Bruce Willis. John McClane. “Die Hard.” At 25 years, the original is now considered an action classic. It changed the genre forever. In its wake, action films were getting pitched as “Die Hard” variants; the movie “Speed” was “Die Hard on a Bus,” “Air Force One” was “Die Hard on a Plane.”
Some aspects stayed the same. You didn’t mess with John McClane’s family members. Some aspects escalated; first he saved a building, then an airport, a city, and lastly the country.
Since in this version John arrives to save his son, clichés inevitably spring to mind: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Actually John’s son Jack is very much a chip off the old block, but the current movie is nowhere near the history-maker the original was.
It should be titled “A Good Day for ‘Die Hard’ to Die,” but just as bad guys can’t get rid of McClane, bad scripts appear not to be able to get rid of the sequels, and since there’s now a possible passing of the torch, “Die Hard” may never die. It should though. It’s gone from the action sublime to the action ridiculous.
John McClane’s an endlessly resourceful, hard-bitten NYPD lifer-cop. He flies to Moscow to bail out his lost and now apparently mobbed-up son Jack. He finds out Jack (Jai Courtney) is in the CIA.
Jack’s been working undercover to protect Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch), a political prisoner, jailed for threatening to expose top-level government corruption.
McClane takes five minutes to blow a three-year operation that exposes Jack and infuriates him to the point of pulling a gun on dad. McClane turns out to be such an annoying, bullying dad that as comedian Chris Rock might phrase it, “I’m not saying Jack should shoot him … but I'd understand.”
