The movie is still in early talks, but the apparent plan is to open and close the film with scenes of Willis as a now permanently sleepy-eyed John McClane, providing the series’ last remaining fan—veterinarian Larry Squabdale, of Hasslefack, New Jersey—with the yipee-ki-yay’s and mother fucking he so desperately craves. But in between those grumbly bookends, the film will devote most of its run time to McClane’s career as a cop in “gritty” 1979 New York, all the better to show “how he became a die hard kind of guy.” This, even though the single most important aspect of the original Die Hard’s greatness—outside of Willis’ long-consumed stores of smirking, smarmy charm—was the idea that John McClane was just a regular cop, desperately improvising in an impossible situation.
But whatever, that sort of thinking stopped mattering three Die Hards ago. Now, we can look forward to some new young actor squinting his way through trips to the explosion factory and deploying his best Bruce Willis impression to crack wise at a bunch of winking hints to the original film. “Boy, it sure would suck to get that in my feet,” he’ll quip, staring at a not-yet-broken window. “Ho Ho Ho? Why Santa, that’s a heck of a line!” “Aw, geeze, my gun is stuck to my back, why does this always happen?” We don’t know, young actor pretending to be Bruce Willis in our hypothetical Die Hard situation. We don’t know why anything happens anymore.
[via Deadline]
