With A Good Day To Die Hard, the franchise has well and truly flat-lined. This fifth instalment barely passes muster as a run-of-the-mill action movie, let alone as a sequel to one of the most thrilling, tremendously-made and flat-out entertaining action movies of all time. It's an uninspired cash-grab punctuated by lacklustre scenes of mayhem and distinguished (or undistinguished) by flavourless dialogue and minimal character development. And at the core of it all is a bored-verging-on-contemptuous performance by Bruce Willis, who in one fell swoop erases all the goodwill he accrued with his committed, nuanced work in last year's Looper and Moonrise Kingdom. A Good Day To Die Hard's John McClane is a shadow of the brash, ballsy, infuriating and instantly likeable character from the first few movies, with Willis now displaying all the enthusiasm of a burnt-out rock star reduced to fronting a tacky cover band churning out limp versions of his golden oldies. This new movie attempts to pass the torch in some way, as McClane travels to Moscow to rescue and hopefully reconnect with his supposedly wayward son Jack (capable Australian actor Jai Courtney), who's been arrested for murder. But guess what? Jack's not a murderer or a screw-up at all! He's a tough-as-nails CIA operative tasked with protecting some political prisoner who's the target of a ruthless power-broker and zzzzzz. Things blow up. People get shot. Bruce Willis says that line that everyone expects him to say. So revisit the original. Hell, revisit Die Hard 4.0. It's better than this shit.
In cinemas now.
