Movie Monday: A Good Day to Die Hard

I've neglected Movie Monday for weeks.  It was a combination of things, but it all boils down to I was busy and not watching movies.  Thus, I neither had time to write the posts nor the time to see anything to write about.  But how can I not post a Movie Monday the day after the Oscars?

This weekend my mother and I went to see A Good Day to Die Hard.  I've mentioned before that she's a big fan of the original Die Hard, so it didn't surprise me that she wanted to go out to see the fifth one.  The first remains the best and the third (Die Hard with a Vengeance) remains the second best.

But A Good Day to Die Hard was definitely a Die Hard movie, even if Die Hard movies have changed.  It was extremely violent, frequently funny, and it was more than once utterly preposterous that John McClane (Bruce Willis) and his son Jack (Jai Courtney) weren't killed.  The worst was a scene were the action stopped to allow father and son to have a bonding talk.  The slowness allowed the stupidity to seep through, and McClane simply yanking a piece of rebar out of his son's abdomen was the cherry on the whole idiotic scene.  (At least the chemical spray that instantly made Chernobyl non-radioactive came in a scene where things were moving along.)

The movie begins with McClane traveling to Russia to attend his son's trial.  But it turns out Jack is there with the CIA to get political prisoner Komarov (Sebastian Koch) out of the country, along with his file on the misdeeds of a prominent political figure.  From there it's basically one big action scene, starting with a fantastically filmed car chase that's disturbing for an instant when it makes the ill-advised decision to call attention to the fact that the hero is heedlessly plowing through cars full of civilians.  The villains aren't all that memorable, and Yuliya Snigir was unfortunately forced to be sexy in an eye-rolling way.  She's a gorgeous woman, she doesn't have to unzip her jacket and flash her garters to command attention.

Honestly though, I enjoyed A Good Day to Die Hard.  It was an action film and it delivered plenty of action and enough laughs to make me happy.  Some of the callbacks to the original worked; some didn't.  McClane and his son using glass as a weapon was terrific.  Attempting to replicate Hans Gruber's death wasn't.  If you're not into the Die Hard films you might wait for video, but the explosions are pretty fun on a big screen.