You know how it is with John McClane. In A Good Day to Die Hard, the yippee-ki-yay mofo of an ex-cop, now in his 50s and still embodied (after 25 years) by Bruce Willis, may be what passes for an old guy in action-hero years. But McClane still knows how to...how does he put it? ''Go out and kill a lot of scumbags.'' And how to crack wise. This time he's in Russia to bail his adult son, Jack (Jai Courtney), out of trouble. Along the way, father and son become embroiled in a very Boris Badenov-type pickle involving bad and even worse Russians, and the rather tacky use of radioactive Chernobyl as a tough-guy plot point.
The Australian-born Courtney doesn't make much of Jack. But then, there's not much to make: The kid's got a noggin shaped like the old man's, and he's a hothead off the old block. In the way of workaday flicks built around long-in-the-tooth badasses, Die Hard 5 leaves room for McClane to make a few jokes about his thinning hair and to rue that he wasn't a better father when his kids were growing up. Oh, boo-hoo. Now go kill some more scumbags. C
