Nice work on the delivery of that Long List, Bob.
Yeah. This was awful. "Dad struggles to connect with his kid" was done much better with Mary Elizabeth Winstead in 4.0 (fuck you all, I'm British), and the main reason it worked that time was because it was just one arc in a whole movie's worth of stuff. But by directly contrasting John'n'Jack's relationship with Komorov'n'Irina's (those are the right names, right?) they tried to make the disconnect between generations into something of a whole theme throughout the movie (Chernobyl is basically a generation ago now). And the problem is that the audience just does. Not. Care. Fathers and sons aren't going to see this movie together (despite the utterly pathetic 12 certificate; Die Hard 1 was an 18, grow a pair filmmakers); Die Hard movies now are for long-standing fans of the franchise. It's quite telling that one of the adverts in the cinema before the movie (when I saw it) was for McDonalds, featuring a teenage boy having nothing in common with his mother's new beau until Big Macs (captcha: cheese burger) come into the equation. Of course, it's even more telling that another advert was for a new DVD box set of all four Die Hard films.
But yeah. I'm kinda okay with McClane having not become an in-universe superhero yet; yeah, he's saved the nation a few times but he's blown up umpteen vehicles, even more buildings (and parts thereof) and at least one freeway in the process; at worst, they might have Dilbert Principled him out of the way to keep him out of trouble, and even that wouldn't have worked because... well, he's John McClane.
Also, Jack's a douche.