Last week  I went and saw the new Die Hard movie.  Now I will freely admit that I knew this was not going to be a "worthwhile film."  But neither are comics "worthwhile" literature.  Yet the comics are the first thing I read in the Sunday paper.  Sometimes, its enough for something to be merely entertaining.  Like a bad comic however, the new Die Hard fails to even entertain.
Bruce Willis reprises his role of tough New York cop John McClane,  who travels to Russia to attend the trial of his estranged son Jack, played by Jai Courtney.  Turns out that Jack is a CIA agent, and trying to prevent the theft of nuclear weapons by a powerful Russian politician.  After an explosion destroys the courtroom,  the two McClanes team up, not always amicably,  to shoot, punch, and drive their way to Chernobyl, where the weapons are being stolen.
The movie suffers from a number of technical mistakes:  The blaring action is matched by the blaring soundtrack, which only seems to have any energy when something on screen is being blown up.  Without the credits, the movie barely makes it to 90 minutes, director John Moore seems to have replaced the middle act with a few fight sequences and forgotten to include interesting dialogue or character development.   Most problematic is the plan of the villain (played by a stone-faced Sebastien Koch) which seems confusing until one realize its just unimaginative.  Part of the fun of previous Die Hard films were the campy-but-clever plots of its charismatic bad guys,  most notably Jeremy Irons.  Here the the movie seems to rely on its endless action scenes, which fail to form an entertaining story.
But what really makes this latest Die Hard movie so uninteresting is the loss of John McClane's charm.   Throughout the various movies, McClane has always been an anti-hero, a hard-bitten cop with a lot of problems.  He suffered from hangovers, his kids were exasperated by him, his wife left. Most of all, his fights hurt, like when he had to escape a gunfight by running over broken glass. And McClane complained about all of it, just before suiting up to shoot back at the bad guys.  In short, John McClane was a bit of an Everyman, and audiences could relate to his issues and then root for him to win.  That everyman quality is lost in this film.  The New York cop crashes cars, gets shot at, and jumps through glass windows with hardly more than a scratch. And his son's distance has no poignancy;  it doesn't seem to bother John.   McClane calls Jack the "007 of Plainsfield, New Jersey."   His words are more a description of himself in this film:  a man who is impervious to physical harm or human feeling.  This missing element makes the movie distant from its audience.
One could argue that those audiences are only seeing a fifth Die Hard movie for the action, and since the movie delivers lots of that,  what am I fussing about?  I would hate to take light entertainment too seriously, but I think that this movie cannot even claim to be entertaining.  The action has no soul.  Like a bad comic, this film is not worth the time.