I couldn’t tell if I was the problem at first, whether the plot involving the bad Russians was straightforward and I was just not paying enough attention or whether it was actually convoluted and presented poorly. Enough people seem to agree that it was poorly done that I feel slightly less bad about myself. There’s the big bad guy shown at the beginning in a scene that makes more sense later on, but we don’t see him again for such a long time that it seems he’s barely factoring into the story whatsoever. Then there’s the under bad guy, who is going for that new villain style where he acts bizarrely and casually, so they have him munching on a carrot. Come on, guys.
Give me Timothy Olyphant any day. His villain had backstory, menace, and style. He was able to laugh when McClane was being funny. He treated his henchmen with such condescension, like a cult leader, acting like he was the only adult in the room. This is what you can do with a villain in a pulpy action movie—the same type of performance Philip Seymour Hoffman delivered in Mission: Impossible III. With no real villain like Alan Rickman, Jeremy Irons or Timothy Olyphant, A Good Day to Die Hard has one less element to make us, and John McClane, interested in what’s happening.
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