It really wasn't a very good day to Die Hard
With a convention filling my Thursday, Friday, and Saturday last week, my only opportunity to see A Good Day to Die Hard on opening weekend was the late Wednesday showing, which, in a stroke of scheduling brilliance on the part of the movie-displaying folks, began at 10:00pm instead of midnight.
So the movie kind of wrecked the end of my Wednesday instead of obliterating a Thursday morning. I still would have done better getting a full night's sleep rather than seeing the film, but at least I was in bed before 2:30am.
"I should have gone to sleep instead" is probably a better recommendation than "I almost fell asleep during the big car chase," so if you're grabbing quotes from me for the DVD box, go with THAT one. Both statements are true, however.
That chase scene has a story, I'm sure, that begins with a Russian minister of film and kickbacks saying (in a Hollywood-Russian accent): "We give you big tax break on movie, you must feature fifteen minutes of glorious Moscow roadways. We provide plenty of automobiles for to be destroyed. My cousin, he has connections."
So, yeah. It was too long, and ridiculous. That said, I did have a pretty good time. I saw it with friends, and we groaned and mocked the film together. A Good Day to Die Hard is #2 for me this year. Fortunately, the year is still quite young.
If I had to order the "Die Hard" franchise by how much I liked the movies, my list would look like this (the numbers in parentheses are the order in which the films were made):
- Die Hard (1)
- Live Free or Die Hard (4)
- Die Hard With a Vengeance (3)
- A Good Day to Die Hard (5)
- Die Hard II: Die Harder (2)
My all time favorite "Die Hard" line comes not from any of the films, but from a game of Draw Something. My friend Dave Brady was learning just how horrid he could deliberately make a picture and still "win," and he tweeted at me between sessions. "Now I have a stylus. Ho ho ho." I laughed myself almost sick. Such is the power of pop-culture.