For the week of June 4th, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing A Good Day to Die Hard to Blu-ray. This is the fifth installment in Bruce Willis' iconic Die Hard franchise, and to say the series is showing its age is a bit of an understatement. Director John Moore (The Omen remake, Max Payne) eschews the classical approach to action choreography that directors John McTiernan, Renny Harlin, and Len Wiseman brought to the first four Die Hards in favor of over-cranked bombast, with Skip Woods' screenplay offers little in the way of plausible justifications to explain John McClane's adventures in Russia; the film even repeats Live Free or Die Hard's unsuccessful conceit to broaden the Die Hard universe by introducing audiences to yet another member of the McClane family (Jai Courtney, acquitting himself nicely in a stock part). That all reads pretty negative, but A Good Day to Die Hard does have enough to recommend it for a lazy Sunday afternoon. The film is wall-to-wall action, as incoherent as it might be, and Willis shows just enough of the John McClane spark that made the first Die Hard such a treat.
Casey Broadwater considers that "the problem with A Good Day to Die Hard - the fifth entry, but probably not the last—is that it feels utterly soulless. Most of the staple Die Hard characteristics are here, but the personality is weirdly gone. Director John Moore (Max Payne) has replaced it with a generic action movie vibe, mixing Bourne-esque shaky cam quick cutting and Bond-like international intrigue. And he does neither of these things particularly well. This is the first Die Hard picture that seems more like one of the series' many imitators - Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down, most recently - than the real deal. This is especially disappointing after the franchise was reinvigorated in 2007 with the surprisingly decent Live Free or Die Hard, which set up the promising possibility of a new trilogy just as good as the first three films. Unfortunately, if you replaced Bruce Willis here with, say, Jason Statham or Vin Diesel, you'd have just another run of the mill, B-level action flick with lots of explosions but no heart."
May 28th also brings the Blu-ray debut of Escape from Planet Earth. A CGI comedy about an alien astronaut who lands on Earth, Escape from Planet Earth's early trailers didn't inspire much optimism among fans of quality animated features; the pace appeared too frenetic, the gags too easy, the tone more Hoodwinked than How to Train Your Dragon or Ratatouille. Thankfully, while the picture isn't as accomplished as the best of DreamWorks or Pixar, it's certainly no fiasco. Escape from Planet Earth is solid family filmmaking, with engaging action scenes and jokes that are just clever enough for adult viewers, and it boasts amusing voicework from the likes of Brendan Fraser, Jane Lynch, Ricky Gervais, Chris Parnell, Hot Tub Time Machine's Craig Robinson and Rob Corddry, and William Shatner.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman writes that, "While Escape doesn't enjoy the story richness of a Pixar film or the advertising muscle of DreamWorks, it's certainly several steps above the digitally animated equivalent of shovel ware that's starting to emerge (Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil, Adventures in Zambezia). While it won't be mistaken for the next great leap forward in entertainment, Escape from Planet Earth delivers an undeniably slick surface, and even if there's not a lot of depth past the animation, it's scripted and voiced just well enough to emerge as a sleeper surprise that should satisfy younger audiences and hold an adult's attention, too."
The big box set this week is Warner Home Entertainment's Clint Eastwood: Twenty-Film Collection. At its core, this package is an expanded and revised version of the previously available Clint Eastwood Collection. It drops the junky-but-enjoyable Kelly's Heroes, Where Eagles Dare, The Rookie, and Absolute Power and adds all of his post-Gran Torino efforts (including Hereafter and Trouble with the Curve) alongside some assorted genre favorites (Pale Rider) and Dirty Harry sequels (Magnum Force and Sudden Impact). As that description suggests, the Twenty-Film Collection really isn't as comprehensive as it could be. I don't quite get the justification behind jettisoning any of the films from the previous Clint Eastwood Collection (the two sets already overlap a lot), nor do I understand why Warner didn't cull together the final two Dirty Harry features for completion's sake.
Furthermore, the less said about the baffling exclusion of Eastwood deep cuts like Bird, The Bridges of Madison County, and the vastly underrated White Hunter Black Heart, the better. However, if you're an Eastwood fan without many of the titles included here, the set provides an aesthetically pleasing way to gather them, and it does have one major bonus: Eastwood Directs: The Untold Story, a feature-length documentary from film critic and Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel. Schickel also directed the wonderful Eastwood Factor documentary (which Warner has included here as well), and his new work promises an in-depth look at the legendary filmmaker's directing process.
Finally, we end the week with Sony's Breaking Bad: The Fifth Season. Technically, this is Season Five, Part One - the Blu-ray package offers the first half of the final season, with the remaining eight episodes scheduled to air this August. However, it's easy to cast those distinctions aside, especially considering how good these eight Breaking Bad episodes are. Showrunner Vince Gilligan has joked that he wanted to use the series to chart how "Mr. Chips becomes Scarface," and Season Five sees chemistry teacher-turned-meth kingpin Walt White (the brilliant Bryan Cranston) deeply entrenched in the Scarface side of that equation. He's a cold, brutal operator, and his criminal machinations reach terrifying (and, truth be told, exhilarating) heights as he works to secure his status in the underworld. Gilligan and his team have crafted a look at morality and evil that is every bit as complex as The Sopranos; should the final eight episodes stick the landing in August, then like that influential HBO gangster saga, Breaking Bad will go down as a television landmark.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review noted "Season Four's unforgettable climax probably represents the show at its peak. It, and the drama leading up to it, seems nearly impossible to top, even for a show that never fails to wow its audience time and again with every new conflict and resolution. That left season five -- at least this first half of season five -- with almost nowhere to go but down. The show does see a decline, albeit a slight one, as it pushes ahead towards its final resolution. However, this half-season feels exactly like what it is, a prelude to something else, a descent from the top necessary for the show to have a place to ascend once again in what should be a more riveting, satisfying, and unforgettable season five, part two."