If at first you don’t succeed, die, die again

Was it Hobbes who once described life as “nasty, brutish and short”? Add “dumb” to that list, and you pretty much have a description of A Good Day To Die Hard, the fifth installment in the Bruce Willis action franchise, now playing at IMAX theaters.

Don’t get me wrong: those four adjectives are like catnip to the average male moviegoer. I prefer my action movies nasty, brutish, short and dumb as much as the next action movie fan. Yet even by Die Hard standards, this effort directed by John Moore seems to be going through a lot of motions.

Anyone who’s spotted the great vertical video billboard along EDSA promoting the new Die Hard will be thrilled to watch it at IMAX, as I did: that slow-motion downward plunge through flame and glass by Willis and son on the billboard looks even cooler on the big, BIG screen. As they say, you don’t just watch a movie in IMAX; you experience it.

But there’s way too much clutter and hand-held shots and dull stretches in A Good Day To Die Hard, even for a 97-minute movie. Running out of script has been a frequent problem with this franchise: somewhere around the 90-minute mark, the movies tend to either fulfill their mission and end abruptly, or go yet another round with the bad guys. This one still feels bitin, somehow.

We open in Moscow, where John McClane (Willis) is engaged in tracking down his son, Jack (Jai Courtney), who is apparently salting away in a Russian prison on drug charges. This is no longer the Moscow of Iron Curtain days, the good old Iron Curtain that produced baddies for McClane to mow down with assault weapons in Die Hard 1 and 2. This is the less-interesting Moscow, with traffic jams and unrealistically cheery Russian cabbies warbling New York, New York to entertain McClane and even waiving the cab fare (yeah, right). This is a Moscow where you can’t even call your adversaries “commies” anymore. All you can really call them is “hegemonic capitalists,” and that doesn’t really have the same zing to it.

Oh, but there’s always someone out there to piss in the punch bowl on a massive scale. Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch) is a whistleblower imprisoned for crossing his old colleague, Chagarin (Sergei Kolesnikov), a high-ranking, power-hungry hegemonic capitalist (think Putin). But it turns out Jack is actually working for the good guys, and helps Komarov escape. But not without a wild car chase first, involving vans, trucks, armored vehicles and rocket launchers — to get things warmed up.

Yet even that chase seems like a retread from old Die Hard movies. Fortunately, A Good Day To Die Hard does eventually up the action ante, with some sequences that are truly state of the art. (If action sequences can be termed “art.”) There are numerous helicopter attacks, countless slow-mo crashes through plate glass, and enough assault weapon spray to give the NRA a hard-on. The finale takes us to what is supposed to be Chernobyl, site of the worst nuclear meltdown in history. It looks like parts of present-day Newark or Detroit.

The main story arc concerns the rocky father-son relationship between Willis and Courtney. Courtney (of TV’s Spartacus) seems almost like a DNA carbon copy of his lunkhead Neanderthal dad, except he’s more callow and needs a few lessons in ass-whupping from his tough old pops. As we know, in previous Die Hard outings, Willis has faced the pure evil of Alan Rickman, Jeremy Irons, Timothy Oliphant… and Kevin Smith. As usual, he’s a fish out of water, this time in Moscow, getting pissed off at Russians for actually speaking Russian(!) in their own country(!!!). This routine kind of wore thin around the third Die Hard movie. What Willis now brings to the table, along with a petrified scowl worthy of Clint Eastwood, is a grizzled, seasoned wisdom. In other words, he knows how to kill people better than his inexperienced sidekick du jour. It’s a given, too, that, around the midway mark of any Die Hard movie, Willis will be sporting a grimy, blood- and sweat-stained wifebeater. No changes here.

There is pretty good back-and-forth between Willis and Courtney, who dismissively calls his absentee dad “John” and sometimes “McClane.” Their stony relationship is contrasted with that of Komarov and his foxy Russian daughter Irina (Yuliya Snigir), who are all affectionate and kissy-huggy, prompting Willis to ask his son, ironically, “Do you want a hug?”

Of course, father and son have some catching up to do before they can bury the hatchet. And nothing spells “bonding” like blowing away bad guys with frequent sprays of gunfire. There’s very little depth to the screenplay (by Skip Woods), which is unfortunate. Even the last Die Hard outing, Live Free or Die Hard, had some interesting dynamic between the young hacker Justin Long and Willis, and especially between McClane and his estranged daughter, Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who is criminally underused here). In fact, Die Hard 4 had enough wit, action and life in it to suggest that a reboot of the franchise could actually work. This one, unfortunately, kills any hope that there should be a Die Hard 6. But as long as they can come up with yet another phrase with “Die” or “Hard” in it for the title, and as long as Willis is willing to look the other way and pocket another paycheck, I guess anything’s possible.