Die Hard 5 Critic’s Review Round Up!

Ok let me say I have not seen A Good Day To Die Hard,that being said I am a fan of the franchise…HUGE fan.I thought part 4 Live Free Or Die Hard was just more of one of my favorite film icons…Mr. John McClane.I look forward to seeing “more” with the new film being released today.Unfortunetly,the critics are not too impressed.My advice,if you love any of the Die Hard films,I am sure you will enjoy this one too.

After you check out the review, make the JUMP  to the Serpentorlsair Forum’s and Join in the Discussion!

Source: Roger Ebert

Ebert: 1 1/2 Stars

According to the “Die Hard” wiki, John McClane has killed a total of 58 people in the first four “Die Hard” films.
That number seems low, but let’s go with it.

So since 1988, when the youngish Det. McClane took that cross-country flight to see estranged wife Holly and wound up singlehandedly quashing the terrorist Hans Gruber and his numerous badly coiffed henchmen (that one guy looked JUST like Huey Lewis), he has killed nearly 60 people, and thwarted hijackers and terrorists. Plus, he’s an alcoholic, his wife is now long gone, he has sustained more injuries than all starting quarterbacks in the NFL put together — and he has experienced enough violence to be a first-ballot entrant in the cinematic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Hall of Fame.

You’d think McClane’s kids would give him a break for not being there for every dance recital and Little League game, but in “Live Free or Die Hard” (2007), it took an attack by a team of cyber-terrorists to reunite him with his estranged daughter. Now, with “A Good Day to Die Hard,” McClane has to go all the way to Russia and battle yet another bunch of ruthless master criminals and their henchmen just to get a little closure with his son, to whom he hasn’t spoken in years.

Yippee-ki-yay, absentee father.

Granted, in the original “Die Hard,” John and Holly probably wouldn’t get back together without Hans crashing the Nakatomi holiday party. But director John McTiernan delivered a first-rate action film that became an instant classic: the perfect vehicle for Willis to showcase his wise-ass but slightly vulnerable persona. “Die Hard” worked because we got to know McClane (and the bad guys) before the body count started piling up.

A quarter-century later, McClane has been stripped of any real traces of an actual three-dimensional character. We feel as if we’re watching Bruce Willis in a Bruce Willis movie in which Bruce Willis can survive anything while taking out the villains, video-game style. “A Good Day to Die Hard” hits the ground shooting, never giving us a chance to get the least bit involved with any of these characters, including McClane’s now-grown son, Jack (Jai Courtney), who keeps reminding “John” (as he persists in calling his dad) he was never there for him, even as they team up to take down a number of high-level Russian thugs.

McClane thinks he’s going to Russia to save or at least his support his son, who’s been charged with a serious crime, but within 15 minutes of his dad’s arrival, Jack has seriously botched an undercover mission.

That’s right: Jack McClane is working for the CIA. Somehow Pops, who’s been pretty good at solving complex mysteries since the days when he was waiting for important faxes at Dulles airport, had no idea the kid was a top-level undercover spy.

Not that any of this stuff matters. Director John Moore is clearly a fan of Explosion Porn, filling up the screen with great fanning orange flames and crashing helicopters, blowing up buildings and engineering multiple slow-motion scenes in which John and/or his son fly through the air like superheroes without wings, crash through windows and bounce off conveniently placed scaffolding, never sustaining so much as a broken rib or a fractured ankle. Iron Man in his full suit would be experiencing concussion-like symptoms after surviving such abuse.

There was some reason for optimism about this film. I’m a huge fan of the original, and I’ve enjoyed most of the sequels, even the ludicrous “Live Free or Die Hard.” The R rating for “A Good Day to Die Hard” told us they weren’t going to skimp on the raw language and the quality kills. And it would be interesting to see where John McClane was in 2013.

Well. Turns out McClane’s back with the New York City police department, where he’s been since the mid-1980s, give or a take a few years off for suspensions and other setbacks. And he’s still fond of the “yippee-ki-yay” punch line, though it’s wasted in shameful fashion in this film.

You’d think McClane would be retired from the force, perhaps enjoying the accolades and wealth that should come the way of a man who has fended off four separate major acts of terrorism over the last 25 years. No such luck.

Like 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.

We’re told another “Die Hard” is in the works. I remember sighing when I heard there was another “Rocky” movie due in 2006 — but “Rocky Balboa” turned out to be a surprisingly powerful and worthy final chapter in a franchise that had lost its way.

Here’s hoping the next “Die Hard” provides a similar kind of redemption. John McClane deserves a much stronger salute as he rides off into the sunset.

Source:Aint It Cool News

John Ary here with Ed “Terry Malloy” Travis talking about the latest entry in the Die Hard franchise.

This time John McClane shoots guns and blows stuff up in Russia with his son. Unfortunately, the story, characters, style, screenplay and action feel much closer in spirit with Live Free or Die Hard rather than the original trilogy. Here’s our thoughts on A Good Day to Die Hard…

Source:MSN.com

2 Out Of 5 Stars

By the time Bruce Willis, playing John McClane, gets around to muttering his signature “Die Hard” line, the modernized cowboy call of “Yippee-kay-ay” spruced up with a 12-letter profane epithet, he might as well be expressing a sentiment from a different franchise, that is, Danny Glover’s “Lethal Weapon” plaint, “I’m getting too old for this s—.”

It’s not Willis’ fault. At least not entirely. Throughout this movie, the fifth and the worst installment in the “Die Hard” franchise, he comports himself professionally if not in an inspired way. He’s in good shape. But he’s failed by pretty much everyone behind the cameras, and much of his supporting cast, too. In this movie, still-tough-as-nails NYPD guy McClane embarks on a trip to Russia, ostensibly to rescue his black-sheep son, Jack (Jai Courtney), who’s going on trial in Moscow for murder. No sooner is McClane trading enervated Sinatra-centric banter with a Russian cabbie than stuff starts blowing up real good, and McClane is ducking shrapnel and flying bullets while protesting, to no one in particular, “I’m on vacation.” But he’s not on vacation — he went to Russia to fetch his black-sheep son. Doesn’t matter. Some executive thought it would be funny for him to do that. It’s not, particularly.

Bing: More about Bruce Willis | More on Jai Courtney

And of course the son’s not a black sheep, either; he’s working deep cover for the CIA, and his pushy dad is screwing up his mission. Said mission involves a “political prisoner” (Sebastian Koch) who’s supposedly got major dirt on the new Russian defense minister, his hot evil daughter, Irina (Yuliya Snigir), a character so one-dimensional she might as well have just been named “Hot Evil Daughter,” and Alik (Rasha Bukvic) a carrot-and-scenery-chewing killer who talks too much even by bad action movie villain-who-talks-too-much standards.

The movie offers up all the physical and simulated physical mayhem that money can buy, and none of the imagination. “I’m not done talking to you,” McClane “comically” grouses in the middle of a car chase, talking to literally no one and nothing, if the shots framing this exclamation are to be believed. When the movie is not bludgeoning you over the head with the pyrotechnics, it’s actively insulting your intelligence, as when McClane and son make the 12-hour drive from Moscow to the Ukraine in the space of an evening. The movie actually perks up just a bit when the action moves to an abandoned power plant of some reputation, and the post-nuclear-meltdown-dystopian production design creates a certain sense of action movie novelty. “What’s this remind you of?” McClane asks in the wreckage. “Newark,” he answers himself. Film nuts might see a slight resemblance to the Russian classic “Stalker.” But anyway …

Courtney, who was last seen trying to become the B-movie version of Ryan Phillippe in “Jack Reacher,” doesn’t do much meaningful résumé-boosting here either. Nobody benefits from the half-hearted interstices in which McClanes junior and senior try to repair the relationship that was only concocted for the sake of a money-grubbing sequel. The movie earns its second star here because I’m a Bruce Willis fan and could watch him in pretty much anything and get some enjoyment out of it (although, to be honest, I have not revisited “Perfect Stranger” or “The Color of Night” recently), but seriously. Unless someone comes in to pump some actual juice into it, the “Die Hard” series ought to stay dead.