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38There are two problems with A Good Day to Die Hard: It’s terribly filmed and nothing in it makes any sense.
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Feb 13, 201338Like the Bond movies, the "Die Hard" films thrive on brilliantly wicked villains. In this edition, we barely know which bad guy is the main bad guy. The script is filled with heavy-handed dialogue about parents and their children, framed by well choreographed but generic action sequences.
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38The best thing about A Good Day to Die Hard is its title.
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38Isn't just the weakest of the "Die Hard" pictures; it's a lousy action movie on its own terms.
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38Loud and tedious, “Die Hard 5” is a shaky-cam/Sensuround blast of bullets and bombs, digital explosions and death defying feats of defying death.
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37Both assaultive and tiresome, A Good Day to Die Hard barely registers on the action movie Richter scale. It goes bang, it goes boom, and then it blessedly goes away.
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33A Good Day To Die Hard isn’t dead on arrival because that would suggest it has a pulse.
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30The absence of a single noteworthy villain is perhaps this movie’s most salient flaw (along with the jumbled, barely coherent editing of a seemingly endless chase through a Moscow traffic jam).
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30It’s the lamest and most vacant of the quintet — though if you mistakenly think you’re buying a ticket to a demolition derby instead of a night at the movies, you’ll feel right at home.
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30A Good Day to Die Hard plays like an extended victory lap for star Bruce Willis and the entire "Die Hard" franchise. Not surprising, but not overwhelmingly entertaining either.
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30Unfortunately, John Moore has directed these sequences in a way that makes the incidents look so far-fetched and essentially unsurvivable that you can only laugh.
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30Everything that made the first “Die Hard” memorable — the nuances of character, the political subtext, the cowboy wit — has been dumbed down or scrubbed away entirely.
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25Time to give the shoot-’em-up thing a rest, guys: It’s tired and played out, and so are you.
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25Ah jeez. I actually wanted this one to be good. Or at least decent. Or at least a reminder of what got us all fired up about the first Die Hard in 1988. But A Good Day To Die Hard, the fifth in a creatively exhausted series, is total crap.
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25It has a weak story that provides no tension, feeling or interest. Its opening action sequence is just a long, drawn-out dud, filmed by director John Moore in the worst modern style of quick cuts and smeary, jittery photography.
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25Actually, Bruce, what stinks is the script — which is woefully lacking the kind of one-liners and memorable bad guys that helped make working-class hero McClane so iconic he’s still around after 25 years. Even the action sequences are pretty much by the numbers this time.
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25The film feels like it was reverse-engineered from its "Yippee Ki-Yay Mother Russia" tagline, a wholly generic international actioner barely distinguished by the presence of Bruce Willis's banner hero.
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20A Good Day to Die Hard is the opposite of a labor of love. It has no good lines, no crackerjack fights, and only one mildly orgasmic revenge killing. It will satisfy no one — high-, low-, or middlebrow. Die Hard is finally in its death throes.
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20Pretty much three well-staged action sequences strung together with the dumbest imaginable connective tissue.
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20We’re a long way from this shoot-’em-up franchise’s John McTiernan–helmed heyday. Willis gives one of his laziest ever performances, leadenly tossing off each quip (“I’m on vacation!” is the most abused) and acting like he’s passing a kidney stone during the bathetic father-son bonding scenes.
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20Ultimately, even more than 2007’s “Live Free or Die Hard,” “Good Day” never lets McClane be McClane. Gone is his taunting snark and quick-witted preparedness; instead he seems like a jerk with a thing for guns.
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16The entire enterprise is a bewildering mess, put in place only to frustrate and alienate anyone who buys a ticket. Every action scene is telegraphed, and most of the dialogue is irrevocably stupid.
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10For anyone who remembers the "Die Hard" adventures at their vital and exciting best, this film feels like a near-death experience.
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10The movie is constructed like a window some kid broke and then tried to glue back together.