A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) - Willis' action-franchise dies an ugly death

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+ Worst Poster of the Year + Stupidest Movie of the Year

Die-hard cop John McClane from New York partners up with the son he (suddenly) has, in Moscow, where uranium and nuclear warheads are falling into the wrong hands.

A Good Day to Die Hard, the 5th film in the Die Hard action movie series, is an awful film through and through. It makes Die Hard 2 (1990) - the series' low-point until now, - seem like a world class film. For a series of movies with as high a standard as the Die Hard movies; Die Hard (1988) is an action masterpiece, and both Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995) and Die Hard 4.0 (2007) are excellent movies, - it is a little painful to see it all come to this:
Die Hard 5 has no good villain, (which is pivotal), and only one other name-actor besides Bruce Willis (Pulp Fiction (1994)) as McClane, and that is up-and-comer Jai Courtney (Jack Reacher (2012)), (not counting Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Death Proof (2007)), because she only reappears very shortly as McClane's daughter.) Courtney and Willis have absolutely no on-screen chemistry and seem in fact to loathe each other. Their scenes together are so bad.
The script is also bonkers; confident that it can do the impossible, when it wants the audience to follow McClane through idiotic, overly huge and stupid action scenes and then go straight into weirdly emotional bonding scenes between Willis and his gorilla-like son. It is also furnished with cliché upon cliché, and seemingly build on thin air - nothing! The responsible writer is Skip Woods (X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)).
A Good Day to Die Hard even has an extremely ugly CGI-finale. - Ugh!
Nevertheless, Willis wants to make a 6th Die Hard film before retiring the franchise, and a writer has been commissioned to write this under the dubious title Die Hardest. - After A Good Day to Die Hard, I am intensely skeptical.
It is directed by Irish action director John Moore (Behind Enemy Lines (2001)).

Related posts:

John Moore: 2013 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED VI]

2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED V]
2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED IV]
2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]  
2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]

Behind Enemy Lines (2001) - Solid action/war/suspense popcorn entertainer

Even the posters for John Moore's A Good Day to Die Hard are ugly and unoriginal, - especially this one, for which A Good Day to Die Hard wins the Worst Poster of the Year award from Film Excess - congratulations!

Watch the trailer here

Cost: 92 mil. $
Box office: 304.6 mil. $
= Box office success
[Distributor Fox did the smart thing of opening Die Hard 5 in Asia a week before the wide American release. There, mass audiences rarely object if a huge movie is terrible. Despite opening 1st in the US, the film's main arena was the rest of the world, where it made an impressive 237.3 mil. $ or 77 % of its total gross.]

What do you think of A Good Day to Die Hard?
Are you interested in another, perhaps last film in the series?

Behind Enemy Lines (2001) - Solid action/war/suspense popcorn entertainer

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Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg's recent, triumphant Lone Survivor was in no way an original plot. 12 years before it, John Moore made Behind Enemy Lines!

QUICK REVIEW:

An American pilot is thoroughly bored as a peace-observer, until one day when he gets shot down over Bosnia during the 90s Bosnian War behind enemy lines and has to fight his way out on foot!

Owen Wilson as the survivor pilot in John Moore's Behind Enemy Lines

First of, debuting Irish director John Moore (A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)) chooses the realistic solutions, and I bought the rest; a dang exciting, albeit a bit CGI-heavy, serving of old-fashioned war action suspense prone to showy cinematography.
Lines is loosely based on a 1995 incident with an American soldier shot down over Bosnia, surviving 6 days there before getting saved by US Marines. He sued the filmmakers, because they hadn't gotten his accept for the film, and he felt he was misrepresented in it, but they settled that out of court.
Critics have called the film jingoistic (meaning that it is excessively biased in its portrayal of one country (America) as extremely superior to others, in this case Eastern European countries) and video-game-like. I didn't think think so, and had no problems with the film showing America as superior to these hoodlum states, which is/was obviously the case in fact.
And sure the film is shallow, but it's no serious war film; Behind Enemy Lines is not terribly deep, but it is fine entertainment. - A fun, exciting, entertaining movie.

John Moore's Behind Enemy Lines is about a plane going down, behind enemy lines, and it stars Owen Wilson and Gene Hackman ... what more do you need?

Watch the awesome trailer for this good movie right here

Budget: 40 mil. $
Box office: 91.7 mil. $
= Minor flop

What do you think of Behind Enemy Lines?