The Later Sequels · McClane
A Good Day to Die Hard
Moscow, and the one everyone agrees to forget.
Availability changes by country and by week, so this searches JustWatch rather than guessing.
Can you skip A Good Day to Die Hard?
Yes, on a first watch. It is self-contained, and nothing in the main Die Hard story depends on it. Come back to it later if you want more. Show only the Die Hard essentials.
The clearest skip on this site, and the shortest film in the series by half an hour, which still feels generous.
McClane goes to Moscow to retrieve a son he barely knows, discovers the son is CIA, and the two of them shoot their way through Russia and then Chernobyl. The father-and-son material is the whole premise and it is written in slogans. The son resents him, the son stops resenting him, and nothing in between is dramatised.
The character is unrecognisable. The McClane of the first film is a man who wants to go home and is terrified. This one announces himself as being on vacation, destroys a significant portion of central Moscow during a motorway chase that goes on for a quarter of an hour, and expresses no concern about any of it. He is a tourist with a gun and no interiority, and the series' defining quality, a working man who should not be here, is entirely absent.
Even the construction is careless: the villain swap in the middle is unmotivated, the Chernobyl sequence invents a chemical that neutralises radiation so the actors can take their masks off, and it ends abruptly at ninety-eight minutes as though the budget ran out. Nothing depends on it. There is no reason to watch it.
Die Hard guides
Where it sits in the Die Hard order
- Release order
- #5 of 5
- Chronological order
- #5 of 5
- Released
- 14 February 2013
- In-universe era
- The Later Films
What to watch next
In release order
Last in this order
In chronological order
Last in this order