Die Hard Series Must Die

John McClane is back, but there's nothing to Yippie-ki-yay over
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 14, 2013 1:55 PM CST

If critics are to be believed, it will probably never be a good day to see A Good Day to Die Hard. Pretty much everyone is savaging the fifth film in the venerable Bruce Willis franchise, with more than a few writing that it's time for the whole series to (you guessed it) die.

  • "Ah jeez. I actually wanted this one to be good. Or at least decent. Or at least a reminder of what got us all fired up about the first Die Hard in 1988," laments Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. Instead, it's "total crap," with an "incoherent" script. The action "never stops, but it's impossible to know where you are at any given time or why you should give a damn."

  • Where is John McClane after all these years? Pretty much exactly where he started, minus any sense of character depth. "We feel as if we're watching Bruce Willis in a Bruce Willis movie in which Bruce Willis can survive anything while taking out the villains, video-game style," writes Richard Roeper at the Chicago Sun-Times.
  • The central idea of having McClane team up with his son is just dreadful, adding "a note of sentiment, but of false sentiment," writes Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle. Jai Courtney's character is "as unwelcome as James Bond Jr. or Sherlock Holmes Jr. Who needs him, when the original is standing right there?"
  • "It must be said that, alongside the rebooted Bond franchise and the Bourne films, poor old McClane's vehicles look pretty cheesy," writes Todd McCarthy at the Hollywood Reporter. Director John Moore makes the action scenes look "so far-fetched and essentially unsurvivable that you can only laugh," and the climax is so dark and poorly shot that it "would have looked at home in a Cannon film back in the 1980s."
On the bright side, a really ridiculous number of things are blown up. Just how ridiculous? Well, read this. (More Die Hard stories.)

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