It’s the one phrase used to sum up the Die Hard series, emblematic of the John McClane attitude, taking the stereotype people use against you and throwing it back in their face as you serve them their just desserts. It’s iconic after the first film, where it acts as an ultimate response to the terrorist Hans Gruber’s referring to McClane derisively as a dumb American cowboy. McClane’s response is perfect. In the second movie he says it as a callback to the first film. In the third one he says it with a bit of a catchphrase sensibility, unfortunately. But in the fourth, they restored its original sensibility, as a response to the villain’s jeers. In the fifth, it’s interchangeable with “Geronimo!” or “Here goes nothing!” or perhaps “Did I do that?”
I don’t mean to constantly be bringing up the strengths of Live Free or Die Hard, but it got all these things right that the most recent attempt got horribly wrong. We know John McClane to be the ultimate badass, bantering back and forth with Samuel L. Jackson, jumping off buildings, going toe to toe with villains, brushing off his superiors, laughing in the face of death, shooting through his own body to hit another bad guy. A Good Day to Die Hard captures little to none of that. Instead of badass, it’s just bad.
