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A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)
Yippee Ki-Yay Mother Russia
Filmmaker(s): John Moore

Iconoclastic, take-no-prisoners cop John McClane, finds himself for the first time on foreign soil after traveling to Moscow to help his wayward son Jack - unaware that Jack is really a highly-trained CIA operative out to stop a nuclear weapons heist. With the Russian underworld in pursuit, and battling a countdown to war, the two McClanes discover that their opposing methods make them unstoppable heroes.

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

Vehicle Porn

I’m pretty sure I understand how this got funded. The franchise is pretty worn out; since the first one, we have hundreds a year of tough boys and girls who manage to flamboyantly kill a lot of bad guys. (Set aside for a moment that most of these dead aren’t crooks, but soldiers and cops simply doing what they do.)

The stars of this are three vehicles. A huge armoured vehicle and two helicopters. It is these that our two heroes combat. Oh, we have sharply drawn villains, but they are there to present these three challenging machines. Note the shift in agency. In Star Wars, the Death Star was imposing, but only as an extension of evil men. Here, the machines are put frontwise.

In the final scene, the bad guys perish incidentally. The real drama is the wounding and death of the large helo. It is dressed to look evil and photographed as if it could move on its own.

What next? We’ve had flying aircraft carriers. Trains are common but are hard to make evil. Pacific Rim robots? I’m not sure. But I do see the need to escalate from one generation of these things to the next and orange fireballs don’t work any more.

Posted in 2015

Ted’s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

IMDB

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