John Moore made a decade of loud studio action pictures, most of them remakes or franchise entries, and the one we have reviewed spends 98 minutes bending metal without ever explaining why. The imagery has its admirers; the stories underneath it do not.
Fi1m perspective
A stolen car, a father and son bickering in the front seats, men with rifles behind them, and a Moscow street coming apart around it all. That is A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) for most of its 98 minutes, and it is as fair a sample of John Moore's cinema as we can offer: a great deal happening, and nobody able to say why. We sat through the chase bored, then irritated, because the noise is competently made and the reason for it never arrives. Skip Woods's screenplay gives John McClane a son to collect and a file to chase, and no cause to care about either.
The career is a decade at one studio. Moore came out of short films and commercials in Ireland, made Behind Enemy Lines (2001), and Fox kept him on for a run of large action pictures: Flight of the Phoenix (2004), The Omen (2006), Max Payne (2008) and then the fifth Die Hard. Two of those are remakes, one is a video game and one is a franchise entry. He was the director you hired when the property already existed and needed pictures put to it. I.T. (2016) is the last feature, and nothing has followed.
What he can do is move a lot of metal and light it. Some critics found Max Payne striking to look at, and the case against him has never been that the films are ugly. It is that the plots are thinner than the images, and that the action, for all its scale, turns messy and leans on effects when it should lean on geography. That is exactly what we found in Moscow: vehicles destroyed by the dozen, Jai Courtney and Bruce Willis shouting at each other over the engine, Sebastian Koch's Komarov in the back seat, and no sense of where anyone is or what would be lost if they were caught.
We were not alone. Twenty-one critics had called the fifth Die Hard poor before we did, and we saw no reason to argue. A director who can stage on that scale and keep a shot legible is not nothing, and a script with a shape would have given him something to be legible about. Moore has been quiet since 2016. If he comes back, we would ask for the script first and the cars second.
Biography
John Moore (born 1 January 1970) is an Irish film director and producer. He was born in Dundalk and studied media arts at Rathmines College of Commerce. After directing short films and commercials in Ireland, including the launch advertisement for the Sega Dreamcast, he was hired by 20th Century Fox to direct his first feature film.
Moore has directed five films for 20th Century Fox: Behind Enemy Lines (2001), Flight of the Phoenix (2004), The Omen (2006), Max Payne (2008) and A Good Day to Die Hard (2013). He also directed I.T. (2016). He is married to make-up artist Fiona Connon.
