A Good Day To Die Hard (John Moore, 2013)

[wigwam]

and the third one was bad too

how come they keep overlooking the single-location cat&mouse improv-weapon magic of the first 2 where he picks off a team of villains we're relatively familiarized with and invested in the stakes? these last 3 times they try to out-sprawl and high-tech one-up and just make it a bland actioner formula that could be anything, plus the buddy nonsense (Sam J, daughter, son) and it ends up being that Transformers shit where we're supposed to be invested/impressed/shocked in/by the destruction of property or vehicles or technology instead of defined individual characters - who gives a shit?

[feihong]

David Thomson made an interesting observation in one of his recent books about how this genre of film had been "taken over by the close-up of the cellphone or computer." The new James Bond movie is full of computer hacking, and bongos are always playing tense rhythms whenever there's a hacking scene starting. Does one really want this out of a Die Hard movie?

I always thought that the first one was successful because just like a great old western or some funky 70s cop chase, the film emphasized the physical commitment of its hero. McClane's pain in the first one is ludicrous, but his physical commitment is made the more extreme, and more admirable for it; and we identify with McClane because it's clear that the odds before him will test him in so many ways. But it seems like movies like this nowadays are all glib one-liners, huge explosions where vehicles catapult through the air in CGI arcs of pure aesthetic polish, and like Thomson says, closeups of computer readouts ticking away time limits like a video game. It feels like the action film is no longer about people, per se, but rather it's a place that is still must be grudgingly inhabited by people in order to make the explosions work and to register the approximate pain of getting shot. Which is why, I think, the narrative seems to break down in so many of these movies--Bruce Willis movies seem as susceptible to this as any other subgenre of action film--and why people seem to be just occupying the space, even though they aren't really the focus of what's going on.

Whereas in so many action movies I have watched in the last few years--my study of American film from the 40s through the 70s--people moved and the camera followed them, describing their movement. A movie like The Naked Spur is exhilarating even though the villain is apprehended in the first 10 minutes and tied up for the remainder of the movie. The physical commitment of climbing the spur is so clearly the test of a hero's resolve, his courage, and his wits. The harrowing shootouts in crowded street markets during Busting are visceral and intense because we see the closeness of the space and the way bystanders are getting badly hurt. As we see people creeping towards one another, we know they are closer than they suppose they are, and we fear their creeping forward to make contact. So many cop dramas from the 70s involve long footchases, where the pursuit of a running character is shown to be an intensely demanding challenge of both human physique and human determination.

Now trucks blow up while speeding down the highway, and the heroes smile and say something glib. James Bond drops under the icepack of a river and emerges out of breath but not even slightly chilled. I feel like there's a huge disconnect between the physical endeavor, the character development and the effects of violence in so many modern action films. I don't know if it's just that I'm getting older? But this stuff leaves me underwhelmed, and even annoyed that the movies are wasting my time like so many of these films do.

[RossyG]

Great post, feihong.

[warren oates]

Now trucks blow up while speeding down the highway, and the heroes smile and say something glib. James Bond drops under the icepack of a river and emerges out of breath but not even slightly chilled. I feel like there's a huge disconnect between the physical endeavor, the character development and the effects of violence in so many modern action films. I don't know if it's just that I'm getting older? But this stuff leaves me underwhelmed, and even annoyed that the movies are wasting my time like so many of these films do.

For me this is a multifaceted problem and it has to do not just with losing the physicality of the actors and the action and thus the plausible reality of the danger but also with a break down of the causal chain when it comes to actions/consequences in favor of spectacle and the barest of surface plot details. God forbid in one of these newfangled "actioners" we should miss the moment when the computer screen screams "vault breeched!" or whatever. Yet the selfsame films or even much more ambitious and artier versions of them will skim over dire consequences of physical actions in order that they don't bore the audience with process and lose us in another way. Feihong's frozen Skyfall moment puts me in mind of similar instances in The Grey and Essential Killing where the aftermath of a spectacular ice-lake/ -river plunge that would kill anyone who didn't immediately build a fire to dry off is elided entirely in the editing.

[captveg]

I actually like Die Hard With a Vengeance and Live Free or Die Hard more than Die Hard 2 because they don't retread so familiarly with the first film. However, unlike this awful fifth installment, the other sequels have the common thread of actually understanding the character of McClane - he takes the threat seriously, but he jokes to relieve stress or get into the head of his adversaries. In AGDTDH he takes the whole situation as a colossal joke and has fun with the mayhem, and his sense of humor is in mocking his son instead of the criminals.

In the other films McClane is always attempting to gain the assistance of the appropriate law enforcement and only goes into action when directly threatened or when he's the only countermeasure to the law's general bureaucracy; yet in this new one he's completely unwilling to step aside and even think to get assistance. OK, let's not contact anyone in the CIA that Jack belongs to when we have a moment because.... why, exactly? Dumb.

The first film is a 10/10 classic, while the three previous sequels are all really fun and enjoyable action films that may have some flaws but still get the job done with making you care about McClane and the extreme situations he is trying to fight through. This one just.... did they really explain anything about who was doing what for any reason?

And they used that vacation "joke" what, four times? Yeesh.

[matrixschmatrix]

That moment in Skyfall is noticable and irritating not only for itself but because it was the same goddamn movie that belabored Bond's bullet wound so extensively earlier, and because the Craig iteration of the series up to that point had been doing a pretty solid job of making Bond vulnerable, and human- I'm thinking of his implicitly lengthy recovery after the torture in Casino Royale. It was as though they genuinely didn't know that swimming around in freezing water would have an impact.

[knives]

I actually like Die Hard With a Vengeance and Live Free or Die Hard more than Die Hard 2 because they don't retread so familiarly with the first film. However, unlike this awful fifth installment, the other sequels have the common thread of actually understanding the character of McClane - he takes the threat seriously, but he jokes to relieve stress or get into the head of his adversaries. In AGDTDH he takes the whole situation as a colossal joke and has fun with the mayhem, and his sense of humor is in mocking his son instead of the criminals.

Which has its ironies in that this is the only film to be developed as a Die Hard film.

[captveg]

I actually like Die Hard With a Vengeance and Live Free or Die Hard more than Die Hard 2 because they don't retread so familiarly with the first film. However, unlike this awful fifth installment, the other sequels have the common thread of actually understanding the character of McClane - he takes the threat seriously, but he jokes to relieve stress or get into the head of his adversaries. In AGDTDH he takes the whole situation as a colossal joke and has fun with the mayhem, and his sense of humor is in mocking his son instead of the criminals.

Which has its ironies in that this is the only film to be developed as a Die Hard film.

Yep. It's as though with the others they knew that in order to turn the story into Die Hard films they needed to get true to the McClane character and add those elements, while with this one they thought since it was starting as a Die Hard that the character would take care of itself.

[cdnchris]

Which has its ironies in that this is the only film to be developed as a Die Hard film.

I know With a Vengeance was originally intended to be a Brandon Lee vehicle (and the script was also the basis for the terrible WWE movie, 12 Rounds, which I ironically also took my father-in-law to see for his birthday) but was Live Free of Die Hard intended to be something else?

[captveg]

Live Free or Die Hard was adapted from a script entitled "WW3.com", which was based on an article from Wired magazine called "A Farewell to Arms".

[warren oates]

That moment in Skyfall is noticable and irritating not only for itself but because it was the same goddamn movie that belabored Bond's bullet wound so extensively earlier, and because the Craig iteration of the series up to that point had been doing a pretty solid job of making Bond vulnerable, and human- I'm thinking of his implicitly lengthy recovery after the torture in Casino Royale. It was as though they genuinely didn't know that swimming around in freezing water would have an impact.

It's like contemporary writers/directors are increasingly afraid of any sort of downtime, wound-licking or recovery scenes of which there are numerous great examples in the first Die Hard or in James Cameron's best films, like the first two Terminators or Aliens.

[Mr Sausage]

To be fair, McClane gets shot in the shoulder(!) in Die Hard, which not only doesn't incapacitate him in the slightest, but he immediately jumps back into the brutal fistfight with Alexander Gudonov, then goes on to tie a hose around himself and jump off a roof, and to top it all off, is still able to lift his arm up and over his head at the end to grab the gun on his back.

I know it was a pretty common action trope in the 80's that getting shot anywhere except the chest or head counted as a scratch. But it needs to be pointed out, before people go too far praising the so-called realistic damage in Die Hard, that getting shot in the arm totally incapacitates your arm.

The only movie I've ever seen deal realistically with a gunshot to the arm is Romero's Day of the Dead, where Rhodes gets shot in his arm, goes to open a door with it (he's holding a gun in his other hand), and can't even turn the knob for the excruciating pain that moving his arm even slightly causes.

EDIT: here's the moment I was talking about.

[feihong]

It's true that the action in Die Hard was implausible, and that it was part of the fun that it was so implausible. That's not really the issue I have problems with per se. Certainly loads of Hong Kong movies from the 80s and 90s were full of more cartoonish physics. But all of these movies from earlier eras...the focus was on human beings. It was about putting human beings through that material. And even if they could defy the laws of gravity, their feelings mattered. Their sense of themselves and their worth was key--McClane in the 1st Die Hard, for example, is thoroughly emasculated and depressed by his separation from his wife. That background element of his persona informs all his decisions and actions throughout the film. I recall no such relatable character focus in Live Free or Die Hard, for instance--which is full of police cars jackknifing and girls in skin-tight bodysuits doing furious kung fu, and "suspenseful" computer hacking.

What's happened instead is that these action movies have become machines of almost indiscriminate destruction; machines that are usually already rolling when the film begins. And the "characters," such as they are, show up to fill requisite places in the machinery. Someone's got to drive the out-of-control truck. The hero's shooting, so someone has to get shot. To go farther, a gun is going to fire, so the nominal "hero" should have their hand on it and be firing. And the way these movies are written, directed, lensed and edited speaks to this new focus. These movies are like the children of Arnold Schwarzenneger's films of the 80s, in which he played no character per se, but brought his own bizarrely compelling personality to the show and they arranged explosions around him. In the children's case, they have grown up not noticing anything but the explosions and their father's glib grin through it all. It's as if it's no longer reckoned that meaningful action and suspense begins with people, with feelings, motivations, or places--beyond places that go boom. Now instead of a meaningful chain of events, a clear sense of human intervention creating action which in turn expresses character--instead we get a choreography, not human enough to be called a dance (the way critics used to refer to the John Woo movies as "bullet ballets"), in which action, character, themes, etc. all become abstracted from one another.

I think this is what makes these movies harder and harder to swallow. If you feel as if the actors might not have bothered to show up for the picture (a la Transformers), or that they could be easily swapped around without making any serious impact, it's only a little leap to the feeling that we as audience members might not bother to show up either.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Oh dear, this was catastrophically bad. It's a series of ludicrious action scenes punctuated by McClane and son's gradual, inane father and son reconciliation. What I learned most is if you leap through glass windows out of skyscrapers, there's always something to break your fall.

[colinr0380]

I haven't seen this fifth film yet but I'm impressed that Russia seems to be the go to place for crazy action films at the moment (I'm thinking back to that Darkest Hour film too)

For me the main reason why the first Die Hard was so great was the claustrophobia of the setting - an entire locked down building - which just isn't present in any of the other films. There is enough space to allow for variety in locations and a large amount of action set pieces, but in the end the characters are all trapped together. It makes the action much more intense and personal, which is something that the films steadily moved away from until McClane is just a pointless figurehead for anonymous action.

This perhaps is another reason why I dislike Die Hard 2, as that film, more than the first, set the template for what was to come in terms of wider and less enclosed action and McClane becoming less of an everyman forced into extreme action to pure hero getting involved in situations for increasingly flimsy reasons.

For example just take the theme of family: Bonnie Bedelia's Holly Gennaro/McClane - while being a hostage throughout the first film is willful, wary, savvy and able to get personally involved in the action at the end. In the second she is trapped on the plane and can only triumph in the comic tasering of the sub-plot nasty reporter as a kind of not quite full compensation for being pushed into just being a passive victim who cannot affect the main plot at all except as a motivator. Family disappears from the third film and the daughter in the fourth is just a kidnappable McGuffin. The son in this fifth film seems in the mould of Mutt from the fourth Indiana Jones film - the filmmaker's acknowledgement of the age of the beloved hero and the hope that a younger chap to share some of the action will smooth a possible transition from veteran to rookie (which is often doomed to failure anyway as it is almost impossible to parachute in someone else to stand-in for a Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford, when all the audience wants is to see that particular actor in their role).

[domino harvey]

This was not only the worst film of the series by miles and miles, it may very well be one of the least-inspired, least-interesting, least-exciting, least-every other good adjective capable of being thrown at an action movie action movies ever made. Ugly and unpleasant from its murky cinematography to the phoned-in perfs and idiotic patter, there's nothing to recommend here. The action sequences are all awful, but special attention must be paid to the car chase early in the film, in which the direction and layout of what's happening is so inept that for half the chase I thought Bruce Willis was in an entirely different vehicle than he actually was, and though I'm hardly a student of physics, even for an action movie the way in which vehicles interact does not follow any rules pre-existent to the creation of their implementation here. Live Free or Die Hard was, of course, completely ridiculous too, but it had an internal logic and ballsy bravado at its increasingly ludicrous machinations that kept it speeding forward past lingering questions, but this film's idiocy doesn't coat its pill in any fashion, and all that's left is garbage. This was quite possibly the worst action movie I've ever seen.

[thirtyframesasecond]

The other thing I remember about this film is that it was really obviously Budapest standing in for Moscow.

[domino harvey]

I just remembered the scene where the bad girl sprays down a contaminated room at Chernobyl with an aerosol dispenser for like fifteen seconds and then proclaims everything within the room to be radiation free. Her entire crew then takes off their masks. This movie is such a piece of shit, oh my God.

[The Narrator Returns]

I just remembered the scene where the bad girl sprays down a contaminated room at Chernobyl with an aerosol dispenser for like fifteen seconds and then proclaims everything within the room to be radiation free. Her entire crew then takes off their masks. This movie is such a piece of shit, oh my God.

Ha, that's like the "hey guys, the air's breathable, take off your helmets!" bit in Prometheus times 19.

[therewillbeblus]

I ignored everyone's advice and decided to rewatch this, which was a huge mistake. I expected there would still be some big dumb action setpieces that I could rally behind and rationalize a defense for, since the fourth film doubled down on the genre's self-conscious image, but no, this is an action film with... no real action? I mean, there's so much awful (I need to repeat, fucking awful) ""drama"" (double air quotes intentional) brought to the focus in this father-son dynamic that this felt very much like a film sparked from a lost bet, or a dare to try an exercise in taking the few seconds of the drama normally inserted into action films between, or within, blockbuster scenes and stretch them out into a feature length 'narrative.' Why?! This is the kind of Die Hard movie that would be shown in Hell, where you go in anticipating to see shit blow up and Willis be a badass and all you get is empty conversations looking for connection and a villainous plot that doesn't make any sense. There is nothing compelling here. Nothing. I really believe that you need to actively try to make a movie this bad.

domino called this the worst action movie ever, and I scoffed at hyperbole that could overlook the likes of xXx's sequel, which featured such boring action that it put my teenage self to sleep in the theatre, but that movie is a banger compared to this dull, meandering, pathetic product. I didn't think Willis could struggle to at least do his part in a duo, but Jai Courtney showed me just how important it is to have two strong personalities to make that dynamic work, and after Long's tremendous job in the last installment, this is the apple falling far from the tree, hitting a few dozen people in the head causing irreparable brain damage, all of whom concocted, greenlit, worked on this film, and then decided to release it anyways. I don't usually like to write negative thoughts on films, partially due to a lack of motivation, having little to say without energized inspiration, and a general aversion to initiating shitposts, but every once in a while I become offended by a film and that motivation, inspiration, and energy needs to be released. I apologize to those who like this film, I really don't mean to invalidate your opinion, but (and this is embarrassing to admit) at one point this movie actually made me tear up from hating movies so much. So I guess it gave me an emotional reaction, unintentionally, and certainly the wrong one.