I went to see this one at the cinema as part of this years massive run of films but forgot to review it until now. Yes that does actually say a lot about this film already.
Unfortunately it was rather forgettable. Let’s face it, none of the die hard films have been amazing (except for maybe the first and that was mostly Alan Rickman) so I wasn’t expecting this to be the best film of the year or anything like that, but it is probably the worst of the five.
For the most part the film featured these three – McClane, McClane Jr and Russian guy who seems to be politically marginalised and on trial for something he may, or may not, have done.
Now as usual with action films these days there were some comedic moments to break up the in your face action and I did laugh a fair bit. A few of the jokes fell flat and I was really really glad I had my friends there to laugh along with me at a few points, because the six of us really were the only people in a packed cinema even close to laughing, and a few times I think we were laughing when we weren’t meant to have been (I’ll come back to this). McClane’s few reminders about being on vacation were genuinly funny though and very well timed and said so I really don’t think it was Bruce Willis’ fault the comedy wasn’t so great.
I also would like to add how amused I am at the release date of this film. Being the very non-girly girl that I am I almost persuaded my fella to take me to see this the day it came out, just for giggles. Yeah, this is my kind of a good date with my guy!
The plot was, well odd. I kinda expected something a bit more modern, especially from the way the film started with the whole court trial, political intrigue stuff. I was expecting some modern info war on terrorism stuff so the Russian Nuclear threat stuff with the complete cold war feel kinda came out of nowhere like a clown in a karate film.
I also appreciated that there was plenty of action in this film. Lots and lots of explosions and shooting etc and some pretty spectacular stunts. Fairly typical ott die hard stuff really. The good guys got attacked a lot, had to do some pretty impressive, and painful looking, stuff to get out of trouble, yet always seemed to be able to get up and walk away afterwards with only a few scratches to show for it. Yeah, that kind of not quite believable action. I had suspended my sense of reality before going into the film (it’s a given with msot action films these days) but even with that I found it happened one too many times.
On top of that there was plenty of the stereotypical, cool guys walk slowly away from stuff exploding, just like this – see! They really did do this kind of thing a lot. Walk slowly away from crashed hellicopter, walk slowly away from scaffolding and rubbish shoot you’ve just fallen all the way through. Walk slowly away from building where you’ve just totally shot the place up!
Yes, this was some of what I meant by the laughter in the not meant to laugh in places. I laughed quite a few times when these unbelievable things happened but the bit that had me in stitches when I really wasn’t meant to be was this line ‘I’m talking terrorism, WMDs, nukes…’ Ummm, yeah, did no one tell McClane Jr that nukes were WMDs? I guess not, because he really did rattle this list off as if nukes were not WMDs, but something entirely unrelated. But I guess not, I guess those pesky terrorists are going to use those WMDs first and then when there’s nothing left they’re going to nuke us too!
All in all, an okay mindless action film, but just doesn’t have a great plot and probably one of the weakest action films that’s out this year.