A Good Day to Die Hard
201397 minutes
rated R
by Scott Mendelson
As my father likes to say, if you don't quit while you're ahead, you'll never be ahead. By all rights, Live Free or Die Hard (trailer 01) should have been terrible. It came twelve years after the previous installment, was helmed by the likes of Len Wiseman (a man who managed to make a movie about vampires fighting werewolves boring), ended up with a PG-13, and held back from the press for as long as humanly possible. Yet, thanks to strong action sequences and a story very much concerned with John McClane coming to terms with his metaphorical death (IE - irrelevance), the fourth entry was just good enough to justify its existence. But the McClane luck has officially run out. A Good Day to Die Hard is a terrible film, one of the very worst theatrical movies I have ever seen. It's willfully stupid, lacking in basic character chemistry and narrative discipline, officially turning John McClane into a borderline insane anti-social lunatic. It has nothing worth recommending. A Good Day to Die Hard is basically the movie we all thought we were getting six years ago.
