A Good Day to Die Hard is the fifth installation in the John McClane story. This time John (Bruce Willis) is  kicking ass in Moscow. It begins with an innocuous visit to catch up with his estranged son (Jai Courtney), but there isn’t even enough time to sit down and catch-up. McClaine instead finds his son working deep cover as a CIA agent, and jumps into to support him after his partner is killed.

Junior is transporting an informant from jail (Sebastian Koch) who’s being chased by the Russian underground. But we know the only good Russian is a dead Russian in American action films, so there’s a double cross, and it turns out they’re assisting a zealous criminal looking to restore Chernobyl from an eyesore into a production plant for enriching uranium. His daughter plays along with the charade, and is especially touchy-feely. John and John Jr. work on their own father-son relationship. The back story is they just aren’t the hugging type, but over the course of the film, the two resolve their differences through some good old-fashioned, inspired violence.

The franchise has never been subtle about anything–and the attention to artillery, autos and aircraft, and even traffic as characters is more inspired than any of the actual-real-life characters. The press notes include twelve pages of a kind of scorecard for all the bad-ass locations and art department scores. It’s a good fit for director John Moore. This is Moore’s first swing at feature film-making, and the style feels distinctly like one of those BMW’s short films they made over a decade ago (The Hire).

It’s sleek and stylized, ornate and almost posh at times, with a crushing threat always nearby looming, the chance that the chandelier-clad ballroom, or the Lenin statuette gets a rotor to the neck sets up a nice anticipation. The car chase on Moscow’s diamond ring balances a gratuity for destruction and absolute disregard for physics. The decrepit ruins of Chernobyl  evokes a terrible, historical nightmare.

As far as story and politics go, The Last Stand is still the most memorable action flick this year much in the same vein. Only AGDTDH completely eschews politics of soft-power when dealing with the enemy, and is more maximalist than the libertarian worldview of The Last Stand. John Jr is definitely a product of secret, manicured and conflicted Obama administration, carefully toeing the line.