A Good Day to Die Hard

“A Good Day to Die Hard” is the worst of the “Die Hard” movies, not because of its restrictive 12A rating, nor its over-reliance on computer-generated effects, but because it is the first instalment in the 25-year franchise to treat its audience with open contempt — here is the “Die Hard" for the “Transformers" crowd, all flashing lights and no brain activity. That’s not to say that none of its four predecessors are guilty of similar crimes — “Die Hard 4.0” certainly could have done with a bit more brain power — but there’s something especially insulting about this fifth entry’s lackadaisical, almost perfunctory attitude towards anything not directly involving an explosion or a helicopter, or indeed a helicopter that’s exploding.

That’s an image that’s stuck with the franchise ever since its first appearance in John McTiernan’s classic 1988 original, as Agents Johnson and Johnson’s FBI chopper was swallowed up by a rooftop fireball. It reappeared several times throughout Renny Harlin’s airport-bound 1990 sequel “Die Harder,” albeit with winged aircrafts, did so again at the end of McTiernan’s 1995 threequel ”Die Hard with a Vengeance,” and then popped up again in Len Wiseman’s 2007 fourquel “Die Hard 4.0,” as Bruce Willis’ maverick cop John McClane took out an attacking helicopter with an airborne police car. “I was out of bullets,” was his smirking quip.

Be it through loving homage or lack of creativity, it appears yet again at the climax of “A Good Day to Die Hard,” this time in “Matrix"-style bullet-time, as a helicopter is blown to smithereens outside a power plant in the radioactive Chernobyl. But by this point in the film we’ve stopped caring enough to feel any surge of excitement or exhilaration, and so has Willis by the looks of it: here, he performs with the enthusiasm of a man impatiently waiting to be handed his paycheck, presumably because he knows just as well as we do that any semblance of intelligence this franchise once held has gone leaping off the top of Nakatomi Plaza after having forgotten to tie the fire hose around its waist.

But then, can we honestly expect anything else when the director is Irish hack John Moore, whose 2008 video game adaptation “Max Payne” is one of the few films I’ve actively sought out and then switched off in exasperation before the 30-minute mark? He presents his usual slick visuals here, as always drenched in CGI, along with his reliable ineptness when it comes to the handling of living, breathing human beings — this is a problem, considering the fact that where the film’s heart is supposed to lie is in the male bonding between John and his estranged son, Jack (Jai Courtney, last seen going fist-to-face with Tom Cruise in “Jack Reacher”).

Jack, unbeknownst to daddy, is a CIA spook operating undercover in Moscow. When Jack is taken into custody for his part in an assassination, John hops on a plane to the Russian capital and finds his boy in grave danger: heavily armed cronies of corrupt bureaucrat Viktor Chagarin (Sergei Kolesnikov, "Cold Souls") are after Jack and mysterious political prisoner Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch, "The Lives of Others"), who knows the location of a stash of nuclear weapons and whom Jack was attempting to extract to the US. Head of the cronies is Alik (Radivoje Bukvic, "Taken"), a cackling buffoon whose defining quirk is tormenting his victims by tap dancing while simultaneously chomping on a raw carrot — he’s a far cry from Alan Rickman’s quietly menacing Hans Gruber, that’s for sure.

John, Jack and Yuri go on the run together, chased at every turn by Alik and his men. In the resulting mayhem, which includes a destructive highway pursuit and a tumble through ten floors of scaffolding, Moore shows a talent for staging high-octane set-pieces, even if they're too cartoonish to build the necessary pulse-pounding tension. Trouble is, little-to-no thought or care has been put into everything in between, and Skip Woods’ dunderheaded script is almost entirely devoid of character or wit — the catchiest line is the hardly inspired “I’m on vacation,” probably because John utters it a total of five times.

Such qualities hardly seem worthy of a “Die Hard” movie, especially when they’re so glaring: Willis looks positively embarrassed to be reciting some of the clunky father-son banter he shares with Courtney. As for McClane, he’s a faded shadow of his former self, and any fondness we still have for him as a person has not come from this film, instead having lived on from previous instalments. Heck, he doesn’t even get to say his iconic catchphrase properly: annoyingly, for the sake of the 12A rating, it has once again been neutered to the briefer and altogether more family-friendly, “Yippee kay-yay, motherf-!”

In 1988, we believed in John McClane as a man of flesh and blood: while still a nigh-unstoppable killing machine, what set him apart from the rest of the ’80s action heroes was that he showed fear and anguish in the face of danger. The sequels saw fit to gradually grant him the power of invincibility: he now runs into speeding traffic and dives through windows with not a moment’s hesitation. In “A Good Day to Die Hard,” he even walks unprotected into an area of dangerously high radiation and suffers no consequences. John McClane is no longer a mere mortal; from the looks of things, he’s now a superhero. I once bought him as a human being; I’m not buying it now.

4/10