This is the Magpie School of action filmmaking: Anytime things start to make so little sense that you might lose the audience, just throw something shiny up on screen to distract. Hence lots of slow-motion jumping and falling while fiery explosions billow up in the background. Cars seem to do more flying than driving, jumping off of overpasses or over other cars, rolling and flipping through the air. In one particularly inspired bit of lunatic misdirection, one of the Russian thugs chasing McClane delivers a menacing speech to the hero ... while loudly eating a carrot.
I have no recollection of what plot details were conveyed in that speech. But I do remember the carrot — and I'm guessing that's exactly the effect director John Moore was going for.
There's little left of the qualities that made the original Die Hard such a masterpiece — or even the things that made the substandard sequels marginally watchable. Where before McClane was out to save the life of a family member or a school full of kids, here — after the self-preservation that drives him in the opening sequence — he's fighting mostly to save his son's reputation and also to thwart a vaguely defined potential terrorist threat.
Humor has always been an essential element of McClane's appeal, but the attempts here aren't even in character. Are we really meant to believe that McClane would answer a cellphone call from his daughter in the midst of a car chase? Or knock out an innocent civilian who's (justifiably) yelling at him for running out into traffic?
Even McClane's trademark one-liners are fewer in number, generally clunkers, and often nearly drowned out by things going boom. It's difficult to tell if the mildly bemused air Willis carries with him through much of the movie is a character choice or just smug satisfaction that he's actually getting away with getting paid for this.
A Good Day to Die Hard does have one redeeming aspect: It has finally ended the debate over whether Die Hard 2 or 4 is the worst of the series. We finally have a clear loser.