I have always been a fan of the Die Hard movies. I loved the first one, found the two sequels that followed equally exciting and enjoyable to watch, and was pleasently surprised with how good the fourth outing of John McClane turned out. The fifth installment however is a completely different story.
This latest Die Hard movie does not take place in America, but is moved half way across the world to Russia, where John McClane goes looking for his supposed screw up son who he has been trying to track down, after not speaking to him for a number of years. Before he leaves we do get a brief cameo from his daughter, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who returns from the last movie. What McClane does not know is that his son is really a spy and has been working undercover in Moscow, Russia for the last three years as part of a CIA operation. Dad manages to turn up and disrupt the mission for his son, leaving him stranded in Moscow along with the man he was trying to extract.
This movie gives us very little in terms of plot and story, or a least anything that makes much sense. The plot seems to be all over the place. The plot-holes are the size of the Grand Canyon, which makes it hard to to follow what is going on, or at least follow it and make some sense of it. One of the biggest holes being the two McClanes travelling from Moscow to Chernobyl by car, chasing the bad guys who are in a helicopter, which a quick Google serch tells me is 430 miles away. On top of that they need to cross international borders, and John’s son is one of the most wanted men in Moscow. While I am on the matter, the police don’t seem to exist in Moscow, as the McClanes take out armoured trucks, destroy buildings and are in car crashes, but all this time, even though his son has just escaped from court and is a wanted murderer, they seem to walk away from all of this without the police being concerned.
Another big downfall for this movie is the fact that John McClane is only here to shoot guns and blow things up. Previous Die Hard outings had McClane doing detective work and using his brain to work things out. He was the detective who got caught up in the action. This movie McClane is the action, he causes it all, from chasing an armoured truck and managing to somehow ram it off the road in a jeep, simply because he wanted to talk to his son, or the bad guys taking it in turn to line up and run into the safe house one by one to get sht by him. It really takes far-fetched to a new level.
I really could go on all day about how the movie simply doesn’t make any sense at all, but I think by now it is pretty clear. What this movie does give us is over the top action, things getting blown up, gun fights, car chases, helicopter crashes, basically all out action, pretty much from start to finish. I think this movie may try to up the aunty on the action but forgets about having a decent story to go with it. It is mainly the fact that you will have no connection to the movie because if it not making any sense.
Bruce Willis seems to be going through the motions with this outing as the cowboy cop from New York. He just needs to point and shoot. He doesn’t have to try and solve any crimes. He is turned from a everyday cop in the wrong place at the wrong time, to a larger than life action hero, who is invulnerable to to pretty much everything, getting hit by cars, car crashes, fall off helicopters, falling off buildings, the lot, probablies even Kryptonite.
This movie was a real let down in the Die Hard series, it loses everything that makes the Die Hard movies great, and gives us an over the top action movie, with very little in depth, that fails to pull the audience in, but instead manages to completely alienate you from the movie and turns into nothing more than a farce.
I think this movie is best avoided, even fans of the previous Die Hard films will struggle to get anything from this.