Publication Date: 12-08-2025

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) review

Dir. John Moore

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★

A Good Day to Die Hard is one abysmal action setpiece after another, each one successfully chipping away all or most of the fibers of good taste and consummate craftsmanship that was so easy to find in the great franchise. Even with the uneven and divisively received Live Free or Die Hard six years prior, there was a film that had a rhyme to match its reason even when it gave into its premise’s most chaotic tendencies. With the fifth go-around, no one was expecting Die Hard with a Vengeance or another film that would routinely be debated both as a Christmas movie and the best action film ever made. However, no one expected — nor should settle — for something this incorrigible.

“Downtrodden” is the best way to describe A Good Day to Die Hard. Director John Moore and screenwriter Skip Woods (Swordfish) have sucked the life out of everything that made the Die Hard franchise so witty and nimble. They broke a streak of engaging films, which required an active mind to absorb their often kinetic style which worked to build a good mystery in addition, by distilling all the flavor out of the series. It’s as if having Chef Emeril make a delectable shrimp scampi only to then strain the butter and garlic oil out of the bowl and replace it with bathwater. Bloated by an infuriating amount of senseless action, a weightless father-and-son dynamic, and a Bruce Willis who looks and moves as if he’s simply tied of it all, A Good Day to Die Hard could hardly disappoint more if the filmmakers really approached the material with a determination to ruin it.

The film picks up on John McClane, the world’s unluckiest cop, who after patching things up with his daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who appears only in a cameo role here), decides to try to make right with his son. He travels to Moscow and finds Jack (Jai Courtney, Jack Reacher), who is facing murder charges, while a billionaire accomplice of his, Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch), wants to seize his own day in court by ratting out his partner-in-crime in lieu of a political promotion. McClane lands in Moscow at, you guessed it, the wrong time, causing Jack, who works for the CIA, to both the transport of Komarov to his coworkers. McClane, Jack, and Komarov are then wanted by Komarov’s old comrade, who sends a host of henchmen to whack the three as they hide in the bustling Russian metropolitan.

A Good Day to Die Hard only knows one color palette and that palette is ugly. Nothing but drab grays, blacks, and browns hit the screen, making for what eventually feels like an assault on your delicate senses. If Die Hard and Die Hard with a Vengeance director John McTiernan, who marked his installments of the series with montages that would serve as gold standards for the genre as well as sublime cinematic techniques, sat through this mess and didn’t vomit at what it became, I’d be stunned.

Cinematographer Jonathan Sela and Moore are workmanlike. They evidently have little interest in retaining the visual hallmarks of this great franchise, and are keen on letting it look and move like an obligatory Russian-set thriller we get in America several times over, any given year. Moore’s sloppy camerawork makes editor Dan Zimmerman’s job hell to try and get this film to remain coherent — all hope of that is lost within the first 20 minutes, as the film starts way too fast, introduces too many new faces all at once, and employs the fastest-moving subtitles I’ve yet to see in an American film. It’s ostensibly a coordinated effort to see how quickly the audience can be confused and an endurance test of patience that begs you to jump-ship. Moore, who has directed Max Payne and The Omen remake, two franchise-potential films that sputtered long before this film hit theaters. Five years later, there still has yet to be another Die Hard film. See what happens when you hire a journeyman to be put in charge of helming a potential new commodity?

Back to the writing. Woods seems disinterested in making McClane who McClane is and has been for the better part of four decades now. His verbal slickness has been traded for physical prowess, resulting in McClane looking like a video-game character incapable of great injury or death. This move compounds one of the larger problems present in Live Free or Die Hard. And then there’s the fact that the character has all but become John Rambo, always looking to solve a problem with the use of an assault rifle. McClane is more trigger happy than Paul Kersey if he had access to a drug-lord’s arsenal. Gone is a quick-on-his-feet McClane who would solve riddles and run through the streets of New York despite a nagging hangover. He now moves and operates like he’d be hard-pressed to walk ten feet for another Busch Light.

Throughout the film, one can see Bruce Willis isn’t having it anymore. This was a franchise that treated him well for three films before being hastily revived and subsequently degraded by removing everything it was and replacing it with everything it was not. Now, Willis is forced to function with daddy issues being his primary personal conflict; a subplot so unconvincingly handled it begs a new Razzie category for most shamelessly employed cliché. Where Willis would normally function in this role with the poise necessary to make it believable, he flounders, and Jai Courtney can’t pick up the slack because it’s the equivalent of a hangnail. The two have no credible chemistry with one another, and watching their contentious banter is contrived as a result.

A Good Day to Die Hard is unspeakably, mercilessly bad. A dismally conceived noise-fest effectively undermining a great franchise and an action movie savant, the fifth installment in the series at least lives up to its title in some sense. It’s a good day to let Die Hard pass on.

My review of Die Hard
My review of Die Hard 2
My review of Die Hard with a Vengeance
My review of Live Free or Die Hard

Starring: Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Rasha Bukvić, Yuliya Snigir, Cole Hauser, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Directed by: John Moore.