Isaacs Picture Conclusions

SHITFEST 2013: FALL ~ A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD

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BY: BANANAS ABOUT MOVIES

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AGDTDH

A Good Day To Die Hard: Shitfest Edition

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Alfred Hitch­cock once said, “Always make the audi­ence suf­fer as much as pos­sible.” I don’t know whether John Moore read that quote before shoot­ing A Good Day To Die Hard, but if he did… well done. You made me suf­fer. But not in the obvi­ously good way Hitch­cock was refer­ring to.

Hitch­cock also said, “The length of a film should be dir­ectly related to the endur­ance of the human blad­der.” I can say with con­fid­ence that the length of A Good Day To Die Hard is dir­ectly related to my desire to start bash­ing my own brains in with a brick, until I’m a drool­ing veget­able, suck­ing liquid­ized roast din­ner through a straw, and shit­ting in a bag, in a dis­ease rid­den hos­pital bed.

I can barely write this review for more than a minute at a time without need­ing to sleep for half an hour, and have my one remain­ing brain cell jump star­ted by the exposed ends of two live wires applied dir­ectly to my forehead.

So, using that as a guideline, I can say that A Good Day To Die Hard at one hour and thirty-eight minutes long, is one hour and thirty-seven minutes and fifty-nine seconds too long.

As soon as I heard they were mak­ing the film, 1% of me thought, “Hey, it might be good!” But 99% of me was already down the local DIY store, test­ing the weight of bricks in my hand, and their poten­tial for smash­ing my skull in.

Thanks, John Moore. No, ser­i­ously. THANKS.

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I guess the ulti­mate ques­tion, which I shall try to answer at the end of this review, is…

WHEN IS IT A GOOD DAY TO WATCH A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD?

The trouble I have with the film is that it doesn’t feel like a Die Hard film. It’s not sur­pris­ing really. The Die Hard for­mula was already being pushed to its lim­its with its first and second sequels, let alone the third sequel. There’s only so much shit can hap­pen to the same guy twice three four five times, which is why A Good Day To Die Hard is so hard to stom­ach. It’s a series that really should have ended with the third film.

And it did. For a long while. With everything tied up neatly, and Jeremy Irons’s Simon Gruber, brother of Hans Gruber, being a nice call­back to the first film. That Die Hard With A Ven­geance was ori­gin­ally not a Die Hard film, but a thriller called Simon Says should also have been a warn­ing. It was a series that had reached the end of its nat­ural life.

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But maybe some pro­du­cer in Hol­ly­wood needed a new drinks cab­inet, or a robot but­ler, and the sorry fran­chise spluttered back into life. From Die Hard 4.0 (or Live Free or Die Hard, as it’s also known) onwards, the series has star­ted to turn John McClane from a cop with huge determ­in­a­tion and ded­ic­a­tion, but very human lim­its, into some sort of CGI super­hero, cap­able of fall­ing great heights through mul­tiple floors of a build­ing into irra­di­ated water and sur­viv­ing with barely a scratch. His duty to pro­tect inno­cent cit­izens also seems to have been thrown out the win­dow. It’s like he doesn’t give a shit any more. Pretty much like Bruce Wil­lis himself.

Which brings me back to the ques­tion I posed earlier…

WHEN IS IT A GOOD DAY TO WATCH A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD?

ANSWER: Never. It will always be a bad day to watch A Good Day To Die Hard. I felt shitty after I watched it. I hope that Hol­ly­wood pro­du­cer is happy with his fuck­ing robot butler.

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35 comments

  1. Terry Malloy's Pigeon Coop

    Absolutely love this and love the effort that’s gone in! Not seen the film as I stopped after number three but I’ve not seen a good word about this and Bruce is coming off as such a douche these days it’s hard to even care about anything he’s doing.

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  9. Parlor of Horror

    That ‘wheel of shits’ rules! That poster is total shit CG, like the pics of women in Maxim Magazine (ie: FAKE). Is that what they did in this movie? Had an actor run around the whole film then just insert Bruce Willis’s head with CG ? (Like Tom Burgeron in those AFV vids?). We all know how these films end… Bruce running around bloody and barefoot, and having to run though broken glass to save the day 😀

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      • Parlor of Horror

        That’s not the problem, the problems are: elongating legs, making butts more full and round, airbrushing skin tones and flesh so they are void of any marks that could be construed as imperfect, enhancing breasts without surgery, slimming waistlines. Quite often what you’re looking at is equivalent to a cartoon or painting, in CG of course. Sorry to break the news, none of those women are that perfect 😦

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  12. table9mutant

    Haha! This review is hilarious. Good job. 🙂 And sorry I’m a day late. I have an excuse as I’m extremely ill! So this review cheered me up. Oh, and I’ve not bothered watching this one. Guess I made the right choice. 🙂

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  13. Nicole Nevermind

    Awesome! Loved the review, which I can guarantee I enjoyed far more than I would’ve enjoyed the movie itself. I really dug the original, the first sequel was okay but after that… man, the only place they have left to go at this point is sending John McClane into outer space. $10 says they do it. ~_0

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  14. Pingback: The 3 Worst Films of 2013 | Oracle of Film

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