John McClane is one beloved action hero who should’ve stayed retired. Sadly, with the last two “Die Hard” sequels, he’s joined fellow aging icons Rocky, Rambo and Indiana Jones, still shooting and punching way past their prime.

“A Good Day to Die Hard” waters down the classic Bruce Willis franchise with a lazily uninspired plot, hollow dialogue, overblown action and implausible stunts. Throwing in a token “Yipee ki-yay motherf***er” doesn’t magically fix a crap movie.

The series pulls a “Rocky IV” and drags our hero to Moscow to help his estranged son Jack (Jai Courtney), who has been arrested for murder. The humor relies heavily on fish-out-of-water Americanisms, like McClane butchering Russian translations while the taxi driver sings Frank Sinatra in a heavy accent.

McClane catches up with Jack just in time to botch his carefully orchestrated escape with political prisoner Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch) after an explosion during their trial. It turns out that Jack’s fine — he’s a CIA agent and Dad just blew a three-year operation.

Komarov and the McClanes find themselves on the run from an army of Russian mercenaries with machine guns and helicopters as they track down a “secret file.” Naturally, there’s some corrupt Russian bureaucrat named Viktor Chagarin (Sergei Kolesnikov) behind the terroristic plot, which involves a stockpile of weaponized uranium, but he’s barely given enough face time to matter.

Amid the running, jumping and shooting is a forced father-son bonding narrative, as John and Jack reconnect mostly through gruff one-liners and shrugs.

“A Good Day” overcompensates with more big explosions, chase sequences and shootouts than some of the other “Die Hard” movies, but these Russian thugs are child’s play for McClane. The plot feigns urgency and relevance, and its “big twist” is utterly predictable. Even the Chernobyl-set climax tries too hard.

The film’s shortcomings start with the villains; these dull Russians are walking stereotypes. There’s the tattooed, muscle-bound brute, the devious femme fatale and the cocky bad guy blurting lines like, “You know what I hate about Americans? Everything, especially cowboys.”

The unconvincing evil mastermind pales in comparison to icons like Hans and Simon Gruber. His weak personality is strung together with clichés like “Goddamn Americans think they’re so smart.” He tells the McClanes, “You’re out of your jurisdiction,” right before Jack hurls him to a grisly death by helicopter blade.

OK, that part was funny.

But Jack McClane’s personality is as empty as the villain’s. Courtney’s acting is all intense stares, imitated Willis mannerisms and grunting dialogue. They act alike and stand in matching poses, guns slung over their shoulders, but the relationship has no deeper resonance.

Willis’ performance is more of a caricature of John McClane than genuine acting. In “Die Hard,” the feds were bumbling idiots and McClane was the smart guy. But this time, he barrels into an active CIA mission cracking lines like, “Let’s go out and kill all the scumbags,” and “We’re not gonna die today.”

The newer sequels paint McClane as some kind of invincible superhero, but he started out as a normal guy. He’s lost that identifiable everyman quality that once made him great.

By the end of “Die Hard,” he was half dead, riddled by bullets with glass shards in his feet. In “A Good Day,” he’s rammed head-on by a truck, avoids a fiery explosion by hiding behind a flimsy cardboard box and jumps out of several tall buildings. Then, the 57-year-old simply dusts himself off and walks away with a few scratches.

“A Good Day to Die Hard” doesn’t feel genuine. It’s a cold, gray stunt-fest more reminiscent of “Taken.” When McClane’s ringtone plays the “Ode to Joy” theme from “Die Hard” amid an excessive car chase, it symbolizes just how far the series has fallen.

Published on February 28, 2013 at 12:12 am

Contact Rob: rjmarvin@syr.edu