I didn't think it was physically possible to doze off at a movie as loud as A Good Day to Die Hard, but for a few moments my mind found some distant, peaceful refuge.

For anyone who remembers the "Die Hard" adventures at their vital and exciting best, this film feels like a near-death experience.

This is the Magpie School of action filmmaking: Anytime things start to make so little sense that you might lose the audience, just throw something shiny up on screen to distract.

An explosive, high-capacity-clip letdown.
Critic Score: 2/4

All Die Hard movies lack sense -- that's a given. This one lacks personality. And that's unforgivable.
Critic Score: C-

If there's something crassly opportunistic about exploiting a real life disaster on the scale of Chernobyl for cheap thrills, that's part and parcel of the film's cynicism.

This series needs to die here. That would be something to "Yippee Ki-Yay" about.
Critic Score: 1/4

A quarter-century after it began, A Good Day to Die Hard continues the franchise without undue embarrassment.
Critic Score: 2.5/4

This is the first Die Hard movie to run well under two hours (the incomprehensible final 30 minutes have been so furiously chopped, they deserve their own show on the Food Network).
Critic Score: 1/4

At this point, "Die Hard" no longer describes the franchise. It describes the fans who are still willing to turn out for the noise and nonsense.
Critic Score: 2/4

Both assaultive and tiresome, "A Good Day to Die Hard" barely registers on the action movie Richter scale. It goes bang, it goes boom, and then it blessedly goes away.
Critic Score: 1.5/4

McClane has been stripped of any real traces of an actual three-dimensional character. We feel as if we're watching Bruce Willis in a Bruce Willis movie in which Bruce Willis can survive anything while taking out the villains, video-game style.
Critic Score: 1.5/4

Obnoxious, over the top and often dull.
Critic Score: 1.5/4

True, a lot of stuff gets blown up and stunts that must have cost the Earth appear with startling regularity, but the sense of exhilaration and fun that marked the best of the series has gone unaccountably AWOL.
Critic Score: 2/5

At 98 minutes, this is by far the shortest of the Die Hard films, the rest of which run more than two hours. But it ends not a moment too soon.

A Good Day to Die Hard is pointless and joyless, a barrage of noise and chaos, an onslaught of destruction without the slightest mention of consequence.

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.
Critic Score: C

Willis may not be the film's saving grace, but he is some kind of grace nonetheless, really the only thing in the movie.
Critic Score: 1/4

While some of the sequels have been entertaining enough, "A Good Day to Die Hard" signals that it may be a better day for John McClane to retire.
Critic Score: 2.5/5

Everything that made the first "Die Hard" memorable -- the nuances of character, the political subtext, the cowboy wit -- has been dumbed down or scrubbed away entirely.
Critic Score: 2/5