So, John McClane is back! Yippee-kay-aye, Mother Russia!
I heard that.
As the script-writers run out of things for John to get unfeasibly involved in State-side it turns out that he can now go and wreak his own brand of havoc over in Russia, thanks to the involvement of his son Jack. Now, I like Die Hard. The first one is brilliant, the second is good (both adapted from novels, don'tcherknow. Didyaknow? Nowyaknow), the third one has Samuel L Jackson and so is automatically good despite the baddie being Jeremy "who Hollywood calls when they need an English villain and Alan Rickman is not available" Irons, and the fourth is... well, it's entertaining enough, and there's amusement to be had seeing Kevin Smith playing an adult teenage nerd. So how does the fifth movie measure up?
In terms of entertaining set pieces: excellently. The first movie was obviously a very claustrophobic movie, by necessity. From DH2:DH onwards however, we had chases: snowtrak chase, taxi careering through Central Park, car being chased by cars, helicopter, fighter jet. There is certainly an epic chase in this one featuring a van, a military armoured vehicle and two different trucks driven by McClane senior, with muchos crashes and stunts. The ending scene is highly impressive as well, as anything that crashes a helicopter into a nuclear power plant gets my vote.
"Not even God knows what you're doing!"
The acting? Also good. Willis's McClane has adapted and evolved, and he's no longer the reluctant hero but now the belligerent tough old bastard who does what he does because it's what he's done for so long, although that does come at the price of some of his character's three-dimensionality. Jai Courtney is convincing as an even more hard-bitten version of his father, a CIA operative who organises prison breaks, blows up buildings and uncovers caches of guns without blinking. The dancing bad guy Arik is rather over-the-top, but Sebastian Koch convinces well as Yuri, the eventual mastermind of the whole series of unfolding events.
However, it's the events themselves that bring the film down, in my reckoning.
First of all, it's the fact that at the end of everything, the McClane boys are entirely irrelevant to the vast majority of the plot. The jailbreak that gets Yuri and Jack out was masterminded by Chagarin, the defence minister Yuri is supposedly going to testify against, and even though the CIA must have known about it to plant Jack in the courtroom, they weren't involved in it. But of course, Yuri knew about it too, and *his* plan involving his daughter working as a double-agent was based on this. In the end, the McClanes were nothing more than an irritation to everyone wanting Yuri to get kidnapped by Chagarin's men, and only turned up at the end to piss on Yuri's eventual plans. Now, granted the fact that they did this stopped the shipping of a bunch of nuclear warheads out of Chernobyl that Yuri had made ages ago out of the uranium there...
Did someone say uranium?
Now, I'm fairly certain that domestic nuclear power stations don't involve weapons-grade uranium. However, I'm not a nuclear scientist so I'll let that one slide. I am however dubious about the whole setup at Chernobyl in the first place, given that it was allegedly Chagarin's men being ready to extract the file and having the mysterious radiation-eating spray to get rid of the problem, but then actually it was Yuri's men being ready to shift out the crates. Shouldn't Arik or someone have gone "hang on, why are all these guys here, and what's with all the helicopters?"
Also, Chernobyl? That's in Ukraine. The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. You're telling me that two Americans with various injuries can drive a car with a boot full of automatic weapons and grenades over the border from Russia into Ukraine and no-one bats an eyelid? Maybe they just shot the border guards.
...in fact, maybe they did. This is my greatest problem with DH5 - the fact that John McClane loses all sense of morality when he leaves the USA. The first four Die Hard films were defined by the fact that he was the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time and he did what he did to protect people. Normal people. Yeah, OK, it was his wife involved in the first two, but still. However, as soon as he gets to Russia and sees his son, who's charged with murder let's remember and as far as McClane Snr knows is dodgy as fuck, breaking out of a jail and running away, what does he do? Does he hold up his hands and go "OK, I screwed up here, best stay out of the way"? No.
John McClane steals a truck and heads off in pursuit.
What's more, when he crashes his first truck he assaults a driver and steals another truck and heads off again. Using this truck, he drives over a whole host of other vehicles including ones with screaming people in simply so he can chase down his delinquent son and the people who seem to be in pursuit. It's not his job, he's just interjecting himself. If there was any incident of him showing regret for his actions, I wouldn't mind so much, but as it is he comes over as the worst stereotype of an American abroad - he can do what he wants because he's an American, and all you people should just speak American so he can understand you.
I can only assume that this is acceptable to Hollywood because the people involved aren't Americans. I'm sure McClane commandeers a few vehicles in previous movies, but that has been because the lives of many people have been at risk (and he's been acting as an officer of the law). Here, he's simply being a bloody nuisance, because he has no evidence that anyone's life is at risk other than his son's, who was about to stand trial for murder anyway and would have been "lucky to get life".
There's also the issue of his son casually tossing Yuri off a building into helicopter roters to be shredded. Yes, the image is a homage to Hans Gruber's demise (although why McClane doesn't mentioned anything about Gruber when he shoots down the glass ceilings in the ballroom is beyond me), but the difference was that Gruber dropped to his death because he was dragging Holly McClane to her death with him and was about to shoot John in the head. Jack kills Yuri simply because he doesn't want to leave him alive.
Willis has said that he'd like to do one more movie and then retire the character. I'm hoping the last instalment is back up to scratch, as this one was a little disappointing.
