3 Short Paragraphs: A Good Day to Die Hard

2013, John Moore (Behind Enemy Lines, Max Payne) -- download

Migawd that was a pretty waste of time.  Seriously, that was the visually best looking action movie I have seen in some time, at least in the use of baysplosions and giant scenes of unbridled destruction [truly the best looking action movie I have seen in quite some time was actually Dredd. -ed.]. But the funny thing is that even now, less than 12 hours since I watched it, I cannot really remember what it was about.  Sure, I may have had some of the "plot" pared down due to that annoying sub-titles / no sub-titles aspect of downloaded movies, which eliminated much of the dialogue between bad guys, but I really doubt I was missing much.  I like small plots, but there has to be one there.

OK, we all know who John McLane is, right?  He is the over confident NYC cop who keeps ending up in the strangest plots (plot, as in Evil Plan by Bad Guy) and through the use of numerous bullets and a torn, bloody tshirt he defeats the bad guys. Oh yes, a liberal use of quips and surprised swearing is required. But the trouble is, this time he seems more like a caricature of his own character.  He heads to the former Soviet Union because he gets wind his son has been arrested for a capital crime. But he has no clue that his son is now a CIA operative and doesn't need to be rescued. So he blows things up, shoots people and destroys a small country's GNR in collateral damage, all under the premise of reconciling with his boy.  And along the way he also accidentally saves the world.

I don't get movies like these where we forgive the hero his collateral damage.  Oh, we can drive under the illusion that nobody is actually hurt in his car crunching, machine gun rattling and exploding helicopter escapades. But we all know in real life, that when twenty or thirty cars are crushed, flipped, knocked aside or exploded in a chase along a busy freeway (highway in Canada so what in Russia? -ed.) that someone has to be hurt if not killed. But no, McLane doesn't give a shit as long as he can give the bad guys there come-uppance and show off to his son. We are supposed to forgive the hero because of the bigger picture, but in this very obvious case, there is no big picture yet. In fact, there is no big picture (bad guy wants to blow up the world) until very very late in the movie. Of course, I could have missed it all because it was all in Russian.