Rating of
1.5/4
A Bad Day for the Franchise
SIngli6 - wrote on 06/27/17
A Good Day to Die Hard, the latest in the multi-million dollar series, is a deceptive film. It’s opening five or so minutes, which see multiple plot threads being set up with Nolanesque aplomb, seduce you into letting your guard down… which is when the film’s putrid awfulness strikes.
But what is this awfulness? Well, it’s not the meagre script, nor is it Bruce Willis’ disinterested performance, nor is it the absence of any remotely interesting or intimidating villains, nor is it the fact that this film turns Willis into a bloody sidekick – because obviously the producers thought that what the public wanted to see from in the next Die Hard film is John McClane being made to look a useless twat by his punk kid – no, it’s simply the cinematography. Oh, the cinematography. I swear, if you had given the camera to a drunken geriatric with Parkinson’s, you would have gotten a better image. Shaky-cam, zoom-ins and shutter-speed are just some examples of the visual savagery Moore employs in this magnum crapus of his.
Even the stupid ending can’t overshadow the horribly rough look of this film, though by God it tries. I won’t spoil it for you, but suffice to say, it makes the Fighter Jet antics of Die Hard 4 look positively Dogme 95 in comparison. Yet that’s to be expected when you get the guy who wrote X-Men Origins: Wolverine to do your screenplay. However, if you can get over the aesthetic and intellectual deficits, this film DOES have a lot of explosions.
