NOTHING LASTS FOREVER (Part 4 - The Five Major Mistakes of Die Hard 5)

I'm a little aghast right now.  I just got back from seeing this travesty...

There were about 20 people in the theater.  One of them left around 20 minutes in and never came back.  That being said, this was one matinee.  By all accounts DH5 will top the weekend box office. And the good people at Fox will think they did everything right because money.  (Sigh...)

Okay, to be completist, I need to write about this one, but it's just been released and I detest spoilers.  So I'm going to be vague about the plot.  I suspect, however, if you go see it, you'll be amazed at how little more there is to tell.  A few key words and phrases, a reveal here and there, but not much more.  Here's goes.

Some high-level Russian politician goes to see an aging prisoner who is set to testify in a major court case.  The politician says something like, "You give me the file and I'll give you back your life."  And the prisoner tells him he doesn't really care about his life.  The politician says he'll never let him testify, and none of this makes any sense yet. You just kind of go along thinking, "They'll tell us at some point."  Then a young guy goes into a Russian nightclub, commits an obvious and publicly visible crime that he's arrested for.  We know from the trailers that he's Jack McClane.

In New York, John McClane (who's still an excellent shot after all these years on the force) gets the news that his son has been arrested in Russia.  John looks weary, crestfallen. Maybe this is heartbreak for his son, who we're told grew up a troubled problem child, always getting in his own way.  His generic cop buddy from the NYPD gives him the whole scoop on Jack's arrest and when his hearing will be.  John plans to take his vacation time to go to Russia to try and help Jack out.  Generic NYPD guy warns John that they do things differently in Russia.  John's response? "Yeah, me too."  (Really? You've been to Russia and you know you do things differently there?  Okay, whatever.)

So John gets a ride to the airport from Lucy.  (Always nice to see her.)  Here's what she looks like driving him to the airport.

"Dad, try not to make and even bigger mess of this."

She gives him an Idiots' Guide to Russia and tells him she loves him.  (Because she does ever since they made up in the last movie.)  Next thing you know John is on a plane, studying the files Generic NYPD guy gave him.  These files are all in Russian.  Then before you know it, he's on the ground, stuck in Garden Ring traffic.  His cabbie is a jovial fellow who takes pity on him for being so uncomfortable in Russia and let's him get out and walk without paying.  He walks to the courthouse, arriving just in time to see Jack get loaded off a prison truck and hustled into court right behind the aging prisoner we saw at the opening of this thing.  A bunch of noisy stuff happens and soon Jack is out of shackles and escorting the Russian prisoner to a disguised panel van so he can  escort him to a safe house somewhere in Moscow.  But in walks John, looking a little bit like this.

"You're only making it worse."

In fact, for the next 20 minutes or so, this is how he looks.  Confused.  This is because, HE HAS NO IDEA WHAT'S GOING ON!  He still thinks Jack is in trouble for being some kind of troubled youth.  He doesn't wonder why Jack is barking orders in Russian at this older prisoner.  Jack keep telling he shouldn't be here, he's not wanted here, he's in the way.  John honestly thinks he's being a good dad by chasing his son and trying to keep him from getting in more trouble than he's already in.

Meanwhile this nice, young woman...

"Zzzzzzziiiippp."

...had ordered some gunmen to kill Jack but make sure they take back the older prisoner alive.  So the gunmen chase Jack and prisoner in the biggest dump truck looking thing you've ever seen, and John, wanting to catch up to his son and talk some sense into him, steals the biggest flatbed truck you've ever seen.  These three monster trucks have a high speed chase-shootout-demolition derby on the streets and highways of Moscow, nary a cop in sight, I might add.  John tumbles the flatbed and has to steal some other guy's car - by punching him the face and saying, "I don't understand a word you're saying." Finally, John pulls a maneuver that lets Jack get away, but it costs he rolls his second car and Jack decides he has to go back for him.  They manage to get away and head for the safe house.  (The guy who left, never saw the end of this sequence, by the way.  It was just too much of a noisy, blurry, shaky cam experience for him, I guess.  And I guess some people just like to know what the heck is going on in a car chase. That wasn't really an option here most of the time.)

Okay, so they wrecked the city and Jack's mad that John is there, but at least they made it to the safe house.  End of Act 1.  John finally figures out that Jack is in the CIA.  They want the Russian alone because he has a file full of evidence that will help them with whatever job they've been working on.  John's relieved and here comes the only reference to Holly since the end of DH3... "Your mom, will be relieved.  She and I thought it was drugs."  Okay, this is key because it tells us that 1) Holly is still alive in the world of Die Hard and 2) she and John occasionally talk about the kids.  But then the safe house stops being safe and they have to flee.

On the street, Jack tells John (whom he doesn't want there) to babysit the most important prisoner in all of Russia while he goes to check if the coast is clear.  This allows the most important prisoner in all of Russia to have a father-to-father talk with John about how it's never too late to make things right with your kids.  He has a daughter, so he knows.  (Any guesses who the daughter is? If you guessed the only important female character in all of Russia, you, too could run a studio.)

NOTE: Service elevators don't play "Girl From Ipanema."
Only cliche movie elevators do.

Look I don't want to relive the whole wafer-thin plot.  Suffice to say, it doesn't feel like Die Hard.  Not once.  Not ever.  In Die Hard, if an assault helicopter destroys a downtown hotel, someone gets the President on the horn.  In Die Hard noisy spectacles not only end up on the news, they represent a golden opportunity for the men and women who report the news.  In Die Hard people everywhere get involved in one way or another.  For example, that Russian cabbie?  I guarantee we would have seen him again, were this a Die Hard movie. But here, it's all done wrong (except maybe McClane's costume - they got that right, at least), but not only is it all done wrong, it's all done wrong in the washed-out monochromatic blue and amber hues of some of today's top shelf TV commercials.  This is some of the worst camera work and color timing Hollywood has to offer.

So, to move on to the title of this post, here are the five things wrong with Die Hard 5.

1) The credit "A John Moore Film" - This is the first of his movies I've ever seen, so I'm not going to go down the road of critiquing his body of work.  My beef with this is that it I got the sense that it actually was a John Moore film.  When you take the reins of the latest installment of a franchise, you don't get the luxury of "putting your stamp on it."  Your job is to step out of the way so much that you become invisible, like a runway model whose job is to make you see the clothes, and let the essential truth of the franchise be your North Star.  If you have Die Hard or Star Wars or Star Trek or any such name in the title of your film, it's not YOUR film.  It's a film you got to direct.  It's a ship you are must steer straight.  It's not yours to plot a new course.  Nobody cares about seeing "Your Die Hard," John Moore.  We want to see Die Hard, plain, simple and clean.  (To be fair, though, for all I know John Moore fought tooth and nail to make it more Die Hard and less him.  I guess we'll never know.)

2) John McClane isn't in it - From the moment we see him, John is quiet, sullen, morose, weary.  He looks old, barely awake.  Never do we see what made Bruce Willis everybody's favorite action guy for a good decade or more - his natural sense of humor.  He was more John McClane in Moonrise Kingdom than he was here.

3) Holly - Don't reference her if it's going to be empty.  There's a moment at the end for, in any and all true life circumstances, Holly would have been present.  Her absence was as glaring as the freeze frame  (!) before the final fade out.  Ironically, it makes her the absentee parent.

4) Isolation - Nothing had any effect on the actual world around it.  By that, I mean the mega-destrcutive car chase in Act 1, the destruction of the downtown hotel, the eventual climatic battle in a remote location - all of it is done in complete isolation, far from all the civilians and authorities that would want to get in the way.  It makes the entire exercise achingly generic.

5) Scale - This is a very small flick.  Die Hard was an event.  They treated it like an event even before they knew what a crowd-pleasing hit it would be.  That sense of importance, the feeling that his is one of Fox's flagship titles.  But this film feels like a B-movie at best, dumped in February on as many small screens as possible.  Nobody seems to care what an opportunity this was.  Instead, they churned out a product that will not be long remembered.

This begs the question that got me blogging about this in the first place. Can Die Hard be rescued?  I do believe it can, if done carefully.  It's not enough to drop in an Ode to Joy ringtone or snippets of Michael Kamen's original score here and there.  You need a writer who remembers what made it great and a director who wants to honor what came before and a studio exec who understands what all this means.  My fear is that nobody in the position to make that happen really thinks it's necessary.

Okay, I'm done with this thing.  It's bringing out too much negativity in me.  Next time I'll start with something I'm genuinely excited about.

- OO