Die Hard 5: A Good Day to Die Hard

(Movie Review)

Why I Saw This Movie

          Given that I’m not a big fan of the Die Hard series (I still haven’t seen the first 3 Die Hard movies in their entirety) and given how negative all the reviews of this movie were, if left to myself I probably would never have bothered with it.  But it was movie night with a group of friends, and this was the only thing playing at the time.

           “So, this movie is supposed to be just awful…” a friend said rather nervously as we were buying our tickets.  Her voice trailed off, so she didn’t fully finish the thought: “Are we sure we want to waste two hours of our lives on it?”  But we all knew that was the implied question.  We bought the tickets anyway.

The Review

          As the movie finished and we left the theater, the same friend remarked, “Well, it was bad, but at least it wasn’t boring.  And there’s nothing worse than a boring movie.  Every other sin I’m willing to forgive.”

            And that is more or less my thoughts as well.

            In my review of Die Hard 4  I wrote:
This is the ultimate pop-corn movie, in that a movie like this would have been unwatchable were it not for the invention of buttered pop corn and coca-cola (or pick your poison of choice). As it is, it provides a great excuse to stuff your face with goodies while being mildly distracted by all the explosions.

           

            And this is perhaps doubly true of Die Hard 5.  As long as you bring in plenty of snacks to stuff your face with, you’ll be entertained by lots of noisy explosions and ridiculous action sequences.

            (None of the action sequences make a lot of logical sense, but just shut up and stuff your face with popcorn and watch all the flying cars and exploding helicopters.)

            But whatever you do, don’t go into this movie without a lot of sugary and salty junk food to keep you occupied as you watch the light show.

            (My personal regret is that my popcorn ran out halfway through the movie, and then I had to just sit and watch all the ridiculous explosions without even having something to eat.  If I had to do it over again, I would have gotten a lot more at the concession stand.)

           True Die Hard fans will lament how far the franchise has degraded itself, and how ridiculous it has become.  But as someone who has no attachment to the series, I was able to enjoy this film for what it was--a mindless action film.  It’s about what you would expect from any other mindless action Hollywood film.

            Despite all the bad press this film has gotten, for the most part it’s not any worse than many of the other mindless action films Hollywood cranks out all the time.  The only place where I felt the film particularly embarrassed itself was the pathetic attempts at humor.

            Interspersed throughout the action sequences were the usual attempts at comic relief and one-liners, and they were all terrible.  In the theater I went to, every single joke was greeted by the audience with complete silence. 

            I’m particularly surprised that the scene with the singing Russian taxi driver made it into the final cut of the film.  Who thought this was entertaining?  Did they not have anything better that they could have replaced that with?

Notes

* I’m not an expert in the film industry, but that scene on the highway (with multiple high speed car wrecks) could not have been cheap to produce.

            It makes you wonder just how much money it costs to make a terrible movie.  (And if they can spend that much money on car wrecks and explosions, couldn’t they have hired better writers, or at least spared a bit of money for some script doctors to fix the jokes?)

* The highway scene is also a good indication of how spoiled we are getting as modern audiences.  If that scene had come out 30 years ago, it would have blown people away.  Now, we are so used to this kind of over the top action movie that we just yawn our way through it.

* Despite my characterization of this film as a dumb action movie, I have to give it some credit—there is some clever misdirection in the script.  I can count at least 3 different reveals in this movie where it turns out some character is not at all who you thought they were, and all of the plot twists took me by surprise.

* I also liked the atmosphere created by the Chernobyl scenes.  I suppose on one level it is a bit cliché to include Chernobyl in a movie exploiting American stereotypes about Russia, but it still drew me in. 

            The creepy atmosphere of the abandoned 1980s city was like some post apocalyptic city in a old science fiction movie, but in this case it isn’t science fiction: there really is a post-nuclear disaster abandoned city out there.

            Of course after briefly being introduced, the Chernobyl scenes just degenerate into a backdrop for the usual mindless violence.  But still, I’ll give the movie an extra point for them.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky - Imperial College Palestinian Society

Die Hard 5: A Good Day to Die Hard: Movie Review