I’m not at all familiar with Jai Courtney as an actor, but he seems to have that Liam Hemsworth/Sam Worthington/Garrett Hedlund look that producers are going to be drawn to in I’m sure a completely hetero way. Consider for a moment everything Justin Long brought to the table in Live Free or Die Hard. He’s a bit of an annoying actor, but instead of trying to tone that down, the movie played that up by making him an incredibly annoying character, always whining about how hungry he is and how he doesn’t want to be doing what he’s doing—in a way, making him like John McClane used to be. The key moment comes at the end when McClane points out that this nerdy hacker guy actually stepped up when he needed to, and that’s what matters.
Jack McClane, on the other hand, just comes off as an angry meathead who is mad at his dad for missing his baseball games. That’s valid enough, but doesn’t make for an interesting dynamic. We’ve seen it enough times before. He seems more like the Dennis Franz character from Die Hard 2, telling John to leave it to the professionals and constantly being wrong because John McClane is awesome and badass and maybe not the smartest but the balls on this guy, etc etc. They could have made this interesting if the son was actually more antagonistic, but he has to also be the hero when he reconciles with his dad, so they sort of set themselves up to fail.
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