With the increasingly creaky English language once more stretched and massaged with liniment to accommodate the title A Good Day To Die Hard, the only lingering mystery about John McLane’s fifth terrible, horrible, no good, very coincidental day was which actor would play the estranged adult son that McLane reunites with in Moscow for some reason, and serve as a constant visible reminder that Bruce Willis has been doing this exact thing for nearly a quarter-century. And when you need an action star who won’t upstage you with an annoying discernible personality, you head to Australia, where the “Boys From Brazil” experiment that’s produced Sam Worthington and assorted Hemsworths has also yielded Jai Courtney—best known for playing “Varro” on Starz’s Spartacus: Blood And Vengeance—whom producers just handed the plum role over Liam Hemsworth, and presumably after checking that Channing Tatum was busy. You can see the first evidence of Courtney and Willis’ father-son chemistry in the above screen test shot, which has been achieved mostly by shaping Courtney’s hair until it also resembles a storm-ravaged shoreline.
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