Incredulity Reigns

I am a founding member of a club called Cinema, Angling and Culinary Appreciation, or CACA. The other members are my attorney, Thos.; Kurt from Oregon; Dr. Chuck; and my cousin Dan. Other emeritus members drift in and out. We meet at my cabin in the Catskills, fish for trout all day, and in the evenings eat great bowls of gas-inducing stew from the slow cooker and watch the World’s Worst Films. We have watched — and survived — “Manos: Hands of Fate.” We analyzed “Zombie Lake.” We cheered the evil warlock Troxartes in “Deathstalker II.” But I’m not sure even the die-hard schlockmeisters of CACA are ready for “A Good Day to Die Hard.” It takes talent to make a film with no story. Usually the director is Fellini. And there are times when the filmmaker does not suffer from talent, but rises above it to produce something of note. The immortal Ray Dennis Steckler managed this feat in 1964’s “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies,” which not only has no story, but is also a musical. In this latest installment of the “Die Hard” series, Bruce Willis is John McClane, tough cop, and he has to go to Russia on account of his son Jack (Jai Courtney) is on trial for murder. But it all turns out to be a giant spy thing, with double and triple crosses, and car chases, and helicopters, and guns, and a Russian actress named Yulia Snigir in a tight dress. The movie features what I believe is filmdom’s longest car chase, which runs at least 10 minutes and destroys about 200 vehicles. It’s not enough to suspend disbelief for this sucker. You have to put your disbelief in a lead-lined container and pay Richard Branson to put it in a rocket and shoot it into space. Only when your disbelief is orbiting Pluto will you be ready to kick back and enjoy “A Good Day to Die Hard.” Speaking of lead-lined containers, the gang — the Swiss Family McClane, the evil Yuri (Sebastian Koch) and his daughter Irina (Snigir), and assorted plug-uglies — wind up at Chernobyl, where they still have a cool vault thing with blue fluorescent lights running, even though the rest of the place looks like something blew up. (Oh wait, something did blow up.) The McClanes have to prevent the bad guys from getting away with the enriched weapons-grade uranium, see, which they do by shooting everything and driving trucks out of airborne helicopters and crashing through glass ceilings and landing in vats of radioactive water. Some people might find the gunplay and related carnage offensive; however, the truly gruesome moments are when the McClanes, father and son, bond. It made me wish I was in outer space with my disbelief. So, we’re talking 200 smashed cars. Super guns that never run out of bullets. No lines at the airport. Russian cabbie singing Sinatra. Woman in tight dress showing a lot of leg as the helicopter swings into action. No nekkidity, though (automatic one star deduction). It could be that I am getting this all wrong, that director John Moore and screenwriters Skip Woods and Roderick Thorpe have deliberately created this flick as an ironic, self-aware sendup of the “Die Hard” movies. But we men of CACA don’t go in for post-modern irony, and I am forced to conclude that the simplest explanation is the most likely — that no day is a good day to die this hard.