A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

Well, that was an interesting movie.

As per tradition, when my buddy Doug and I get together to see a film, we pick the most interesting of the dumb action films currently in release with big, nonsensical explosions. Why? It’s not quite by choice. When Doug and I want to go out, we like to go see a good action film for guys. I’d like to watch a good film with great action and the occasional explosion. Unfortunately, the Hollywood film industry doesn’t produce those very often. It produces action films with terrible plots and large explosions every other month or so. I’ve given up waiting for the right film to come along — otherwise, we’d never get around to hanging out together. This time, we picked A Good Day to Die Hard, Bruce Willis in his latest outing as John McClane.

Here’s the plot summary that I pulled from IMDB.com:

John McClane travels to Russia to help out his seemingly wayward son, Jack, only to discover that Jack is a CIA operative working to prevent a nuclear-weapons heist, causing the father and son to team up against underworld forces.

Makes sense, right? John McClane travels to Russia, gets caught up in some huge plot, overcomes the odds stacked against him, and he’s paired up with his son. So, that’s twice the number of heroes to root for. Let me tell you what I could not get over. Bruce Willis, and by extension, John McClane, is 57 or something years old. The original Die Hard came out 25 years ago in 1988. If John McClane was anywhere between 30-35 years old in that film, he would be between 55-60 years old.  Yet in this film, he jumping through (or getting thrown through) windows, jumping out of buildings, falling through scaffolding, getting hit by cars, etc, etc. Yet the man is still getting up and kicking ass. Um, no. And that bugged me throughout the entire film. The nonstop action was more videogame than reality. It was so videogame-like that I started to get annoyed at how unrealistic videogames themselves are, and I love 1st-person shooter and 3rd-person shooters. So imagine how annoyed I was getting.

The story is a little confusing, because there isn’t one villain, but a few different ones, and I got confused with the names. The action was over the top, and John’s re-introduction to his son Jack during the first big car chase was less “I have to protect my son”, and more “Wah, how dare you talk to your father this way? I’m going to chase you down, even though I’m not going to acknowledge the fact that I know guys with guns are chasing you on the highway.”

We wanted to see a big, explosion-filled, action film, even if it would be dumb. We got what we expected, so I can’t complain.

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)