By Brett A. Mejia ’13
THE ROUNDUP
“A Good Day to Die Hard”—Bruce Willis and Jai Courtney
5 out of 10
John McClane’s latest adventure is full of dull and boring moments, along with an abundant amount of car crashes.
Bruce Willis returns as the ever-loving father figure and New York City police officer John McClane in director John Moore’s film, “A Good Day to Die Hard.”
The premise of the movie is about a father trying to reconnect with an estranged son whom he has not spoken to in years.
McClane has one of his friends track down his son, who is in Moscow, and he decides to take a vacation to go see him.
But what McClane doesn’t know is that his son is working for the CIA and is trying to free a political prisoner who is being held captive in Russia.
Eventually McClane runs into his son Jack, played by Jai Courtney, in the middle of the rescue mission and he disrupts the mission, which causes his son and the political prisoner to miss their escape out of Russia, making them resort to plan B.
This turns into a lengthy car chase that leads to hundreds of cars being demolished, but McClane survives this without a single scratch on his face.
For the rest of the movie, McClane and Jack work together to try to escape Moscow along with the prisoner.
Will they make out it alive?
It’s definitely not a nail biting movie like the other films in the series, but it does have its moments where it makes you say that McClane will live forever.
For instance, McClane and Jack are trying to escape a skyscraper while being fired at by a huge helicopter. They decide to just jump out of the window, about 15 stories high, and they hit each level of the fire escape and then slide down a tube to finally land in a dumpster.
The end result of this was both of them being able to walk away with a few scratches.
It was these types of action sequences that seemed both impossible but interesting because there wasn’t much else to really enjoy.
The plot itself was not very strong because it just seemed as if McClane and Jack spent the whole movie running around Moscow while being shot at.
Another noticeable thing was how lucky both McClane and Jack were. First they are able to survive all the action sequences without any serious injuries, second they are constantly unnoticed by police or guards when they are in the middle of a gun battle and third, after they run out of ammo, they steal a car and find a full arsenal of weapons in the back of the trunk.
“A Good Day to Die Hard” has its moments of action and funny quotes from Willis, but in the end the boring plot, overwhelming luck that McClane and Jack seem to have and the short runtime of 97 minutes trumps anything that may be good in the film.
