1 out of 5

Director: John Moore

1. Bruce Willis fan, 2. Rating this as a Die Hard movie (though as an action flick, it’s still pretty poor), 3. I feel I had realistic expectations for this – which is to say, Die Hard 4 had Something To Prove, so we saw Bruce more in the action scenes, and if you heard director Wiseman speak about the film, there was reverence for the series that absolutely came across in the presentation – it felt like a Die Hard film, and Willis reminded us all of how fully he created that McClane archetype of the everyman.  With Die Hard 5 galloping rather closely on 4’s heels, I assumed it would be in the vein of Die Hard 2… sequelitis.  Too much reliance on one-liners and wink-wink remember this junk, and the character getting lost behind huge action.  But with DH2, Bruce was still Bruce.  Frankly, A Good Day strips everything from the franchise, including McClane.  And Willis can tell that the vibe is different – this is not his game face, this is his DTV face.  It doesn’t help that despite John Moore having some great sets (and borrowing John McTiernan’s beautiful sense of diffused lighting) and executing some interesting action *ideas*, there’s no sense of consequence to any of the destruction and whatever the 180 degree rule is for action sequences is repeatedly violated – inside shot of car of Bruce driving and turning the wheel, then outside shot of… a different car…?  It’s sloppy editing that’s borne of the Transformers school.  Some moments ..almost.. work – Jai and Bruce’s chemistry almost feels legit, or McClane almost feels like the everyman, but then that feeling is dismissed with a poorly scripted f-bomb to counter the PG-13 whines from DH4.  This just wasn’t a Die Hard movie, it’s any action film – it just happens to have Bruce Willis in it, and a couple shots are homages to a superior flick from the 80s. And it ends with an effing FREEZE FRAME.  Goodness.