Strip Mining Yippikiyay: the Film Doctor's one sentence review of A Good Day to Die Hard

'Tis a melancholy thing to brood upon A Good Day to Die Hard's vision of American befuddled balding male machismo, this barren culturally illiterate depiction of Russia, a celebration of American xenophobia in which McClane yells out "You think I understand a word you say?" after knocking a random Muscovite out, this bleak traffic-congested Moscow of numbingly repetitive car crashes and heroes falling through glass over and over, a grim mid-August would-be blockbuster released in February with a high-pitched orchestral score conveying heightened continual excitement, the movie a large, unwieldy tanklike object with saturated marketing conning viewers into witnessing aging action tropes (a plunge into a bullet-ridden bar echoing The Fifth Element (1997)) as it purveys cold war nostalgia, a dream of boomer dads awkwardly reconciling with their progeny mixed in with triumphalist Reagan-era fantasies of an aging empire too stupefied with its CGI explosions to recognize how its sequelitis mirrors its obsolescence, so yeah, sure, gramps has still got it even as Willis cashes in on all of the good will he has generated since appearing in Moonrise Kingdom and Looper when he squints and mutters lines like "You are gonna shoot your father?" and "I believed work was all that mattered" and "I love you, boy" and "Let's go kill some of those bad guys" (the movie would benefit from having no dialogue) as a vacuum cleaner-esque machine neutralizes (!) Chernobyl radiation just before John McClane hangs off the back end of a military Russki helicopter spinning around helplessly, committing copter-harakiri as this poor bludgeoned moviegoer prays that perhaps, somewhere, somehow, some day, a 20th Century Fox studio executive weeps for strip mining the last vestiges of a viewer's affection for the 1988 Die Hard.

Comments

Richard Bellamy said…
Great sentence, FilmDr. I did four short sentences and a fragment. In one sense, yes, the whole thing is sad (yet I see no sadness that this is the weak final chapter of a franchise that started with a film that left me cold); it's sad in the sense that Americans like movies like this. Still, I was fascinated by how many cars were wrecked in the making of this movie.
Thanks, Hokahey. The many car crashes of the movie reminded me of the latter third of The Blues Brothers. It seemed to me as if the filmmakers of A Good Day to Die Hard had run out of ideas already in the first 30 minutes. I did very much enjoy the original Die Hard, and this film preys on that affection remorselessly. Someone in Russia should sue.
Anthony Hopper said…
I haven't seen this one yet...
Shayari SMS said…
it is time die hard stops producing sequels...or it will worse than the rocky franchise.... i thought last one was bad but this is even worse.....