the two McClanes discover their opposing methods make them unstoppable heroes.

A Good Day to Die Hard is available from Amazon (I really wouldn't bother)