When the Cheshire emerges...

Wow, I was slack with this. I've just had the most full-on few days. But here you go, a belated review of the latest in the Die Hard franchise.

A Good Day To Die Hard (M)

JOHN McClane, accidental action hero, has finally gone global. New York, Washington DC and Los Angeles don't cut it for the cop anymore. At an older age he's still hungry to catch the bad guys, and a grander scheme was inevitable in trying to fit him into the world of Generation Y for the second Die Hard film of the new millennium.

He's a tough old bastard, still immune to hearing loss from explosions and bone breakage. Now we see that his son is one and the same, in name and in figure. The expansion of the McClane backstory finally fits in the last piece of the puzzle as John (Bruce Willis) chases Jack (a brawny Jai Courtney) to Moscow.

Jack's relationship with his dad hasn't been good. Unlike what most people would think, discovering John's flown to Moscow to find him and get him out of prison isn't a comforting thought.
But he makes do of the situation and accepts his father's presence before revealing that he's followed a similar line of work to his old man - as a covert CIA agent.

The fifth film in this revered franchise plays out much the same as the fourth (Live Free or Die Hard), in that it pushes John McClane out of his comfort zone. John's the most traditional of protagonists, and placing him in a world of technology and international terrorism doesn't work a second time any more than it did the first.

The action, while big, is ramped up to such an extreme that it's unbelievable to see John and Jack walking around afterwards as they do. There's significantly less of the wit we expect from John, perhaps as a result of the sheer pain he must be in, and not much that comes with the story to allow feelings of sympathy.

McClane's exasperation in saying his most famous phrase is proof enough that it was time to hang up the boots some time ago. The plot adheres to that, involving a stoush between underworld figures Komarov (Sebastian Koch) and Chagarin (Sergey Kolesnikov) that comes to revolve around riches.
Nothing changes - as McClane says himself, it's always about the money.

John Moore and writer Skip Woods have no reservations in referencing earlier films, suggestively making a statement to suggest that characters can be successfully repeated in this age.

Instead, it's an affirmation to us that we've seen it before, and it doesn't need to be bettered because it was done when John McClane was in his ultimate realm. One before 9/11 that didn't overcompensate in action or gadgets.

Rating: 2.5/5