Just die already

A-Good-Day-to-Die-HardIn case you forgot, the reason we have Bruce Willis is Die Hard, John McTiernan’s ridiculously entertaining 1988 action film about a wise-cracking lone cop trying to save his wife from a hostage-taking gang of criminals in an LA skyscraper. (Yes, it was his Emmy-winning role in Moonlighting that got him Die Hard, but Die Hard is what made Willis a movie star.) There have been four sequels, two in the 90s that were not as great as the original but were still funny and thrilling popcorn films. Then they rebooted the franchise in 2007 with Live Free or Die Hard, which was absurdly plotted and featured equally absurd action sequences, such as a chase scene between a fighter jet and a car and a bunch of highway overpasses. It was a great ride, and I loved it. I was thrilled that they decided to make another Die Hard, but A Good Day to Die Hard is unfortunately the worst of the series.

Like the previous movies in the series, the plot of A Good Day to Die Hard is jumpstarted by the familial duties of John McClane (Willis). In this version, he is trying to reunite with his estranged son, Jack (Jai Courtney), who has been arrested for murder in Moscow. As John travels from New York to Russia, we discover that Jack is not the ne’er-do-well John seems to think he is; rather he’s a CIA agent charged with rescuing a Russian political prisoner. Because it’s a Die Hard movie and Die Hard movies don’t operate in the real world, John runs into Jack as Jack is trying to make his getaway with the prisoner, Komarov (Sebastian Koch). Then there is a really long chase scene through the streets and highways of Moscow. One thing leads to another, and we end up at Chernobyl. Continue…

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Loop-de-looped

Fun and exciting. Just don’t think about it too hard. Unfortunately, I had to.

I love the idea of time travel. I fantasize about it a great deal: going back and stopping 9/11, going forward and finding out the right lottery numbers, visiting ancient Greece to see the Parthenon in its original form, or to 1970s San Francisco to visit pre-AIDS Castro. I’m always excited by time travel stories, from those great Star Trek episodes, to HG Wells’ The Time Machine, even to dorky shows like Quantum Leap. But when the time travel involves people visiting themselves in the past and trying to fix the future, things go awry, because the paradoxes start piling up. I either get annoyed or I have to force myself to ignore the annoyances. I had to do this with the Terminator franchise and with Heroes; if I thought about it too much, I could poke holes in the plot and my enjoyment would stutter. This is how I felt while watching Looper, the brainy, mostly thrilling new time travel thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Bruce Willis’s younger self. Continue…

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