A Good Day to Die Hard Fans Prove Critics Wrong

Bruce Willis’ latest action thriller, “A Good Day to Die Hard,” has, quite predictably, been ripped a new one by those oh-so-hard-to-please critics. In “A Good Day,” John McClane, the “007 of Plainfield, New Jersey” of the Die Hard series, travels to Russia to bail his boy, Jack, out of trouble. In Moscow, he finds out that Jack is a CIA operative. They join forces to thwart a terrorist plot. Jai Courtney, who was recently in the Tom Cruise thriller “Jack Reacher”, plays the son, Jack McClane.

Now can you imagine having a job where you have to go watch a lot of mindless entertainment and then explain why people who like watching mindless entertainment shouldn’t?

We don’t get why The New York Times, for example, would even bother to review it. Their critic Kenneth Turan, calls Bruce Willis’ performance “pro forma.” Seriously, dude? We would venture to say that he’s got to be the only person who saw the film that those two words even occurred to.

NPR’s Ian Buckwalter found the film to be the worst “Die Hard” offering ever, calling the original a masterpiece, and the others “marginally watchable.” You could almost feel bad for him that he had to watch this one at all if he wasn’t so unequivocally insufferable.

Then there’s poor Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post, assigned to sit through a film she thought was “staged and choreographed as if by a bored toddler” with “jittery car chases, hyperkinetic explosions and ham-handed gunfights piling up with wanton randomness” culminating in “a you-got-your-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate stunt involving a whirling helicopter, a dangling truck and a gruesomely absurd bit of business with a propeller.” Most charitably, she does allow that “A Good Day to Die Hard” is a bit better than the recent offerings of Sylvester Stallone (“Bullet to the Head”) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (“The Last Stand”), thanks to “the brief running time…”

Fortunately for Bruce Willis and his studio, “Die Hard” fans are not as high-falutin’ and the film did better at the box office on its opening day ($8.3 million) than the films of Stallone and Schwarzenegger on their whole first weekend.

“Bullet to the Head” only made back $4.5 million of its $55 million budget in opening weekend.

“The Last Stand” had a budget of $30 million and made back $6.3 million of that from its USA debut.

Still, it’s a bit relative, since “A Good Day’s” budget was a reported $92 million but 20th Century Fox is counting on it doing very well in Europe.

Maybe these critics think Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger ought to pack it in, but the action stars don’t think so. Looks like they agree with “The Last Stand” tagline — “retirement is for sissies.”