JOHN MOORE

Bil’s rating (out of 5):   B.5

USA, 2013.  Twentieth Century Fox, TSG Entertainment, Giant Pictures, Dune Entertainment, Ingenious Media, Big Screen Productions, Mid Atlantic Films, Temple Hill Entertainment.  Screenplay by Skip Woods, based on characters created by Roderick Thorp.  Cinematography by Jonathan Sela.  Produced by Wyck Godfrey, Alex Young.  Music by Marco Beltrami.  Production Design by Daniel T. Dorrance.  Costume Design by Bojana Nikitovic.  Film Editing by Dan Zimmerman.  

Even the most ardent and uncritical fan of action movies will have a tough time wrapping their brain around this convoluted lunacy, there’s evidence of a breakdown in the gene pool in this fourth sequel to the 1988 hit (that is still one of the greatest action films of all time). The ever-stalwart John McClane (Bruce Willis) travels to Russia to find his son, who as far as he knows is a directionless disappointment in constant trouble. When he arrives in St. Petersburg, McClane accidentally steps into the middle of a CIA operation which his offspring (Jai Courtney) has been setting up for months, involving an imprisoned politician with access to some kind of data file that the agency wants to get hold of (I can’t pretend that I really understood the plot enough to relate it to you).   Despite making a mess of things as soon as he gets there, our aging hero eventually deals with his estranged relationship with his son by tearing the city up, then traveling to Chernobyl where they set fire to and explode anything they come across.

What was tense and clever oh so many years ago has here been replaced with nonsensical excuses for mayhem (if you’re driving over cars stuck in traffic and crushing them, doesn’t that mean you’re killing people?) and a strange sense of macho obsession (why does the guy whose vulnerability made him such a great anti-Schwarzenegger in the eighties keep chiding his son about hugging and crying?) If the two leads had the fun chemistry that Willis shared with Samuel L. Jackson in the middling third film (which seems like a masterpiece by comparison), it might have helped smooth things along, but Courtney is a washout on the big screen and the two actors never make a noticeable connection. All in all, it’s worthless bullshit, not even bad in a fun way, and you’d do well to avoid it completely.