There aren’t many franchises to have avoided the law of diminishing returns throughout their entire existence, but there also aren’t many iconic IPs in Hollywood history to have experienced such a steep drop-off in quality between their first and last installments as Die Hard.
Kicking off with an instant classic that everybody knows is one of the greatest actioners that’s ever going to be made, it was always going to be nothing but downhill from there. However, despite a solid-if-familiar sequel and a fantastically subversive third chapter, returning from a dozen-year absence screens proved to be the undoing of John McClane.
Live Free or Die Hard is a decent enough big budget blockbuster, but it’s a terrible Die Hard flick, whereas A Good Day to Die Hard is just an embarrassment. Poorly shot, dismally edited, loaded with sketchy CGI, and featuring far too much Jai Courtney for anybody’s liking, the fifth and final chapter in a classic saga was unanimously panned by critics, crowds, and fans of the vest-wearing property in equal measure.
Time has a funny habit of healing the majority of old wounds, though, but we can at least rest easy knowing that the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia have yet to penetrate the putrid veneer of A Good Day to Die Hard. A Reddit thread blasted John Moore’s horrific contribution to canon can’t find a single soul willing to defend it, and one comment opining that “I can’t think of a once great franchise that came to a worse conclusion” is right on the money.
Die Hard did die hard, but it shouldn’t have gone out the way it did.