The big moment in the early portion of A Good Day to Die Hard comes when we see Bruce Willis basically doing a monster truck maneuver over top of cars on the freeway. I mean, this is weird for a number of reasons—he’s possibly killing random drivers and doing damage to real people with his recklessness rather than just himself—but it’s also just kind of dull to look at, and drawn out even longer than it would have been interesting, had it been interesting in the first place. The other movies have had some pretty nicely choreographed action, most impressively some of the driving scenes in the last entry, with cars flying towards our heroes and pyrotechnics that actually have something of an impact on the eyes and ears.
I think in this one they were trying to return to something of a smaller scale in terms of the special effects, with characters jumping out of windows and being thrown off of buildings like in the good old days, but then this all gets undermined by the gruelling slow motion that provides some interesting perspective at first, but gets prolonged to Michael Bay proportions. Maybe if the rest of the movie was remotely interesting this stuff would have kept my attention.
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