Die Hard 2

I was expecting the worse when I saw this film, but this movie seemed to escape the curse of the cheesy sequel. Just as action packed and enthralling as the original, the wit displayed in this film saved it from being a mediocre follow-up. Bruce Willis was once again a great hero, showing how little being considered a hero means to him. A good film with a great plot twist, this is one of those action films which is just as good as the original.

John McClane is in Washington to meet his wife as she arrives at the airport. However as he waits for her plane to come in terrorists seize control of the control equipment and keep the planes circling. They plan to rescue captured dictator General Esperanza by landing his plane at the airport and making their escape. However as the terrorists wait the circling planes get shorter and shorter on fuel, leading John McClane to take what action he can to regain control of the planes.

This second of the exciting die hard series has a hard act to follow. The first film was amazing and broke the mould relating to action films, it showed that action could occur in everyday locations, caused English actors to get lots of work as bad guys and set many other copycat films in motion (die hard on a mountain, die hard on a bus etc). However this is nothing special. The plot tries to be similar to the original but it lacks as much originality as the first. The terrorist plot is not quite as likely and it doesn't have the same flow as the first. Story-wise the main flaw is in McClane's involvement - in the first film he was very much trapped and forced to take action, in fact his first instinct was to run away from the terrorists. Here the same is not true, Willis tries to make it seem that he doesn't want all this again ("how can the same **** happen to the same guy") but really he throws himself into the thick of the battle. This takes away from the image of him as an ordinary guy put into a difficult situation.

The action scenes don't help this problem. Yes all the action scenes are good and exciting, but many of them are too big. In the first the action occurred in short standoffs, usually with McClane running away or sneaking around. Here there's too many of one man v's the world style action with Willis running in against a large number of terrorists and winning. Again this takes away from the tension and claustrophobia of the other film and makes it feel like a Arnie blockbuster. That said the action is still good and won't disappoint action fans.

The main failing of the film is that it tries to be like the first film without success. It retains the same set-up (McClane trying to rescue his wife from terrorists), brings back the same Christmas time setting and music, it even wheels back in as many repeat characters as it can (Veljohnson as Sergeant Powell, Atherton as Thornburg) but it loses the most important item - the set parameters of the action. Die Hard was great because it had very tightly set locations for it's action in the office block. Here the action can spread out all over so a lot of the tension and claustrophobia is lost. The decision to make the second film so similar to the first can only lead us to comparing the two and seeing the inferiorities.

The performances are quite good generally. Willis can almost do this type of thing in his sleep while the other repeat characters simply redo their roles. Unfortunately many of the repeat characters don't have much to do and seem out of place. The 'new' characters fill the stereotyped shoes of previous actors. Dennis Franz takes on the mantle of incompetent cop standing in McClane's way by going by the book, Sheila McCarthy takes on the story hungry journalist role etc. The bad guys do have a lot to live up to by replacing Alan Rickman and they don't quite reach that standard. William Sadler is good as Colonel Stuart but doesn't have any style of his own, anyway it's good to see Franco Nero (cult star of western Django) in an American film.

The film has some nice twists towards the end but it just doesn't come close to the atmosphere of the first film. By trying to be similar to the first film, Renny Harlin shows that he's not as capable as McTiernan in creating a mood of tension mixed with the action. The result is a great action movie but one that cowers in the shadow of it's better bigger brother.

...but other than that, there's very little going against the second in the series. It helps (but not enough) that the character realizes he's basically in a sequel. There are some minor variations in the formula, but basically the movie relies on the Bruce Willis' charisma and humor, and elaborate action sequences. William Sadler is okay, but no Alan Rickman (or Jeremy Irons in #3). It's still enjoyable, though.

Series note: It is not necessary to watch Die Hard (1988) before this film. However, that is the better film and it will give you a better introduction to the continuing characters, so it is still recommendable to watch the first film before this one.

Set an unspecified number of years after Die Hard (I'll call it "Die Hard 1"), Die Hard 2 has John McClane (Bruce Willis) just outside of Washington, D.C. on Christmas Eve, where he is waiting for his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), to arrive at Dulles International Airport from Los Angeles so they can visit her mother for the holidays. Holly calls John from the plane to tell him that they're a half-hour behind schedule. While he's waiting in the crowded airport, he first sees a man he recognizes but can't place (it turns out to be one of the villains), then sees a couple other suspicious men heading into the restricted baggage area. He follows them in, has a confrontation, and eventually learns that one is a special ops military guy whose records say he's been dead for two years. That cues him in to the fact that something big is going to go down (as if he couldn't tell based on the fact that he's in another Die Hard film). Since a bigwig cocaine dealer from Latin America is on his way to Washington for extradition, that's a pretty big clue regarding what is about to go down. Shortly after chaos ensues, as "terrorists" take control of Dulles with dozens of planes in the air and no place to land--they're not able to talk to the tower, use their instruments properly or conduct a visual landing. How will they resolve the situation?

I'm not one to subtract points for a lack of realism, or "real world believability" in films. Because of that, Die Hard 2 poses a very interesting case study for me. Real world believability is very difficult to not think about when watching this film. Why wouldn't the planes just reroute to other nearby airports? There are a bunch less than an hour's flight away, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, the three New York City-area airports, and so on. Why wouldn't they be able to call another close airport, or the Pentagon, or somewhere else nearby to have them contact the planes? They're near Washington, D.C., after all (don't forget that Dulles is 26 miles away from D.C., in Virginia, making it unlikely that planes out of fuel would begin "dropping on the White House lawn"). It seems like maybe this film should have been set somewhere like Salt Lake City, Utah instead. Why wouldn't they be able to show the runways through some other means, like a line of emergency or police vehicles with their sirens on? If the "terrorists" started shooting at the vehicles, or trying to blow them up, at least they'd be given an indication where the fire is coming from/given their location. Just how likely would it be that there's a big storm in the area on the day when General Ramon Esperanza (Franco Nero) is being extradited? How likely is it that he'd be extradited on Christmas Eve? Why the hell is John standing out on the runway in the snow waving a couple of flaming poles--just what does he think that will do? And we can go on and on.

In the above, it becomes clear that maybe the problem isn't real-world believability but internal logic, although to an extent, some of the internal logic is extremely difficult to separate from facts we know about the real world that aren't mentioned in the film. But Die Hard 1 was an extremely taut film that had impeccable internal logic. The film itself gave reasons for the dilemmas that arose, and they were justifications that made the dilemmas inevitable. It doesn't matter that some of the "facts" or situations in Die Hard 1 were contrary to our beliefs about the real world. The film defined things to be the fictional way it defined them, and the logic was consistent and valid (in the formal sense) from within the film.

However, it becomes clear, not too far into Die Hard 2, that perhaps looking at it for things like real-world believability and logical consistency/validity is misconceiving it. My belief is that this film is meant to be a spoof of action films as much as it is meant to be a serious action film. _That's_ why John is standing out on the runway waving around flaming poles like a maniac. That's why baddies can easily shoot and kill 20 or so highly trained, highly armed S.W.A.T. team members wearing bulletproof vests but can't hit John, who is wearing street clothes and rolling around on the floor with a pistol. That's why the planes are stuck over D.C. with no options and the film doesn't even try to justify this. That's why there are scenes of John "riding explosions" like a cowboy (yippee-ki-yay mf'er indeed). That's why there are a number of "wink-wink" cracks about being in another Die Hard film. That's why there are a few scenes that look oddly similar to Airplane! (1980). That's why the film so frequently, joyously embraces silliness.

Director Renny Harlin and his bulletproof vested army of scriptwriters and producers apparently set out to make a cartoonish satire of action films, while still making a serious action film. In 1990, action films were just at the tail end of their domination of the U.S. box office, so it was a ripe time to spoof them. Harlin and company succeed fairly well. It might have been even more artistically successful if they had more firmly committed to one angle (cartoonish satire) or the other (serious actioner), but the performances are pretty good, the fistfights, gunfights, explosions and chases are very good, and the film is frequently funny if you have a taste for the absurd.

I don't know how it could but it did and I enjoyed it a lot. This was one great flick and it's one of those movies that seem longer than it actually is.

John McClane(Willis)is back. Only this time he's at Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. waiting for his wife's plane to arrive. But when McClane stumbles upon a couple of terrorists he tries to warn everyone in the control tower about it. But before they could do anything, the terrorists shut down all of the plane's landing systems. The terrorist leader led by Col. Stuart(played greatly by William Sadler)is demanding that major foreign drug dealer, General Esperanza is freed. But since the tower is powerless, McClane wages another one man war against the terrorists and must hurry before his wife's plane crashes.

Willis and Sadler do great jobs in their roles. Dennis Franz also does a funny job as the airport police chief. It has a great return of some old characters such as Bonnie Bedelia, William Atherton, and Reginald VelJohnson.

This gets my vote as the most entertaining of the three Die Hard movies. 10/10