A Good Day to Die Hard takes McClane out of the US and into Russia where he hooks up with his estranged son, Jack (Jai Courtney). As it turns out, the younger McClane is actually a CIA agent and John’s appearance on the scene of a covert op really makes a mess of his son’s plan.
Jack’s mission is to keep a Russian political prisoner named Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch) safe and be led to some hidden files that will bring down a particularly corrupt government official, Viktor Chagarin (Sergei Kolesnikov). Unfortunately, the arrival of Jack’s father throws a few monkey wrenches in the works and the plans have to change, but quite frankly, John works best flying by the seat of his pants, and maybe Jack will learn how to wing it a bit as well. Along the way, Yuri and the McClanes meet up with Komarov’s daughter, Irina (Yuilya Snigir), but it becomes obvious that not everyone is exactly who or what they appear to be.
Let’s face it though, this is just the excuse a Die Hard movie has to get the viewers from one explosion to the next. A Good Day to Die Hard not only comes with the normal selection of gun fire, evil bad guys, and one-liner catch phrases, but it also contains the biggest helicopter in production shooting at everyone and the longest car chase sequence I think I’ve ever seen. Actually, that car chase is a major centerpiece of the film and is basically how the movie starts off. It’s such a big part of the film that it gets its very own half-hour featurette that goes into a lot of detail about the painstaking efforts that were made to choreograph the massive sequence.
The explosions are only overshadowed by the sheer amount of special features found on the Blu-ray release of A Good Day to Die Hard. Not only is there the aforementioned "Anatomy of a Car Chase" featurette, but there are other making of featurettes that talk about everything from the weapons used, to the helicopter the main enemies have in their possession, to the music, camera work and even the post-production coloring added to finalize the mood for the film. Outside of the making of featurettes, there are a couple of other behind-the-scenes tidbits that go into the interaction between John and Jack McClane, as well as an in-depth look into the film’s villain. This version also comes with deleted scenes, concept art, a commentary and three pre-visualization sequences for some of the film’s scenes. Like I said, there are a lot of special features that come with this fifth Die Hard film.
So is it worth the purchase? Well, you have to go into the film knowing what to expect. John McClane is a bad-a$$. He ends up in bad situations and in order to get out of them, pretty much everything around him will explode. If you go in and don’t expect any kind of deep story, then you won’t be disappointed. With the introduction of Jack, this movie feels a bit like a passing of the torch or maybe even the ending of the series, but if so, that hasn’t been announced yet as far as I know. While the two characters do grow a bit throughout the film, that feels very ancillary to the rest of the action, so unless you are a die hard Die Hard fan (it couldn’t be passed up), then this latest installment is probably just a rental.
