An Okay Day To Die Hard...

"I'm getting too old for this..."

Bruce Willis gets bored, you know? So he made another Die Hard movie. This time we see John McClane venture to Moscow (comedy gold already, right?) to find his son Jack, played by Spartacus' Jai Courtney, whom he hasn't heard from in years.

Assuming the worst (not kidding, the worst) of his son, good 'ol John wastes no time in finding trouble. This leads to the obligatory car chase, explosion scene, and hostage situation.

The problems start once you realize that the movie only really has two characters. Nobody else really needs a name. You've got John, and Jack. Everyone else is generic and kinda pointless. The movie centers around the banter between father and son, their attempts at comedy get a chuckle out of you every once in a while, but it often falls flat. John's one liners are also uninspired at best. His "I'm supposed to be on vacation" lines happen a couple of times too many, akin to Lethal Weapon's "I'm getting to old for this shit". Even the mandatory Yippee Ki-Yay moment feels phoned in.

Story wise, it isn't anything special. Bad attempts at plot twists don't really work because you only care about the two main characters, and even when it gets the chance to do something interesting the McClanes always seem to figure it all out surprisingly quickly, leading to more action instead of interesting storytelling. And honestly, that might not be a bad thing.

The action scenes are another story. Some of these segments are legitimately jaw dropping. The chase scene comes to mind, brutally over the top and quite entertaining. The stunt work is very well done, and the slow motion is used sparingly and it really works surprisingly well.

Ultimately a lack of memorable characters leads to nothing special. This is easily the weakest of the Die Hard films. That doesn't mean it's bad, just not good. There's no Hans Gruber to give you memorable bad guy lines, there's nothing to challenge running barefoot on broken glass. It just falls flat.

This probably won't be the last Die Hard. The way Hollywood works these days this will keep going. And of course, we'll watch them... We can only hope that they can once again find their charm and they stop with the ridiculous title puns.

Fine... The title puns can stay.

A Good Day To Die Hard... Who comes up with this shit?!


5.5/10

Netflix Reviews #9

The crap fest edition.

Setup

I watched this movie one of those nights where there is absolutely nothing on and you just want to see some mindless action movie with some guns and some fists flying about.  Slow mo is required.  Seeing Bruce Willis was in this definitely threw me off, so I decided to give it a try.  The movie was directed by Mike Gunther.  He is a stunt man turned director.  I'm mostly surprised at the cast, though.  It seems Willis owed Gunther some sort of favor.  50 Cent is the "star" of this show and it is easily the worse performance of the bunch.  His character is devoid of anything interesting.  It's like a cloud of boringness follows him everywhere he goes.  There doesn't seem to be any passion that doesn't seem forced.  Bruce Willis was my favorite character as everyone else seems to be cardboard cutouts.  It was funny seeing Randy Couture in this thing as well.  Anyways, avoid.

2.5 out of 10   

Ironclad

Directed by mostly unknown director Jonathan English, this violent medieval action film deals with a Knights Templar (James Purefoy) who decides to join with aristocrats against the evil King John (Paul Giamatti) who has decided to forget about signing the Magna Carta and paid a bunch of vikings as mercenaries.  The movie fails mostly because the people casting this thing had no idea what they were doing.  Besides Purefoy, who did his job fairly well, Brian Cox plays a good guy... who came up with that?  Paul Giamatti hones one in with his performance here.  Its goofy and unbelievably bad.  I don't think I've ever seen him stink up the screen so badly.  Kate Mara plays the young wife of some other stuffy guy who apparently couldn't get it up or something so she falls for Purefoy's character in one of the most forced romances this side of Kim Kardashian and that basketball player no one remembers.  That being said, this is probably the best movie of this batch.  The action is gory and the battle scenes are alright.  By all means, don't rush out and see this, but its better than the other crap on this list.

4.5 out of 10

Cowboys & Aliens

Who would have thunk that this movie would be such dross.  How do you go from directing Iron Man to this movie?  The premise is really interesting.  Come on, cowboys and indians battling aliens?  I'm sold.  The movie leaves a lot to be desired.  First of all, Daniel Craig is completely uninteresting and seems just as uninterested at what is going on.  Olivia Wilde is there to be the only eye candy and hardly has anything to do.  The best character in this movie is Harrison Ford's Woodrow Dollarhyde.  He is crass, loud mouthed and just generally a prick, but we sort of like him.  Especially because everyone else is incredibly dull.  By the way... nice work in turning a great actor like Sam Rockwell into a boring mess of a character.  While the special effects looked pretty cool, the rest of the movie is plodding and uninteresting.  I'm surprised how much I disliked it, except for Harrison Ford.

4 out of 10

Friends With Benefits

I admit that I was incredibly skeptical that Justin Timberlake could act at all.  I'm glad I was wrong, because we get a young and talented actor that with some more work, could be a really good actor.  Not if he keeps picking roles like this one, though.  This movie looked interesting when I saw the trailer but it ended up being the usual rom-com bullshit that we are used to seeing all the time.  I think my biggest problem with it is that it starts completely anti-romantic and ends up being exactly what it was criticizing at the beginning.  Talk about a hypocritical movie.  I'm even more of a moron for believing for a second that this might be more than the usual dross.  Although I actually enjoyed director Will Gluck's previous film (Easy A), this one lacked any of the others originality or likeability.  Probably the best part was played by Richard Jenkins as Dylan Harper's (Justin Timberlake) father who has Alzheimer's.  I still think Timberlake could go on to do some great things while Kunis will probably stick to this type of role.  This one specifically is just not one you should watch.  Watch Love and Other Drugs instead.

4 out of 10

Detective Dee and The Mystery of the Phantom Flame

I have said here before how high I think of Andy Lau and his acting chops.  I think he is one of the premiere Hong Kong actors going at this moment.  That being said, this movie stunk of high budgitis.  Instead of going for an interesting story, we get talking deer and people bursting into flame from the inside.  Meh.  I just couldn't get to the story.  Maybe there was something that I was missing and the movie just didn't do enough to try to capture me and immerse me in this particular story.  The special effects also looked pretty cheap.  Now, I really like Hark Tsui, but I guess I just couldn't get this film at all.

3 out of 10