A Good Day to Die Hard
Bruce Willis’s wise-guy cop starts looking his age.
Directed by John Moore
(R)
*
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
![https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516-320-80.jpg)
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
“It took 25 years,” but the Die Hard series “has finally devolved into joyless sludge,” said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. Sure, “the cars and choppers and buildings blow up real good” in this fifth installment, but “nothing in it makes sense,” and it’s even “terribly filmed.” Bruce Willis reprises his role as John McClane in a project that completes a film-by-film makeover of the ex-cop that has “bastardized one of action cinema’s most enduring icons,” said Nick Schager in New York magazine. Back in 1988, McClane was an average-joe detective reluctantly answering the call to action. Now, as he tries to get his CIA operative son (Jai Courtney) out of the middle of a dangerous Russian plot, he’s a smart-aleck superman so invincible that he’d be “perfectly at home in a Looney Tunes cartoon.” A Good Day “isn’t just the weakest of the Die Hard pictures; it’s a lousy action movie on its own terms,” said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. There’s “a misjudged reliance on absurd digital effects,” lame villains, and poor dialogue. The run time barely passes 90 minutes, but it feels longer. “A lot longer.” Even Willis seems bored.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
The manosphere: the shady online network of masculinists
The Explainer A new police report said a rise in radicalised young men is contributing to an increase in violence against women and girls
By Richard Windsor, The Week UK Published
-
How can we fix tourism?
Today's Big Question Local protests over negative impact of ever-rising visitor numbers could change how we travel forever
By The Week UK Published
-
Simone Biles: Rising – an 'elegantly paced and vulnerable' portrait of the gymnast
The Week Recommends Netflix's four-part documentary is more than a 'riveting comeback story'
By Irenie Forshaw, The Week UK Published