A Good Day To Die Hard: 10 Reasons It Sucks

6. Terrible Villains

One of the best things about the previous Die Hard films was unquestionably the villains; Hans Gruber is of course the series favourite, but Colonel Stuart, Simon Gruber and Thomas Gabriel all had a degree of vitality and savage intelligence that made them great fun to watch. Here, however, I can't even recite a single one of the villain's names without resorting to the press kit, partially because the difficult-to-pronounce Russian names all blur into one, but mainly because they're all so perfunctory and thinly-drawn. Radivoje Bukvi‡€™s Alik is probably the most entertaining of the bunch, snacking on carrots while talking to the McClane boys, tap dancing and announcing his hated for Americans (especially cowboys). However, it's a brief moment of fun, for the character is mostly as one-note as all the others, and promptly gets shot in the head 2/3 through the movie anyway. The third-act villain, Yuliya Snigir's Irina had the potential to be the series' first legitimate femme fatale, but she's mostly just window dressing, and suffers a ridiculously idiotic demise (which I'll get to in a second).
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Frequently sleep-deprived film addict and video game obsessive who spends more time than is healthy in darkened London screening rooms. Follow his twitter on @ShaunMunroFilm or e-mail him at shaneo632 [at] gmail.com.