Credit: Stuart Miles

During a campaign called Get Dads Reading, the writer said: “If I can help dads to understand their role in making books and reading more important in children’s lives, I’ll be a happy man”.

According to a poll by Booktrust, only 13% of UK dads read to their children, and work is blamed for the lack of time they have to read.

Patterson has created a website, readkiddoread, to help find books that children and their parents would enjoy.

The final installment of the “Twilight” saga was up for 11 nominations — at least one in every category. The popular film got two nods in the “Worst Screen Couple” category.

For A List Of Razzie “Winners” Click Here

The “Twilight” film competed for “Worst Picture” with “Battleship,” “The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure,” Adam Sandler’s “That’s My Boy” and Eddie Murphy’s “A Thousand Words.”

Sandler made Razzie history last year when he and his film–  “Jack & Jill” — claimed prizes in every category.

This year, the “Razzies” happily took aim at Tyler Perry, nominated for both “Alex Cross” and “Good Deeds.” And, thanks to his performance in drag in “Madea’s Witness Protection,” he was also nominated for worst actress and worst screen couple.

Winners of the Razzies  receive the dubious prize of a $4.97 spray-painted trophy. Some “winners” have actually shown up in person to accept the trophy, including Halle Berry and Sandra Bullock.

Here is a complete list of nominees:

 Worst Picture

– “Battleship”

– “The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure”

– “That’s My Boy”

– “A Thousand Words”

– “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II”

Worst Director

– Sean Anders – “That’s My Boy”

– Peter Berg – “Battleship”

– Bill Condon – “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II”

– Tyler Perry – “Good Deeds”/”Madea’s Witness Protection”

– John Putch – “Atlas Shrugged: Part II”

Worst Actress

– Katherine Heigl, “One for the Money”

– Milla Jovovich, “Resident Evil: Retribution”

– Tyler Perry, “Madea’s Witness Protection”

– Kristen Stewart, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II”/”Snow White and the Huntsman”

– Barbra Streisand, “The Guilt Trip”

Worst Actor

– Nicolas Cage, “Ghost Rider 2: Spirit of Vengeance”/”Seeking Justice”

– Eddie Murphy, “A Thousand Words”

– Robert Pattinson, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II”

– Tyler Perry, “Alex Cross” / “Good Deeds”

– Adam Sandler, “That’s My Boy”

Worst Supporting Actress

– Jessica Biel, “Playing For Keeps” / “Total Recall”

– Brooklyn Decker, “Battleship” / “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”

– Ashley Greene, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II”

– Jennifer Lopez, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”

– Rihanna, “Battleship”

Worst Supporting Actor

– David Hasselhoff, “Piranha 3-DD”

– Taylor Lautner, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II”

– Liam Neeson, “Battleship” / “Wrath of the Titans”

– Nick Swardson, “That’s My Boy”

– Vanilla Ice, “That’s My Boy”

Worst Screen Ensemble

– “Battleship”

– “The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure”

– “That’s My Boy”

– “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II”

– “Madea’s Witness Protection”

Worst Screenplay

– “Atlas Shrugged Part II”

– “Battleship”

– “That’s My Boy”

– “A Thousand Words”

– “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II”

Worst Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel

– “Ghost Rider 2: Spirit of Vengeance”

– “Piranha 3-DD”

– “Red Dawn”

– “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II”

– “Madea’s Witness Protection”

Worst Screen Couple

– Any two cast members from Jersey Shore in “The Three Stooges”

– Mackenzie Foy and Taylor Lautner in “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II”

– Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II”

– Tyler Perry and his drag in “Madea’s Witness Protection”

– Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg, Leighton Meester, or Susan Sarandon in “That’s My Boy”

Alex Cross (2012): Starring Tyler Perry and Matthew Fox

Synopsis: A homicide detective is pushed to the brink of his moral and physical limits as he tangles with a ferociously skilled serial killer who specializes in torture and pain.

Have you ever had a movie make you want to check out the book, partly because the synopsis intrigued you and partly because you think the movie didn’t really go far enough in capturing the story?

This is the crossroads I’m at with Alex Cross. Before I started on this review, I wanted to find out what “Cross”, the James Patterson book the movie is based on is all about.

Alex Cross—based on the book previously published as “Cross” by James Patterson

Alex Cross was a rising star in the Washington, DC, Police Department when an unknown shooter gunned down his wife, Maria, in front of him. Alex’s need for vengeance was placed on hold as he faced another huge challenge-raising his children without their mother.

THE MOST TERRIFYING CROSS EVER.
Years later Alex is making a bold move in his life. He has left the FBI and set up practice as a psychologist once again. His life with Nana Mama, Damon, Jannie, and little Alex finally feels like it’s in order. He even has a chance at a new love.

Then Cross’s former partner, John Sampson, calls in a favor. He is tracking a serial rapist in Georgetown, one whose brutal modus operandi includes threatening his victims with terrifying photos. Cross and Sampson need the testimonies of these women to stop the predator, but the rape victims refuse to reveal anything about their attacker.

THE MOST EMOTIONAL CROSS EVER.
When the case triggers a connection to Maria’s death, Alex may have a chance to catch his wife’s murderer after all these years. Is this a chance for justice at long last? Or the culminating scene in his own deadly obsession?

Warning:  There are a lot of differences between the set up of the movie and the set up of the book. I want to put that out there, since there are some people who get aggravated if the movie doesn’t fully follow the book, and this is one you may get very annoyed with.

First off, in the book, it paints Alex as having three children. But in the movie, there only exists two children—a girl and a boy—with the other child not being born yet. In fact, the other child ends up dying with Alex’s wife.

Also, in the book, it made it seem as if Alex waited to try to seek revenge on his wife’s killer while in the movie, the reaction was immediate, not too long after the funeral took place.

In the majority of the book version of Cross, Alex is a D.C. police officer who has left the FBI and is studying psychology again. In the movie version, the scene is set in Detroit, and Alex is debating on taking the FBI job in Washington, DC, which he ultimately does, once his wife and unborn child are taken away from him.

So, you see, if you’re a reader of the Alex Cross series, the movie version may have already ruined quite a few things for you.

In this situation, I am fortunate, since I haven’t read the series, so I can go into it with a bit of a clean slate.

Therefore, you have to rate the movie based on the actors as well as the action.

The character I was the most enthralled by wasn’t Alex Cross but by Picasso, the psychopath played by Matthew Fox.

Before Alex Cross

Matthew Fox as Picasso (like whoa)

That guy has come a long way since Party of Five, although I’m sure more people know him as being in the TV series, Lost. I barely recognized the guy. He lost about 44 pounds but he was super shredded. I didn’t see an ounce of fat on him. He really became the villain; he became Picasso.

Picasso wasn’t just smooth with the systematic way he took out people, but just the fact he always seemed one step ahead. It did leave me wondering was there more to the story as far as the reasoning why Picasso decided to take out Alex’s wife other than Alex making him angry.

Was that a part of the story that could have made the movie more confusion? Or was it one that could have made the movie longer? Either way, it would have been nice for it to have been expanded on slightly.

So, the ultimate question: What did I think of Tyler Perry being Alex Cross?

Tyler Perry (Alex Cross)

I tried the best I could to roll with him being this character. He definitely got in shape (lost 30 pounds to prepare for the role), looks healthier, more toned.

However, I just kept seeing Madea or some of the other roles where he provides a bit of comic relief, and I guess that kind of ruined it for me. It made it hard for me to really take him seriously, even though he wasn’t doing anything that would generate laughter.

I saw that he could get dark and get ruthless, especially with his wife getting killed, but in the beginning part of the movie—the lighthearted way he interacted with his mama and his wife at the beginning, when he flashed that smile, I saw Madea.

I would have to see more of Tyler in different roles to determine whether he has the multi faceted ability in his acting, like Will Smith (who started in music and in comedy) and like Jamie Foxx. His role in Alex Cross doesn’t really tell the story. It doesn’t have me convinced.

I’m glad I did wait for someone to pass me a copy of this movie rather than actually go to the theater. It would make for a good DVD rental, but I wouldn’t really consider it a keeper.

Thanks for stopping in at The Review Board. Always enjoying any like, shares, or subscribes! Have a glorious weekend!

When I was single, I frequent the movie theatre alone or with friends. Sometimes catching that last full show, holding a big bag of popcorn and a drink on the other hand.

Nowadays, going to the movies is a seldom event because of the presence of Netflix, endless premium channels on tv, and free movies you can watch online. (You want to know the sites?- just key in watch free movies online on GOOGLE and you’ll see what I mean)

Anyways..

I am not choosy as to what types of movie I watch.

Recently, the only movie we watched- courtesy of a date with my husband- is a movie called MAMA. It is a horror movie which I will give a 3 STAR  rating. I am not one to be easily scared and I like a good horror movie. It doesn’t help that when we watched the movie there are a bunch of teenagers who can’t keep their voices low, chitchatting, laughing and then scream loud when it is not even scary at all- I mean I understand them as I was once a teenager,too but it is different when it’s a group of them. We were there to enjoy the movie and relax but of course unless we have our own home theatre- then I can keep my complaints to myself. The story was good- the ending could have been better, but the visuals and soundtrack were decent enough. I always say it when I don’t hate nor like the food I just ate- it is chokable. LOL. So this movie is not perfect, it is not terrible. It is plainly watchable. See for yourself. Here is the trailer (which is pretty good actually)

ALEX CROSS

I always say that the book is always better when it is made into a film. I am mostly right. I guess because I expect too much and I have my own imagination of how a character should be portrayed and sometimes it is best that each story is imagined by the readers themselves. Somehow, stories are turned into film and all the good stuff are cut and wasted and all profit-oriented not for the audience’s enjoyment.

So I watched, Alex Cross ( I didn’t even know there was a film about it until I saw it as one of the new films added in our TV channel subscriptions. The trailer alone (for the On Demand channel) was boring and looked like a regular TV series kind of thing. Sometimes, the TV series trailer are much better. But what do I know, I hardly watch CSI, or any other thriller, police, criminal tv series whatsoever as I don’t have time to do so..I would rather read.

So where was I? Oh, I got interested to watch the film (starring Tyler Perry- whom I know as a comedian) because I am pretty familiar with Alex Cross, the character in James Patterson novels. I know Morgan Freeman played Cross once in the movie “Kiss the Girls”  but since Freeman is older- of course he can’t play him anymore, although I am pretty sure he would still be good at it. But if he did, I would be biased and wouldn’t be convinced because I think Morgan Freeman is best suited as “God” – with his voice and hosting the Through the Wormhole on Science Channel. Okay okay..I think I am sidetracked and all over the place. I am supposed to review the film.

The movie was about Alex Cross as he meets his match in a serial killer. he two face off in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse, but when the mission gets personal, Cross is pushed to the edge of his moral and psychological limits in this taut and exciting action thriller.

So, I was able to finish the Alex Cross movie, and thought Tyler Perry is okay as Alex Cross but not convincing enough. Maybe Denzel Washington could have been better, the story maybe more thrilling and the whole movie more appealing to the audience. I would give it  3 stars  just because I like Alex Cross.:-) I would give a better rating to the serial killer’s acting played by Matthew Fox.

Here is the trailer of Alex Cross…

JACK REACHER

A movie starring Tom Cruise, at first when I heard about him playing the role- I said to myself, he is not the Jack Reacher I imagined to be. The description of Lee Child in his novels of him- was tall, big (about 6’5″), strong, can break someone’s bones by his hands- things like that- and Tom Cruise is hardly  t hat. I mean he is good with the Mission Impossible stuff but I think the reason he was picked for the role is that there isn’t much big, tall actors who can portray the role who can both give justice to the character and act it. I was thinking of The Rock (Dwayne Johnson or even Vin Diesel but then-maybe they would be too much and I wasn’t sure they would even give justice to the role- so Tom Cruise it is.

I just watched it last night, and well I can say, it is okay. Tom Cruise was able to be the stoic, drifter that Reacher is. In that sense, Cruise was able to portray in essence what Reacher should have been.

The film is about five random shootings in which the suspect was forced to confess of the killings but instead gave the investigators Reacher’s name. Like a ghost, he shows up in the DA’s office wanting to see the evidence and at first reluctant to be a part of the defense team as a private investigator when the defense lawyer herself is convinced that her client is guilty and only defends him to keep him away from the Death Row. Ultimately, with Reacher’s investigative skills, he figured out that everything was a set up to frame James Barr (the suspect) and that the random killing was done to mask the murder of one. It was meant to be seen by an ordinary eyes as random killings but the truth was hidden and only uncovered by a trained investigator such as Reacher who was a former major in the US Army Military Police Corps. The car chases are good enough and would probably best seen in the big screen- which I didn’t.

The film isn’t brilliant but it is good enough. It is not a thriller ride like Cruise’s Mission Impossible- but it gives justice to the story and ends in the way Reacher would end it- usually brings justice using his own judgment.

I give the film 4 stars.

Here is the film’s trailer. If you are a Lee Child reader, you should watch it, especially if you know Jack Reacher’s character enough.

FLIGHT 

Starring Denzel Washington

Are you afraid of flying? You should, especially when you watch the introduction of the film “FLIGHT.”

At first, it might seem boring but then- eventually the story progresses and show the essence of the film.

Revolving around the story of a pilot played by Denzel Washington and his ability to land a crashing plane, but investigations about it will reveal the truth behind it which might lead to his ruin. It has an alcoholism theme and how one suffers from it, accepting it and embracing the truth and being responsible of your actions.

Denzel Washington is a great actor, as always.

A film to watch and a lesson learned.

Here is the trailer of the film..

I have more films (old, new) that I will add later on….and will add here,too.

Life of Pi, Silver Linings PLaybook…Argo..and more.

2. It was a very warm President’s Day here in Tennessee, so we took Sammy on his first walk.  He seemed to enjoy it.  He alternated between sleeping and staring, but did not scream, so I took that to mean he liked it.

3. I watched “The Amazing Race” online tonight, since I completely forgot to set my DVR.  I am not sure who I like yet, but I can tell you who I don’t like.  The newlywed couple seem very snotty and fake.  The Youtube people are going to get on my last nerve, especially the guy.  There are two girls from Nashville who claim to be country singers (I’ve never heard of them), so I might root for them unless they turn out to be annoying.  I was sad to see the firefighter dudes get out first, they seemed like good guys.

I’m addicted too.

No. It’s not smoking or drinking or any other regular stuff. To be honest, until this afternoon I never took offense when my addiction was pointed out. Today afternoon was the lightening striking on me but the first indication I was given (by the high and mighty Lord) was 2 days back. I went to my regular library and issued Cross. It’s book 12 in the Alex Cross series written by James Patterson. I love the author. He’s quick and has a strong emotional impact. Out of the 12 I can definitely say without fear of contradiction that at least 8 of them were simply brilliant and lightening quick. Anyway, I started around noon. It was a healthy 280+ pages. I never intended to do what I did. Apparently, I tried hard. Real hard.

I finished it before the 8th hour dissolved into the 9th.

My eyes were red. The central fixation of my pupil was disoriented. There was a distinct pain in my right temple. I could feel my retina cry out.

I could’ve accepted  these physical yearning of rest if I was reading a  Dostoyevsky. But I was reading a Patterson for god’s sake! Patterson is fast, quick and thrilling. They weren’t heavy on the head. They didn’t require analytic reasoning and analysis after they’re read. But for some unknown reason I just couldn’t stop. I kept it aside 5 times. I went to wash my face and freshen up. I took around 4 chai breaks. But I just couldn’t let it be. Is this good, I ask? An addiction of any substance whatsoever is nothing but that, an addiction!

Well, this was then. Now, for the second home coming. I was working and surfing gocomics to alleviate the boredom that my job brings along with it. Mind you, I was busy. But I still read at least 3 months worth of Luann. Somewhere around January or February 1991 there was this innocent little strip of Luann asking her mother what she did on weekends.

Mum says she read.

What??? Reading only on weekends? Are you kidding me? Really?

And that was it. I’m addicted to my reading and until now I was proud of it. Addiction is bad. Being a voracious reader means that I want to read. Not that I cannot help but read. Well, I’m going to change that. I don’t want to be like those who read a 100 books a year. I’m very happy reading just 2, or maybe 3, books every month depending on the thickness and genre and the educational value it has. I’m going to outline a proper schedule, filter in genre wise and then read. I’ll enjoy every written word. I’ll let every chapter wash through me and pervade every pore of my body. I won’t confuse myself. I won’t push myself. I won’t force myself.

I will do this and enjoy my books a lot more than I did.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I just read a book by scanning my eyes over the dialogues and skimming through the descriptive part. I can say it with pride that I read everything carefully. I get my quotes right if I have to. I write reviews for our book reading group here and enjoy it. But this wanton wildness has to stop.

And it will.

Siddiqui F.
(18.02.2013)

Change is good right?  Well, think about this for a second.  The character Alex Cross had previously appeared on screen played by Morgan Freeman in Kiss The Girls and Along Came A Spider.  The same Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption, Seven, the recent Batman films, and oh yeah, played God in Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty.  So, Alex Cross has gone from God to…..Madea? But, Tyler Perry as Alex Cross is just one of many things wrong with this new entry into the Alex Cross story.

My biggest complaint was the writing.  The story was a shallow, tried, and tired plot seen more times than I care to count.  The ancillary characters didn’t do much for the film either. In fact, most of them are just down right annoying.  Tommy Kane (Ed Burns), Alex Cross’s partner, progressively got on my nerves the more he appeared on screen.  His high pitched screeching voice was like nails being dragged up and down a chalkboard.  Matthew Fox, who plays the illogical and maniacal villain, speaks in constant clichés, but that kind of works since his character is a great big cliché.

The “twist” at the end, if you want to call it that, can be seen from a mile away.  It also felt rushed and unnatural, like it didn’t have much to do with the previous 115 minutes.

The camera work was pretty poor.  I’d be ashamed to have been the director of photography for this film, because it’s some of the worst I’ve seen in a long time.  During most of the fight scenes, we have no idea what’s going. The shaky camera method employed is terrible. It doesn’t work and makes it unwatchable at times.

The best moments of the film came when Alex Cross interacted with his family.  It came across as natural and unforced, unlike the rest of the film.  If the movie had just been Alex Cross talking with his mother, wife, and children for the entire movie, a Madea film, it would have been tremendously better.

As I said earlier, change isn’t always good.  Sometimes just sticking with what works is the best formula for success, like Morgan Freeman as Alex Cross and Tyler Perry as….well Madea.

At first glance ABC’s new thriller Zero Hour holds a lot of promise, in a backwards sort of way. Any television show that gives us an undead Nazi demon baby in the first ten minutes is clearly not gunning for any Emmys, but should at least be a hell of a lot of fun to watch. Instead, Zero Hour slips right on past the “so bad it’s good” category and goes head first into “unwatchable bullshit.”

The show revolves around magazine editor Hank Galliston (Anthony Edwards), a skeptic whose wife is kidnapped by an international terrorist one day after she buys a unique looking antique clock. Most of the plot of Zero Hour can be summed up in two words; clock Nazis. This is tripe, and in the hands of some savvy writers could have even been very entertaining tripe. But when Zero Hour needs to crank the ridiculous levels up to 11 it just stalls and falls flat on its face.

Edwards is normally a very fine actor, having a long history of strong supporting roles in films like Top Gun and Zodiac and serving as the lead in ER for nearly eight seasons. Here he is dead weight, making every line reading sound like it was forced out of him at gunpoint. It’s impossible to feel any sympathy for a main character when he delivers his lines with the urgency of a man waiting to get his cold cuts at the deli counter. He is of course not helped at all by a script that seems hellbent on the ludicrous plot of the show instead of giving any time for us to learn anything about the characters beyond their names. The show doesn’t even do that well, just minutes after finishing the episode I still had trouble recalling the names of half of the characters.

Unbelievably, Edward’s sleepy performance is probably the best the show has to offer. Carmen Ejogo (Alex Cross) as the FBI Agent helping Galliston just spews a cliché after cliché while she waits for the plot to advance itself. Addison Timlin (Californication) and Scott Michael Forster (Greek) play two writers for Galliston’s magazine, but hardly bring anything interesting to the screen with forced performances made worse with bland writing. Even one of my all-time favorite character actors, Charles S. Dutton, shows up in the thankless role of a priest who offers some gibberish about ancient languages and hidden orders of the church before being unceremoniously shanked.

The show’s main villain is called White Vincent, played by Michael Nyqvist of the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movies. He seems to be the only actor who realizes the script is schlock and tries to play his Nazi-loving assassin as over-the-top as possible. Even with that performance, the script just serves up too many nonsense plot points for his character to gain any real traction and instead we just are left with a dollar-store Anton Chigurh. Instead of intimidating he just seems like a goofball who likes to yell overly cryptic lines into a cellphone.

By the end of the pilot the reason behind the Nazi’s preoccupation with mysterious clocks is revealed. It turns out that the 12 numbers on the clock correspond to the 12 Apostles of Jesus Christ. In 1938, 12 new apostles were chosen to safeguard a secret to immortality that, if found by the Nazis, could mean the end of the world. The show then throws a curveball at viewers that seems so silly it loses all emotional impact it is intended to have. As it turns out, Galliston is some sort of reincarnation or clone of one of these 12 new apostles. The show does little to explain why Galliston is the spitting image of New Bartholomew, a former Nazi who worked with the church, but it doesn’t seem to even care. This twist seemed like a hackneyed last minute idea from a writers meeting that accidentally found itself into the final version of the script. The image of Anthony Edwards as a member of the Gestapo is so outrageously goofy that I spent the last minutes of the show laughing my ass of instead of being glued to the screen.

It is clear ABC has had a rough time finding a replacement for Lost. Like Flash Forward before it, shows like Zero Hour are being thrown out to the masses in the hopes of setting the world on fire just like Lost did almost a decade ago. But the haphazard construction of Zero Hour is nothing compared to the scope and scale of a show like Lost. ABC has the mindset that audiences liked Lost for its twists and supernatural mystery, forgetting that it was the characters and the interaction between them that drove the show for so many episodes. I hope ABC does strike television gold again one day, I really do. But for the love of God, they need to try harder than a show that can best be described as “Mildly Upset Anthony Edwards and the Secret of the Nazi Clocks.”

What it did do was legitimise large-scale action cinema, at least in my mind, and stop me from feeling guilty for deriving more pleasure from this genre than all the canonical films in the pantheon of cinema history. No longer did I feel like claiming my favourite film was something high-falutin’ out of guilt or concern that I would appear intellectually empty for finding perfection in a commercial, mainstream movie, and this realisation is something that has been a guiding principle for this blog ever since I started it; celebrating the artistry involved in creating populist art. You can stuff your Dogme films in a recycling bin for all I care; the moment the lens flare bursts next to Hans Gruber’s head as the vault opens, Ode to Joy blaring out, I was done for life. That was beauty, transcendent and perfect, located in a Joel Silver-produced action film starring that guy off Moonlighting. If it could be found there, it could be found anywhere.

But as much as Die Hard is good enough — no, magnificent enough — to suspend concerns about falling in love with a “dumb” action film (and please, the last thing Die Hard is is dumb), there is no way to ignore that this rough-cut diamond is a commodity, a summer schedule filler that just happened to attract a number of highly-gifted artists and technicians all at the top of their game who rose to their material, back in a time when people still thought that the best way to attract an audience was to give them something attractive, instead of just bludgeoning them into accepting the inevitability that they would have to swallow a product out of some weird sense of obligation. It was talent that made Die Hard incredible, but it was money that eventually made the franchise mundane.

And yet for a time, Die Hard still managed to surprise. Die Hard 2 is no one’s idea of a great movie, but if it hadn’t followed the greatest pure action spectacular of the late 20th century it would have been one of Silver Productions’ best films. As sequels go, it’s still pretty entertaining, thanks to some canny casting — Fred Dalton Thompson, Jon Amos and Dennis Franz are great value — and some fun action, not to mention a fealty to Die Hard‘s audience-sating blend of drama and comedy. If it has a real flaw it’s that it hews too closely to the first film’s structure, to the point of distractingly trying to find things for Holly, Thornburg and Al to do, but it was made back in the 1990s, when the idea of creating a longform story throughout a franchise, with the same characters in new forms of adventure, was only just beginning to become popular. Carbon-copies of successful films were a dime-a-dozen.

Which is one of the reasons why the third Die Hard film is such a success. This is a movie that starts with two explosions, one visual and one narrative. The John McClane that we grew to love in the first two movies has become a bitter wreck, estranged from his wife and hated by his colleagues. This time, instead of accidentally falling into trouble, he is dragged into it as a consequence of his actions in the first movie. Placing McClane in a new type of danger, and exploring the consequences of his actions years before, is one of the most satisfying plot choices in any franchise of recent years, creating a sense of progression from what has gone before, the feeling that we are following a real person in an unreal world. For a short time, the Die Hard series felt like it lived and breathed.

Honouring the character of John McClane is the key to this. Though this sequel sees a return to McClane’s arc in the first film, it’s shown as being one aspect of his increasingly irascible nature, and pairing him up with a similarly aggravated companion — Samuel L. Jackson’s brilliantly realised Zeus; possibly the only likeable racist in cinema history — is a great way of exploring the idea that the Die Hard franchise is based not around a noble white knight but actually a complete asshole, or perhaps just a once-decent, idealistic man who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (his wisecracks could actually be a coping mechanism); a borked Übermensch who appeals to the audience as an ordinary person who just happens to have flashes of incredible courage. While this dire psychological break means we’re only ever going to get temporary fixes to the man, for the purposes of the series this works fine.

There’s a strong argument that the final reshot ending of Die Hard 3 is a failure; certainly, it seems disappointing that we end up with a form of mano-a-mano showdown between protagonist and antagonist even when we’re taken out of New York and the ticking clocks of Simon’s games –  the geographic claustrophobia of the first (and, to a lesser extent, the second) replaced with a temporal form that constrains our hero even as he is given an entire city to explore — but all of that is forgiven by the elegance of the final shot; McClane redeemed by the new friend’s prompting, his broken soul fixed with little more than a quarter and a payphone. The outcome of his call is not important; he has swallowed his pride, made friends with someone as spiky as him, and taken a step towards rehabilitation.

This might be the last grace note in a franchise that has to amp up its threats in order to justify its existence. Die Hard 4.0 (or Live Free Or Die Hard) is the first in the series that isn’t good enough to make you forget the fact that the franchise is just being kept afloat to squeeze a few more drops out of the original, but even though it’s oft-derided, it’s better than it has any right to be, and it signalled an evolution in Len Wiseman’s directorial style for the better. It’s doubtful he’ll ever become as thoughtful and unpredictable as peak-career John McTiernan, or as able to harness the power of the image and the cut as current action-blockbuster champion Justin Lin (a Justin Lin Die Hard movie would be cinematic nirvana), but Die Hard 4 has enough charge, pace, and humour to please at least this cynic.

Part of the charm of Die Hard 4 is the replication of some of the beats necessary for this to register as a Die Hard film, especially as by this point the series has transformed into something that could easily go completely awry, as I will get to in a moment. Yes, there is an escalation in spectacle in this one that dwarfs the first, which featured huge action moments but from a human point-of-view that acknowledged the scale of those events. Wiseman doesn’t really worry about that, as he blows up a power plant and sets a F-35B Lightning II on our hero, destroying a freeway in the process, but through Willis and Justin Long’s self-effacing recognition that some cray shit’s going down, it stays just on the right side of absurdity.

It also wisely keeps the other films’ focus on secondary characters; one of the great joys of the Die Hard series is that each film contains a sub-cast of well-sketched protagonists and antagonists who just happen to have this other guy, this unstoppable wreck, show up to act as “the monkey in the wrench”, whatever that means. Die Hard had the best cast of characters: noble but heartbroken Al, magnificently stupid Dwayne T. Robinson, tragic Takagi, alpha-douchebag Ellis, archetypal headstrong wife Holly, comic relief Argyle, Agents Johnson and Johnson, shitbag Thornburg. And that’s before we get into the villains; cocky Theo, vengeful Karl and his hapless brother Tony with his tiny feet, greedy Uli (Al Leong’s theft of a candy bar prior to a firefight shows more character than most films can muster during their entire running time), galumphing James (aka VIGO from Ghostbusters 2), “Huey Lewis” aka Eddie down in reception, and of course Hans Gruber, the king of action movie bad guys, a Teutonic Basil Rathbone, regal and venal in equal measure. My God, this movie is near-miraculous.

But the other films do a good job of filling out their casts too. Die Hard 2 has three bad guys, none of whom are as memorable as Hans Gruber, but traitorous Major Grant is particularly vile. It also features a group of meddling bureaucratic cowards who are slowly won over by McClane; tetchy Barnes, officious Trudeau, delta-male Carmine, and eccentric Marvin. We also get a slightly more respectable journalist in Sam Coleman, not to mention a roster of villains played by character actors like John Leguizamo, Robert Patrick, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Don Harvey and, of course, Robert Sadler. Die Hard 3 has Sam Jackson taking up most of the screentime, but we still get a set of initially sceptical side-players in McClane’s court; colleagues Cobb, Walsh, Kowalski and Lambert, courageous bomb disposal expert Weiss, FBI jerk Andy Cross and Jarvis From Another Organisation, plus four great villains in sneaky Simon Gruber, man-mountain Targo, vile oaf Otto, and the frankly terrifying Katya.

Die Hard 4 is smart enough to keep this tradition going. Justin Long’s Matt takes on the Zeus role here, working as a surrogate son for McClane’s reluctant father. The cops are represented by Bowman and Molina (Cliff Curtis and Željko Ivanek), the bad guys include Thomas Gabriel (a sadly underpowered Timothy Olyphant), nigh-superhuman Mai Linh, parkour badass Rand, and hapless hacker Trey, while Kevin Smith appears as the fanbase-splitting hacker Warlock (for what it’s worth, I thought he was kinda funny). Yes, this is not on the same level as previous Die Hard films, and Wiseman isn’t about to give them all delightful character moments like the ones that litter the first three films, but the conventions of the series are at least being honoured. He has recognised that they exist, and has included them. This is more than we could have hoped.

The best thing I can say about the fourth Die Hard sequel, John Moore’s awkwardly-titled A Good Day To Die Hard, is that it too seems to have noticed this thread, even if it doesn’t really make the most of it. The villains are multitudinous; a consequence of its unnecessarily complex plot involving incriminating files and double-treble-quadruple crosses that makes one wonder if the movie should be about the dealings of the deeply boring Komarov and Chagarin, with no need for John McClane and his estranged son Jack. The post-Vengeance convention of a female antagonist is honoured by the inclusion of Irina, the heavy is a tap-dancing clown whose japes completely undercut his menace, the comic relief is provided by the un-named cab driver (The New Girl‘s Pacha Lychnikoff), and Jack’s partner is Collins, played by Cole Hauser in what amounts to a cameo during which we get absolutely no sense of who he is.

But A Good Day To Die Hard is not interested in creating rounded characters, or to even acknowledge that the Die Hard films are about actual recognisable humans put into absurd situations which are played as much for laughs as they are for thrills. Even at its worst Die Hard 4 recognised that, and thus honoured the previous films despite being the least memorable film in the series by that point. The latest film, on the other hand, is everything the fourth could have been; an empty, soulless cash-in on the franchise, made by people who couldn’t give a damn about the fanbase, the legacy of this series, or even fundamentally necessary elements of a successful film such as coherence, aesthetic pleasure, or even lizard-brain level spectacle. In short, it is a farrago and a disgrace.

Why did I just go to such obnoxious lengths to list the things that make the Die Hard films so distinct? Because A Good Day To Die Hard is such an insult to the other four films that while watching it I could only hold onto those fond memories in order to make it through. As someone who loves or likes all four films to one degree or another, it was like a mantra in my head, listing all of the great things in order to keep the insidious, sanity-sapping badness away; the SWAT guy pricking his hand on a rose in DH1, McClane trying desperately to signal a 747 landing in the middle of a snowstorm in DH2 and then sobbing when his efforts prove futile (and then saying “Motherfucker!” with such menace and hatred it boils the blood), the two bad guys disguised as cops in DH3 who get into an argument about leaving a block of C4 in the street for kids to find, the parkour villain in DH4 leaping out of a helicopter moments before a cop car crashes through it. There are dozens upon dozens of these moments in the series; DH5 has nothing. Just nothing.

There are so many things wrong with this film that it’s hard to know where to start, but perhaps it’s best to begin with what has happened to John McClane, who we see here as a barely conscious force of sheer unpleasant negativity, finally reconciled with his daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead returning in a franchise-solidifying cameo as Lucy), suddenly deciding to chase down his errant, possibly criminal son Jack (played by a non-curly-haired Jai “Varro from Spartacus” Courtney). This takes him to Moscow, where John manages to stumble across Jack in the process of breaking Russian whistleblower Komarov out of jail. Komarov’s plot is pointlessly labyrinthine, while John’s is simple; reconcile with his son, who detests him. Which makes sense, because this incarnation of the previously-witty John McClane is a glum mannequin, animated by the promise of millions and millions of easy dollars. He can’t support anything more than that.

This is perfectly in keeping with the other McClane arcs, which were all about redemption, but by now the well is dry, and Skip Woods’ script — which feels like an unpolished first draft — doesn’t even bother to dramatise the reconciliation in any imaginative ways. Relying on hoary old plot elements — like sceptical Jack having second thoughts when he overhears his father talking about how he has failed his family, or the fact that he calls his dad “John” until a key moment, much like Lucy does in DH4 — is one thing, but to try to echo this familial strife within Komarov’s sub-plot only really works if Komarov’s plot doesn’t take any right turns. You get the sense that Woods was trying to do something smarter than expected here, but certain third act twists render this character work moot, even as they notably continue the trend of including unexpected secret motivations of the Die Hard villains from previous installments.

At least that thematic reflection shows some kind of life in the process of creating the film. Other than that we get very little sense that any effort was expended. Perhaps part of that lies in the genesis of this film. Greenlit prior to the release of DH4, this is the first sequel in the series that started out as a Die Hard project; Die Hard 2 was based on the non-McClane novel 58 Minutes by Walter Wager, Die Hard 3 was originally a non-McClane spec script by Jonathan Hensleigh called Simon Says which was meant for Brandon Lee before almost becoming Lethal Weapon 4, and Die Hard 4 was originally a script called WW3.com based on a Wired article about cyber-terrorism. Die Hard 5 is merely Die Hard 5, and as a result feels like an undistinguished straight-to-DVD actioner that just happens to have John McClane in it. Instead of finding exceptional source material for our hero, they crafted something for him; the cart before the horse.

It’s bad enough that John’s arc is almost identical to the one in DH4, with him estranged from his angry son the way he was with his angry daughter. It’s worse that this time he gets to partner up with the person he’s trying to win back, meaning his growth is too directly connected with the character he bounces off. In DH3 and DH4 McClane learns to accept the ones he loves by being taught how to bend by characters he’s not related to (Zeus and Matt), but here he is already healthy enough to merely want to save his son, who ends up having to bend instead. In previous films the choice to almost accidentally resolve McClane’s character issues by having him chase one thing and in the process give him the thing he really wants is deftly done. Here the resolutions are clunkily sign-posted, and means John McClane is just there as a guy who shoots things. He’s not a character, and his son Jack isn’t drawn well enough to fill this gap.

The worst thing that could happen to this franchise has finally happened; McClane doesn’t really feel like McClane, and not just because this is easily Bruce Willis’ worst work as the put-upon hero. Not only can he barely muster any enthusiasm for the part, he’s sorely underwritten, with almost no wit apparent in his reaction to his predicament. Instead he keeps banging on about how he’s on vacation, which isn’t even accurate, as he starts the movie by looking for his son and then travels to Moscow with only one intention; to find out why Jack is in jail (it’s for shooting someone for some poorly explained reason, which has something to do with him being in the CIA though it’s not clear how shooting someone and being arrested helps him in his goal of saving Komarov).

It also doesn’t help that this McClane actively seeks trouble, goading his son on in the middle of the movie whereas in all previous installments he is obviously only getting involved in these troublesome events because he is forced to by a desire to save his loved ones or by the machinations of a villain. Other than the final act of Die Hard 3, where he chooses to chase Simon into Canada (which completes his redemption plot for that film), or Die Hard 4, where he finds himself chaperoning the most important hacker in the US, in all of the other movies he is obviously really annoyed that he has to do anything. He’s the ultimate reluctant hero of Campbellian theory, resisting the Call To Adventure over and over again, only ever becoming a pro-active character when his family is threatened or he’s just really really pissed off.

Die Hard 4 started this pro-activity by having him teach Matt how to be brave, but then the threat they face is all around them, and he is being tested by Gabriel throughout. In contrast, in the middle of DH5 he could easily walk away and take his son with him, but he doesn’t. To this McClane fan, even though this was a heroic choice on McClane’s part, the moment clanged. Even worse, there’s no growing tension here. In all of the other films there is some form of ticking clock urging McClane on. There’s nothing like that here. Some lines are added about a threat of weapons-grade uranium falling into the wrong hands but it smacks of convenience; no one in the film seems to even buy it. McClane is the one thing standing in the way of disaster in 1-4. Here he’s a guy who courts danger, possibly because he likes the idea of teaching his son some things (there’s a nice reference to “Bill Clay”‘s attempt to get a gun from the roof of the Nakatomi Plaza but even this doesn’t work as McClane doesn’t even know Clay is Gruber at that point, so it’s yet another empty reference solely for the audience).

This is all bad enough, betraying the conventions of the series or mimicking them bluntly without weaving them into the sub-plots of each previous film. It’s enough to make the heart sink, and look back on DH4 as a greater success than we had realised at the time; a rewatch last night showed that it’s much funnier and pacier than I had remembered. But while I cast aspersions on the script, and Willis’ performance (Jai Courtney is fine with the little he’s given, I guess), the real problem with Die Hard 5 is John Moore’s direction. I’ve never been a fan, I’ll admit, though I liked one sequence in Behind Enemy Lines (the insanely detailed plane-ejection setpiece) and thought Flight of the Phoenix wasn’t terrible. Nevertheless, The Omen remake and Max Payne were quite dreadful and unlovable, with the videogame adaptation being particularly painful.

A Good Day To Die Hard, on the other hand, should not have been released into cinemas in this form. Early scenes display Moore’s obnoxiously tricksy compositions, but it’s not the kind of thing that could ruin a movie, being merely irksome. A couple of crash zooms during a scene in which McClane’s cab gets stuck in traffic are jarring, but again, no biggie. A couple of impressively large explosions follow, and a clumsily shot scene with Bruce Willis staggering about in a cloud of budget-shortfall-obscuring smoke is not great, I’ll admit, but it’s still not the end of the world. He then stumbles upon his son, and the camera’s either too far away from the action or too close, or not looking at the right thing. Pretty shoddy, not helped by the relentlessly blue palette, but again I let it slide. I was trying to be nice.

And then the car chase happened, and all bets were off. How do I explain this sequence using words and not clips? How do I conjure up all of the feelings I had without merely resorting to obscenity? Even though Moore has not bothered to take my feelings into account with this infinitely awful sequence, maybe I should respect his feelings, so as to prevent the miserable possibility of being transformed into a mere troll by the grueling experience of watching that scene. And yet the car chase sequence in A Good Day To Die Hard is so far and away the worst and most ineptly shot and edited sequence in action cinema — nay, ALL cinema — that I think it’s incumbent on me to go hell for leather here, to state exactly how astonished and upset I was as it unfurled, in the hope that it will deter people from wasting their time and money on this film.

The aesthetics of action cinema have become a bone of contention with action fans over recent years, with numerous filmmakers receiving censure for their lack of visual clarity (Paul Greengrass, Christopher Nolan) or haphazard editing (Michael Bay specifically, though a number of other filmmakers have emulated him). Both crimes are terrible, I will agree, though I don’t think Greengrass or Nolan are anywhere near as bad as critics make out, and will even go so far as to say that Greengrass’ photography is actually very clear, almost startlingly so, with the camera choreographed along with the stuntmen, anticipating every move or stunt in order to capture them in entirety before being clipped down as much as possible in the editing bay, while still giving you the sense of what is going on in each shot.

I’d even defend Bay (and have done before), while stressing MOST VIGOROUSLY that I do not enjoy his action scenes as pure action scenes, with characters exploring geographically-clear spaces and achieving in-sequence sub-goals that include surviving attacks through evasion or suppressing enemies through force, like real action directors do. As I’ve said before, a really good action scene is like a really punchy pop song or a classical symphony, with all the parts working together to create a melodious whole, a break within the film that has a beginning, middle and end, as well as a kind of intrinsic harmony, if I can use that word to describe the camera’s recording of these action events. Bay’s action scenes are often syncopated drum solos without melody and harmony or even a structure, but I quite like drums so I don’t mind that so much. I’m not pretending they are something they’re not; I’m enjoying them for what they are; noisy, ostentatious exercises in self-indulgence. (I’ve seen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen a dozen times and even I don’t know what the hell is going on in this shot.)

Nevertheless, even if I were to hate Bay, Greengrass or Nolan for all the reasons that many others hate them (not counting Bay’s sexism and racism, which I DO hate), what John Moore has accomplished in the car chase in A Good Day To Die Hard is to create an action scene of such cancerous awfulness, such baffling incoherence, such cornea-scraping criminality, as to render all arguments about other action filmmakers moot. This is without a doubt the nadir of action cinema; not just a drip of poison into the old king’s ear but a full fireman’s hose of ichor right in the face at such force it blasts the eyes from their sockets. It’s an insult to my soul so egregious that I very nearly leapt from my chair to vocally denounce it the way a devout old crone in a religious horror movie would react to the presence of a possessed child. It is an abomination.

All of the things you have ever hated about modern action cinema are here; lazy witticisms, cackling villains, no awareness of geography, the shakiest of shakycams, staccato editing that nullifies every beat and shuffles all of the events into a baffling montage, camera placement that misses every stunt and hides the key elements from the viewer, zero sense of pace or escalation, crash zoom after crash zoom after crash zoom, and cacophonous music that batters the viewer into thinking he or she is witnessing something vital and exciting when what you’re seeing is a total lack of effort smeared across the screen like snot wiped on a handrail. The stunt work is great, though. If I were a stuntman on this film I’d be livid at seeing my hard work ruined, at the risks taken wasted in this vomitous sequence. (This clip shows the most clearly edited sub-section, though the footage is taken from random moments throughout.)

In all the years I’ve been watching films I’ve never once walked out of a cinema in disgust but yesterday I very nearly did. Moore’s utter disregard for how films work was like a fuck you to anyone who has ever expended any effort on a film only to see their careers falter. How is this man still working? Max Payne crawled into the shadow of profitability, and apparently that’s all that matters even though that film satisfied no one. Say what you like about Brett Ratner, but even if you hate X-Men: The Last Stand, if Moore — who was once in contention for the job — had made it we would have been even unhappier with what we got. Ratner isn’t particularly competent or imaginative but he at least knows that putting about ten crash zooms into a car chase is just not on.

The rest of the film isn’t as bad as that one scene, but it’s all so tossed off that it never redeems it either. The stink of laziness pervades the film, enough to make Len Wiseman look like a tyro McTiernan in comparison (seriously, there’s some good stuff in DH4; the shot where the camera follows the parkour guy from rooftop to fire escape and then down is astonishing). Those anamorphic shots from Die Hard that thrilled me so when I was young are replaced here by irritatingly garbled compositions and clumsy camera-placements (one shot sees McClane temporarily shoved into the corner of an otherwise black frame, and it doesn’t seem like it was intentional), not to mention the most binary teal-and-orange colour scheme ever; it makes Transformers: Dark of the Moon look like a rainbow-riot of multicoloured joy in comparison.

Anyone not particularly interested in this kind of thing will naturally accuse me of being too precious, but I guarantee that this film will offend your eyes, be it by the endless shakiness of the camera operation, the pointless cutting from medium shot to retina-shattering close-up and back again, or by the inability to actually get the subjects of each shot into focus. The only movie I’ve seen recently that got basic stuff as wrong as this was in Rob Cohen’s dire Alex Cross, but that was at least funny. This is just depressing. I’ve railed against Tom Hooper’s awful visual direction a number of times but his worst crimes are arguably borne of out-of-control enthusiasm and puppy-dog eagerness to impress his master/peers. Moore just doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing. During that car chase it’s as if he took a photo of a car’s bumper and just flapped it in front of the camera for four minutes.

If the action scenes were even choreographed or designed in an interesting way then perhaps there would be a way to salvage this. As Moore showed in Behind Enemy Lines, he obviously likes the idea of the discrete and intricate setpiece made up of heavily-detailed elements (the plane crash sequence I mentioned earlier is a great example of that, breaking down the ejection of a pilot into tiny slices of time). But by now it’s easier to just rely on his favourite action trope; men running through a hail of bullets, either fired by bad guys or by flying machines. He used that shot a number of times in Behind Enemy Lines, again in Max Payne, and here has both McClanes running through a hellstorm of bullets fired by a helicopter not once but twice. And no one said to him that maybe he should change it up. If he could have engineered a way to shove this shot into The Omen he would have.

Perhaps I’ve been spoiled recently. The three big action scenes in this film are not well-thought-through or shot cleanly, and while these are possibly the worst examples I’ve seen of this, it’s not like Moore’s the only filmmaker farting out disappointing action scenes. However all is not lost, and I have a feeling action cinema is about to undergo a transformation. Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher might be a gamechanger in the same way The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy were — friend-of-the-blog @T_Lee recently referred to the subsequent deluge of Bourne-aping brawls as “pat-a-cake fights”, but at the time those minutely choreographed fights were a new thing in action cinema, as were those intensely edited car and foot chases. It didn’t take long for everyone to wear those tricks out, so it’s time for a change, and McQuarrie’s adaptation of Lee Childs’ novels might usher a new era of action cinema.

In Jack Reacher McQuarrie takes the “realism” of the Bourne fights and chases to their logical extreme, doing his best to remove cinematic artifice (though not entirely, of course). His fist fights are strategic and swift, with every contact creating new challenges for our diminutive hero; whoever thought we’d see a film in which the characters get smacked in the face and then take a few seconds to recover, instead of absorbing every blow like an impact-sponge? His car chases are full of errors, stalls, oversteers and reverses, all while sustaining the flow and tension. His shoot-outs are precise and focused mainly on cover, not firing; a logical continuation of the staging of the gunfights in his brilliant anti-heroic crime movie Way of the Gun. All of these action scenes are like nothing you’ve ever seen before, and are utterly thrilling and, most importantly, comprehensible without sacrificing energy.

McQuarrie has rewritten the rules of action staging, merely by looking at them dispassionately and intelligently, stripping away as much bullshit as possible and writing characters who think before they fight. The results are astonishing, and helped eradicate any difficulties I had swallowing the unfortunate thriller-novel bullshit tropes that McQuarrie was required to add, such as Little Jackie Reacher’s hilarious philosophy of lonerdom vs societal contraints, or his White Knight mansplaining and patronising of women, and his inhuman and reader-flattering sexual magnetism. All of that was pure chuff, but Jack Reacher remains a milestone in the evolution of the genre, a fact that will become apparent when fans embrace it on its DVD release. Though to be honest, that should have happened after Way of the Gun. (Check out this scene from WotG: the only gunshots occur off-screen, but it’s still 100 times more exciting than any of Die Hard 5‘s garbled and hysterical pyrotechnics.)

After that, it’s hard not to look at previous “geological eras” of action cinema with anything but a kind of annoyed pity. Most of the classics, the ones that defined the visual rules for each stage of the genre like Aliens, Die Hard, The Killer, Bourne 1 and 2; they’re all fine. It’s the knock-offs, the indifferently-made and identikit ones, that will suffer the most, and pure tripe like this suffers most of all. It’s kinda funny that Jai Courtney was in both Die Hard 5 and Jack Reacher, as The Zec’s right-hand man, and also amusing to note that McQuarrie gives him more personality as a henchman than Skip Woods does as co-lead. It’s as if he’s the bridge that action cinema had to cross to reach The New World. This is not to say that Jack Reacher will lead us into a land full of hard-edged and brilliantly conceived action classics, but it does give us an alternative to the mechanical and uninvolving rote staging of Moore’s farrago.

And it really is the laziness that kills this film, and not just in the way that it’s shot. Missed opportunities abound. Michael Kamen’s scores for the first three films are a pure delight, playfully mixing well-known musical classics into his chiming and rambunctious soundtracks; the “Ode to Joy” fourth movement from Beethoven’s 9th in the first, Sibelius’ Finlandia in the second, and Louis Lambert’s When Johnny Comes Marching Home in the third. Marco Beltrami took over for the next two after Kamen’s tragic, too-early death, and while he does enough in terms of replicating some of Kamen’s signature stings amid all the musical tumult, this trend of including classical music vanished. It’s not a big deal in the fourth film, but in the fifth film? Set in Moscow? Imagine what Kamen could have done with Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights, or Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers.

But then there would have had to have been moments of grace within Die Hard 5 to accommodate such a musical flourish, and Moore has no interest in doing that when he can shoehorn in another crash zoom or fussy composition or grinding conversation devoid of subtext (the moment when the McClanes declare their love for each other is just them saying they love each other; whatever happened to “show, don’t tell”?). Would Moore have taken a cue from McTiernan with his casting, choosing Broadway veterans for supporting roles in DH3 (including playwright Michael Christofer) so that every minor character feels like they have a backstory and inner life? No. Moore’s actors are all straight out of central casting, and attempts to make them stand out, like the bad guy who dances for no particular reason, or the needlessly objectified Irina (Yuliya Snigir, who strips to her underwear in an early scene for no reason other than empty titillation) just look lazy.

All of these complaints are, I realise, finicky and probably not the kinds of things that would bother most viewers. I get that. When I wrote about the awfulness of Alex Cross I went on about how thrillingly inept it was, how every moment in it was slightly off, so much so that the finished product is a classic example of exactly how not to make a film. Most other people who have endured it seemed to think it was just a generic thriller, making me wonder if I’m taking all of this far too seriously. This could well happen with A Good Day To Die Hard. While I rail against it as a chancre on the tongue of cinema, I’ll wager most people will just think that this is an underwhelming sequel, the inevitable lowpoint of a franchise flogged to death by a studio who saw the opportunity of making a quick buck.

Nevertheless, I defy anyone to remain agnostic about this film’s quality when they see the mid-car-chase insert in which Jack calls his bosses at Langley as the camera wobbles from side to side and zooms and shakes as if the room is on the epicentre of an earthquake, before pulling out for a moment to show every monitor in the room has a little red light on it to add dramatic strobes to their faces. Or the close-up of a target on a shooting range on which you can see part of the squib that blew it up, an error no one could be bothered to fix in post (a piddling error but indicative of a lack of care overall). Or the stupendously moronic twist at the end which [SPOILER] means that the villanous Komarov has been chased for most of the movie by a miniature army of people in his employ pretending to be his enemies, led by one guy who didn’t know any of this who is then killed. [END SPOILER]

Or the fact that it ends in Chernobyl, in a building that is made non-radioactive using enormous Radiation-Negating Wands Of Magic, so that no one needs protective gear; lucky for the McClanes — who drive from Moscow to Pripyat in just slightly more time than it took a helicopter (it actually takes 12 and a half hours to drive but whatevs). Our heroes don’t have any protective gear, but that doesn’t matter; when they fall into a pool of water Jack says, “It’s okay, it’s rainwater!” so that’s okay then even though the pool is indoors so this is actually impossible. And what does happen to all the uranium that gets stolen? Was it in the helicopter that crashes at the end? If not, was it taken by the bad guy’s mini-army? And as the McClanes don’t kill them I guess they just leave? That’s not cool. Oh, and can we PLEASE retire the “Girl From Ipanema Elevator Music” joke please? That shit got tired decades ago.

Even taking into account those awful moments, many people will think I’m just being overdramatic about this, that my Twitter rating for this film of 1/10 was melodramatic, and that’s okay. This is inevitably personal to me because these films are so important to me, and I don’t expect everyone to see it the same way that I do. Die Hard fired my imagination and made me treat cinema as a reliable source of joy that would continue to excite me for decades to come. And, barring some hiccups, this is still the case. Even better, the original Die Hard — my favourite film of all time — is still a wondrous thing, still breathlessly exciting, still a pitch-perfect example of how to make a crowd-pleasing, emotionally-resonant slice of populist cinema that looks breathtaking.

Die Hard 5, on the other hand, is so poor that it makes me want to take up a baton that seems to have been dropped, to actually make a movie myself that rights these wrongs. Anyone who knows how unconfident I am in real life will be surprised to hear me make a bold statement like that but just by avoiding every visual error and plot cliche here, anyone could make something that honours the genre’s greats in exactly the way this latest film doesn’t. That’s not going to happen, obviously, so instead I find myself, horribly, hoping that this tanks. Because right now, if this film’s final image — a freeze-frame of three McClanes, rictus-smiling in front of an orange sunset — is the last we see of John McClane, I’m absolutely fine with that. Unless the franchise gets a massive reboot, something that brings it back to basics the way Casino Royale saved the Bond series, it’s better off abandoned, choked to death on this gargantuan, unflushable turd.

Director: Rob Cohen

Writers: Marc Moss and Kerry Williamson

(Based on the novel “Cross” by James Patterson)

Having trouble deciding which movie to rent at the Redbox?  This list just might help you make a good decision on what to rent.  Hopefully it will save you from wasting your money renting a bad movie.

Along with my list, I have given my rating and a “Quickie” review.

Quickie review = A film review in 13 words or less.  If a title does not have a quickie review then you may click on it for my full review.

I cannot say that I have seen all of the movies that are currently available at the Redbox, but I have seen 62 of them.  Of those 62 titles, here are my top 13 favorite movies that are currently available at the Redbox:

Rank                           Title                             13movies Rating

1.         What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993)          9         

            Quickie: Johnny Depp excellent!  Young Leonardo DiCaprio maybe even better.  Fun, touching, drama.  Great!

2.         Ted (2012)                                                      9         

3.         The Dark Knight Rises (2012)                      9         

            Quickie: A grand final chapter in the Christopher Nolan directed Batman Trilogy.  Epic film.

4.         The Raid: Redemption (2011)                       9         

5.         The Machinist (2004)                                                9         

            Quickie: Christian Bale lost 60lbs. for delusional insomniac role.  Mind-bending.

6.         Looper (2012)                                                 8.5      

            Quickie: Joseph Gordon-Levitt + = Bruce Willis in a time travel thriller puzzle.

7.         Titanic (1997)                                                            8.5      

            Quickie: Who hasn’t seen this?  Ship sink.  Dreadful historical event.  Well made recreation.  Iceberg.

8.         Frankenweenie (2012)                                   8.5      

9.         Flight (2012)                                                  8         

10.       Moneyball (2011)                                           8         

            Quickie: Brad Pitt spectacular performance!  Jonah Hill proves acting capable.  Interesting, solid baseball story.

11.       Men in Black 3 (2012)                                   8         

            Quickie: As good as 1.  Josh Brolin as Tommy Lee Jones.  Will Smith reloaded.

12.       Total Recall (2012)                                        8         

            Quickie: Colin Farell in updated Schwarzenegger role.  More fun than original.  Kate Beckinsale badass!

13.       Lawless (2012)                                               8         

            Quickie: Shia LaBeouf gets big.  Tom Hardy tough.  Jessica Chastain shows, proves herself.  Bootleggers.

Those are in my opinion the best movies that are currently at the Redbox.

If you would like to read Top 13 Current Redbox Movies Vol. 2, click on this link. from 3/14/13

Click on this link for Vol. 3. from 4/21/13

Click on this link for Vol. 4. from 5/9/13

Now that you have seen my recommended Redbox movies, check out my list of movies to stay away from.  Click on the link below:

Top 13 Disappointing Current Redbox Movies

Here is how the rest of the movies currently at the Redbox that I have seen rate:

21 Jump Street (2012)                                                8         

            Quickie: Hilarious Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill buddy cop comedy.  One of funniest movies 2012.

The Grey (2011)                                                         8         

            Quickie: Liam Neeson fighting wolves bare-handed after a plane crash in Alaska.  Period.

Dark Shadows (2012)                                                            8         

            Quickie: Johnny Depp as a vampire in a comedy.  Rarely does he disappoint.

The Dictator (2012)                                                   8         

            Quickie: Sacha Baron Cohen’s funniest movie ever.  All levels of humor and raunch.  Absurdity.

War of the Worlds (2005)                                          8         

            Quickie: Tom Cruise fighting aliens to try to save the world.  Steven Spielberg directs.

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The Bourne Identity (2002)                                       7.5      

            Quickie: Matt Damon gets amnesia.  He gets chased not knowing why.  He fights back.

Seven Psychopaths (2012)                                         7.5                  

            Quickie: Sam Rockwell steals the show.  Witty, dark comedy.  Clever characters.  Great dialogue!

Trouble with the Curve (2012)                                  7.5      

            Quickie: Amy Adams helps aging father Clint Eastwood try to keep baseball scout job.

The Bourne Legacy (2012)                                        7         

Quickie: Jeremy Renner replaces Matt Damon in the series and is more qualified.

Safe House (2012)                                                      7         

            Quickie: Ryan Reynolds tries to take fugitive Denzel Washington down.  Good action.  Good twists.

Paranorman (2012)                                                    7         

            Quickie: PG Suggested.  Delightful animated story about a kid who sees the dead.  Amusing.

The Watch (2012)                                                      7         

            Quickie: Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, hysterical buddy comedy about aliens at Costco.

A Christmas Carol (2009)                                         7         

            Quickie: Amazing animation retelling of a classic story and voiced by Jim Carrey.

Alex Cross (2012)                                                       7         

            Quickie: Tyler Perry plays a game of cat and mouse with Matthew Fox.

Arthur Christmas (2011)                                           7         

            Quickie: Family friendly animated Christmas movie.  Fun to watch around the holidays.  Unique.

Seeking Justice (2011)                                               7         

            Quickie: Nicolas Cage wife assaulted.  Guy Pierce help.  Rift after favor not returned.  Solid.

Brake (2012)                                                               7         

            Quickie: Stephen Dorff kidnapped for information about the president.  Won’t give up.  Tense.  Exciting.

Stolen (2012)                                                              7         

Dredd (2012)                                                              6.5      

The Words (2012)                                                       6.5      

            Quickie: Bradley Cooper plagiarizes a story and it comes back to haunt him.

The Campaign (2012)                                                6.5      

            Quickie: Will Farrell runs against Zach Galifianakis.  Dirty politics and humor ensue.

The Expendables 2 (2012)                                         6.5      

            Quickie: Sylvester Stallone brings action hero friends back together for round 2 of battle.

Premium Rush (2012)                                                6.5      

            Quickie: Joseph Gordon-Levitt freestyle fast and furious bicycle messenger hide and seek

Wanderlust (2012)                                                     6.5      

            Quickie: Jennifer Aniston, Paul Rudd turn into tree hugging hippies.  Funny moments.  Tacky moments.

The Raven (2012)                                                       6.5      

            Quickie: John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe investigating crimes that he wrote.  Good enough.

The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)                         6.5      

            Quickie: Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer try to slay lions while lions slay others.

Why Stop Now (2012)                                                6.5                  

            Quickie: Jesse Eisenberg tries to drug free mother and get into music school.  Laughs.

People like us (2012)                                                 6.5      

            Quickie: Dysfunctional drama.  Lost siblings try to find each other after father’s death.

Red Lights (2012)                                          6.5                  

            Quickie: Robert De Niro has mind powers.  Cillian Murphy Disagrees.  Their minds tango.

American Reunion (2012)                             6.5      

            Quickie: One sequel too many.  Funny parts.  Same old story.  Slight variation.  Decent enough.

A Thousand Words (2012)                             6.5      

            Quickie: Eddie Murphy shares life with tree.  He speaks, leaves fall.  Comical and stupid.

Being Flynn (2012)                                       6.5      

            Quickie: Robert De Niro, Paul Dano bad father son relationship.  They both write.

Spider-Man (2002)                                         6.5      

            Quickie: Tobey McGuire and Kirsten Dunst are unpleasant.  Spiderman is okay.  Other cast helps.

The Avengers (2012)                                      6.5      

            Quickie: Cool Special effects technology.  Robert Downey Jr. carries the movie on his back.

The Expendables (2010)                                6         

            Quickie: Too many action heroes take away from plot.  Fun to watch though.

Officer Down (2013)                                      6         

            Quickie: Stephen Dorff tries to repair his life after being a dirty cop.  Mediocre.

The Three Stooges (2012)                              6         

            Quickie: Great impressions of original stooges.  Especially Curly.  Humorous at times.

Get the Gringo (2012)                                   6         

            Quickie: Mel Gibson goes to Mexican prison.  Trying getting out is the fun part.

Savages (2012)                                               6         

            Quickie: Benicio Del Toro and John Travolta make movie better.

The Liability (2012)                                       5.5      

            Quickie: Tim Roth is fun as a hit man.  Film dwindles halfway through.

That’s My Boy (2012)                                    5         

            Quickie: Bad movie that gets better towards the end.

All about Steve (2009)                                   5         

            Quickie: Sandra Bullock is funny at times.

Tropic Thunder (2008)                                  4.5      

            Quickie: Robert Downey Jr. is a riot as a black guy.

The Possession (2012)                                   4         

Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011)                    4         

            Quickie: The title says it all and that’s about it.

Fire with Fire (2012)                                     3         

In Bruges (2008)                                            2         

            Quickie: The only thing worse are the 2 movies below this one.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)              2         

The Paperboy (2012)                                      2         

Links to buy it > Alex Cross DVD (Amazon.com)

> Alex Cross Blu-Ray (Amazon.com)

 Chad Lindberg Tweet : Hey Folks if you wanna see me get my Ass kicked this weekend…run out to your local Redbox. #AlexCross is now available on DVD! .

I LOVED the writing style.  Gillian Flynn is an amazing author and did an amazing job writing the book.  It will be a great movie.

I HATED the language.  I just do not believe that every book needs to be filled with those words multiple times.  Good writers can write without cussing every other word.  And Gillian Flynn is a great writer,  but I still think overused the cuss words.

I was not a fan of the ending.  The book was broken into 3 parts.  I predicted the first part pretty easily, but it was still very good.  The second and third parts were decent…until the end…just not my pick.

No I am back to Clash of the Kings before I return to the Alex Cross series.  I did treat myself to the Alex Cross movie though.  ;)

In this new segment I’m doing for BPCC News, I highlight the week’s new releases on DVD, Blu-Ray, and video on demand. Check it out!

Jack From “Lost” (Matthew Fox) somehow slimmed his body down and bulked it up at the same time. He’s freakishly skinny, with bulging, tatted-up muscles. His eyes bug out and his head jerks like a bird’s, but his movements are otherwise hyper-efficient. He wears tight black clothes, a silver suit, or goes shirtless. His head is shaved. He paralyzes victims with an injection before he tortures and kills them, because he’s a “stimulus-seeking sociopathic narcissist.” He cage fights as “The Butcher,” and warns his opponent “Don’t hit me in the face, or you’ll never live to fight again.” He backs it up. The cops call him Picasso, because he leaves elaborate, meticulous charcoal drawings with the corpses he’s brutalized. He’s great with guns. His voice is a little too high, and he speaks in choppy sentences.

Fox’s performance as this character is freaky and dynamic, and “Alex Cross” is great during his scenes.

But it’s a borderline disaster when Tyler Perry’s on-screen. God damn does Tyler Perry suck. The “Alex Cross” DVD has trailers for “Good Deeds,” where he plays a successful businessman being made to feel guilty for his wealth, and “Madea’s Witness Protection,” where he cross dresses and yells his lines. Perry’s movies are shockingly terrible, yet they keep coming out. A couple years ago, “South Park” featured Tyler Perry, in drag, getting on characters’ nerves for saying things like “You know when a man be cheatin’ he never know what to say!” After each joke no one would laugh, but the show’s recurring black character Token would hand Perry some cash. Also, this:

Perry is not good as the title character in “Alex Cross.” Even when he says his lines well enough, the eyes stay stuck on “Whatever.” If you saw “Boogie Nights,” think about the way Dirk Diggler acts in those action pornos he made. That’s Perry, except Perry really exists.

Perry’s crap acting may, though, actually help “Alex Cross” in an inverse-dumb-lucky way. He’s so bad he’s good (entertaining), and Fox is so good he’s great. Not only is Fox a great actor chewing insatiably on a crazy role, but he contrasts against Tyler “Madea” Perry. It’s embarrassing how much better Fox is in this movie than Perry, which is sweet to watch if you’re into this kind of thing.

Alex Cross is out to a nice dinner with his pregnant wife when The Butcher (Picasso) kills her with a sniper rifle. Cross psychoanalyzed Butcher during a previous phone conversation, teasing about killing animals as a kid and growing up an outcast. After he shoots Cross’s wife, Butcher says she’d still be alive if Cross hadn’t handed down his load of “psychobabble.” She’s dead because he was both a bad cop and a pompous jerk.

Clouded by thoughts of vengeance for wife and unborn child, Cross becomes an even worse cop. They fight at the end – chubby, big-headed Tyler Perry beats up a ripped cyborg killing machine who we’ve already seen is an unbeatable cage fighter. Right. Butcher winds up falling from a great height. Matthew Fox is acting dead when we last see him, with blood around his head and a smile on his face. He wins.

Summit Entertainment/Lionsgate

Actor/producer/director Tyler Perry is known largely for his widely popular movies focusing on the over the top Madea.  So it goes without saying that when he was announced to take over the role of Alex Cross from veteran actor Morgan Freeman, audiences both of his work and that of author James Patterson were left quite in shock to say the least.  Any time that an actor or actress takes a leap outside of his or her comfort zone, it also pulls said actor/actress’ fans out of their comfort zones.  And that apparently is what happened in the case of his take in the new action flick bearing the character’s name.

Perry’s audiences and critics alike were pulled out of their comfort zone with Alex Cross because all involved became so accustomed to seeing Perry in dramadies, not action flicks.  So much so that they refused to see Perry’s potential in this movie.  Director Rob Cohen even discusses this in the Director’s Commentary of the movie’s new home release on DVD and Blu-ray.  It’s just one of many discussions that he raises which will make for more appreciation for this movie among audiences.  The reality of Alex Cross is that while the story may be somewhat outrageous, it’s no more outrageous than the criminal profilers in CBS’ Criminal Minds going out on “missions” to stop deranged killers, which is exactly what co-star Matthew Fox (ABC’s Lost) plays here.  Fox expertly plays the absolutely deranged sociopathic killer Picasso who is hell bent on taking down Cross for past events.  Much like Perry, his performance is a powerhouse.  He is one of those villains that is totally believable.  He is one of those rare villains that audiences love to hate, and by whom they are disturbed.  That means that Fox did his job and did it well.  So to that extent, Fox and Perry together really are what make the story work.

Keeping in mind why Picasso is after Cross, one can’t help but make at least a slight comparison to fellow actor Denzel Washington’s 1999 crime drama, The Bone Collector.  The difference between the two is that this crime drama is far better and moves much faster.  What Perry has done here for all intents and purposes is harnessed both Washington and fellow action star Will Smith and proven to be even better than both.  Audiences need only allow themselves to suspend their disbelief and they too will realize Perry’s talents as an action star.

It goes without saying that a number of factors were changed in this adaptation of its namesake book by author James Patterson.  But few movies ever adapted from books have ever stayed one hundred percent true to their origins.  Just look at the movies in the Die Hard franchise.  They are prime examples of that.   Audiences need to keep this in mind as well in order to maintain their suspension of disbelief.  Allowing that to happen allows audiences to simply enjoy the fast paced action that starts right off the bat and barely lets up right to the movie’s final confrontation.  And if doing that doesn’t work, then perhaps watching the bonus making of featurette in the brand new DVD and Blu-ray release of the movie will finally convince people to let go of their own expectations.  The feature, “The Psychologist and the Butcher: Adapting & Filming Alex Cross” features interviews with James Patterson himself in which he in no uncertain terms lets audiences know that he accepts the big screen adaptation of Cross.  It’s nice to see an author giving his personal stamp of approval on an adaptation of one of his books.  And hopefully both Patterson’s readers and Perry’s fans will come together after watching this new home release and give the movie the appreciation which it deserves.  It is available now on DVD and Blu-ray in stores and online and is worth at least one watch by any true action movie fan.

To keep up with the latest entertainment reviews and news, go online to http://www.facebook.com/philspicks and “Like” it or its companion page, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Reel-Reviews/381028148587141.  Fans can always keep up with the latest entertainment reviews and news in the Phil’s Picks blog at http://philspicks.wordpress.com.

(Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)

Have you checked in with JT the Freeloader lately?

Yep, he has a blog now!

Well, some call it a blog…

Others call it ramblings of the deeply disturbed, but why debate the semantics?!

You can read his blog and look over all of his freebies, like tickets to see The Killers May 9th at Verizon or an “Alex Cross” DVD.

And since you’re already on our website, go ahead and vote for Jack’s Pick the Oscar Contest!

You could win a $1000 just for picking what movies are going to win, but don’t vote for “Alex Cross.”

Yeah, that won’t win anything but a Razzie…

Click on the player below to join our “Nominate Tyler Perry for an Oscar” campaign:

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