Movie trailers are all about puffery–all about showing the best and hiding the worst and finding that right calculation that will get viewers into the theater. Typically studios won’t lie to viewers, and if you see a movie that isn’t stellar you can often go back and see that a closer study of the trailer would have informed you of precisely what you were getting. You might end up with a good movie despite bad trailer, but more often good trailers point us to a movie whose best scenes were in that trailer–and not much else. A Good Day to Die Hard is one of those movies whose trailers pretty much pointed out that there would be a problem with the movie. Like last year’s Total Recall remake, this fifth movie in the franchise of Bruce Willis as John McClane, ultimately just suffers from a poor script. How hard is it to give fans what they want with these popular franchises?
