Best Known for the Fanservice: Odd example. One of the few memorable moments (or at least one that most people remember about this work) has Irina getting off a motorbike and stripping off her catsuit (revealing lingerie underneath) and changing into a dress. Inexplicably, it only happens in the trailer, in the actual film, this is not shown on-screen, as it cuts from Irina beginning to unzip her suit to a scene outside, and her having already donned the dress by the time it cuts back
Cliché Storm: Alik is your typical America-hating Russian villain. The portrayal of Russia in the movie as a whole is a hailstorm of The New Russia clichés that were already dated 20 years before.
Complete Monster: Alik is a Russian mercenary hired by corrupt Russian official Viktor Chagarin to kidnap Yuri Komarov from the court and extract files which contain compromising information about Chagarin. To this end, Alik sends several of his people to drive explosive-rigged vehicles near the courthouse, only to blow them up with his henchmen still inside, killing dozens of innocent people in the courthouse. When John McClane, Jr. has extracted Yuri from his grasp, Alik starts chasing him across the whole city, endangering countless lives and even killing several bystanders, laughing at all the mayhem that was happening around him. Capturing Yuri, Alik tries to sadistically and slowly kill John McClane and John McClane, Jr., beating them for fun.
Critic-Proof: In the US, it was by far the lowest-grossing film in the series. However, internationally, it still made back its budget and more besides.
Chagarin planning a rigged trial against the whistleblower billionaire Komarov can be seen as this, as Vladimir Putin's government is known to be extremely hostile towards oligarchs they dislike, and often they don't get even get a public trial, rigged or not. They get Destination Defenestration if they don't just quietly go away with even less than that.
A battle at the mostly abandoned Chernobyl exclusion zone is largely fantastical in 2013, but hits closer to home after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, where Russian troops occupied the plant for over a month and caused significant damage to the place.
He's Just Hiding: It's possible to harbor a little doubt about Irina and her copilots' death in the helicopter crash, given that Irina had time to see that the McClanes were escaping her suicide attack by jumping out the window and into the water below. They might have had the time and the reason to jump out of the chopper and onto one of the building floors during the seconds where the chopper is out of sight as the camera follows the McClanes’ descent.
The idea that the Chernobyl accident was due to the fact that Big Bad steals military uranium from a peaceful nuclear power plant. Adding to this is one of the villains says that they have the means to erase the radiation and follows it up with "trust me".
The premise of the film is that ordinary Russians will protest if the authorities want to judge someone from the oligarchs, while in fact, the word "oligarch" in the CIS has negative connotations and many people would support it, even on a contrived charge.
In the movie, there literally is a Helicopter Boss. And it quietly flies in the center of Moscow, without any reaction from the army or police.
Presumed Flop: Despite having the dishonor of being the least popular movie in the series and releasing on Dump Months, its box office was still far from failure, earning back $305 million internationally (versus $92 million budget).
Sequelitis: It is, at least from a critical standpoint, the weakest movie in the franchise (given the largely negative response, far and away below the other four). While the first four films had enough plot to fill two hours, the fifth barely has enough material to scratch 90 minutes, a bulk of that being action and the rest being exhausted The New Russia clichés. Fox also probably sensed a turkey, since it was the first Die Hard film to not be released in the summer, instead debuting during the Dump Months (Valentine's Day to be exact), and the film is far and away the least-attended film in the series.
So Bad, It's Good: The film can make for some light-hearted enjoyment due to the heavy amount of Artistic License used, resulting in cartoony scenes and laughably absurd situations that wouldn't be possible in real life. For instance, there's a rogue attack helicopter in the middle of Moscow that causes a very underwhelming response from the Russian government, and a final fight in the middle of the Chernobyl power plant without even a worry about radiation poisoning.
