Die Hard 2 (1990) 20th Century Fox/Action RT: 124 minutes Rated R (strong bloody violence, language, brief nudity) Director: Renny Harlin Screenplay: Steven E. de Souza and Doug Richardson Music: Michael Kamen Cinematography: Oliver Wood Release date: July 4, 1990 (US) Cast: Bruce Willis, Bonnie Bedelia, William Sadler, John Amos, William Atherton, Franco Nero, Reginald VelJohnson, Dennis Franz, Art Evans, Fred Dalton Thompson, Tom Bower, Sheila McCarthy, Robert Costanzo, Don Harvey, Tony Ganios, Peter Nelson, Vondie Curtis-Hall, John Leguizamo, Robert Patrick, Mark Boone Junior, Colm Meany, Patrick O’Neal. Box Office: $117.5M (US)/$240M (World)
Rating: *** ½
I’m not sure if it’s as big a debate as the first, but let me state for the record: Die Hard 2 is a Christmas movie too. That’s how I see it anyway.
At one point early on in Die Hard 2, John McClane (Willis) asks “How can the same s*** happen to the same guy twice?” The easy answer is because the premise worked the first time; why not repeat the formula? Let’s throw John into another ordeal involving terrorists and confined spaces. There’s no way it can miss.
This time around, McClane finds himself up against mercenaries who have seized control of Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C. in order to secure the release of General Ramon Esperanza (Nero, Enter the Ninja), a drug lord and dictator of Val Verde who’s being brought to the US to stand trial for his crimes against the people. Action movie fans will recall that Val Verde is the same fictional South American country featured in Commando (1985) and Predator (1987).
Former US Army Special Forces Colonel Stuart (Sadler, Trespass) and his merry band of mercenaries have set up a command center at a nearby church, taking over air traffic control systems and shutting down all communication systems, making it impossible for the tower to communicate with the pilots. It’s Christmas Eve, the airport is extremely busy and there’s a huge blizzard outside. A terrorist attack is the last thing anybody needs.
Several planes are circling the airport, hoping to land before their fuel runs out. Holly McClane (Bedelia) is on one of those planes. John realizes that something is amiss after spotting two suspicious characters entering a restricted area of the airport. He follows them and engages them in a gunfight which results in one of them getting killed. Captain Carmine Lorenzo (Franz, NYPD Blue), head of the airport police, refuses to listen to McClane’s claims that something major is going down and tells him to mind his own business.
McClane ignores his directive and fingerprints the dead terrorist who he learns he was “officially” killed in action a couple of years earlier. He brings this to the attention of Trudeau (Thompson, Law & Order), the top guy at the airport, but ends up being ejected from the tower by Lorenzo. McClane finds himself alone (again, naturally) as he tries to take down the terrorists and restore control of the airport to its rightful operators. A Special Forces team, led by Major Grant (Amos, The Beastmaster), is called in to help take down Stuart after a failed attempt to restore communications results in a horrible act of retaliation by the heartless villain.
Die Hard 2 is a great sequel. It comes very close to being as epic as its predecessor. If the first one was The Towering Inferno, the sequel is an Airport movie. All that’s missing is a poster featuring little boxes with the actors’ faces in them running along the bottom. Too bad Henry Fonda isn’t around to play “The President”.
There are plenty of large scale action scenes and wild stunts, but the movie falters slightly with its villain. Colonel Stuart may be a crazy, cold-hearted bastard, but he hardly approaches the reptilian level of Hans Gruber. Who really cares about some corrupt soldier attempting to help a notorious drug lord/dictator escape from custody? Aside from any financial motivation, what is there to gain from this enterprise? I guess it doesn’t really matter. Action movie fans aren’t analyzing the plot with any great depth. Still, Colonel Stuart is a rather forgettable villain. I’ve spoken with several fans of the series who say the same thing.
What people remember most about Die Hard 2 are the top-notch action scenes and crack direction by Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger, The Long Kiss Goodnight). Coincidentally, he also directed The Adventures of Ford Fairlane which was released one week after this movie. It’s not often that two movies from the same director are released in such close proximity to each other. It’s a shame Renny’s career never fully recovered from his notorious 1995 pirate bomb Cutthroat Island (a movie I personally enjoy).
Die Hard 2 has plenty of interesting supporting characters on hand to keep things interesting while McClane tries to figure out how to defeat the terrorists. William Atherton (Ghostbusters) reprises his role as Richard Thornburg, the smug journalist who exposed John’s identity to the bad guys in the first movie. He finds himself seated right near Holly on the plane even though he has a restraining order against her for knocking out some of his teeth at the end of the original. This time he creates mass panic by reporting on the situation by correspondence from the plane’s lavatory. Sgt Al Powell (VelJohnson, Family Matters) also returns, but it’s just a cameo that he literally phones in.
Another reporter, Samantha Coleman (McCarthy, Pacific Heights), is on the ground covering the Esperanza story. She knows something’s going on and tries to find out exactly what. Marvin (Bower, The Killer Inside Me) is an airport maintenance man who helps McClane navigate the complex arrangement of the facility. Airport cop and Capt. Lorenzo’s brother Vito (Costanzo, Total Recall) has McClane’s car towed from in front of the airport at the beginning of the movie. Jeanne Bates (Eraserhead) plays the elderly woman seated next to Holly. She carries a taser that predictably comes in handy later.
There’s an interesting plot twist in the second half of the movie, one that shows how far Esperanza’s power and influence extends. There are some cool stunts like when McClane ejects himself from the cockpit of an plane Stuart’s men have bombarded with hand grenades. The violence is pretty fierce. One bad guy gets stabbed in the eye with an icicle, Another ends up getting shredded by a plane’s propeller.
The screenplay by Steven E. de Souza and Doug Richardson, based on the novel 58 Minutes by Walter Wager, is tight and exciting. The score by Michael Kamen augments the awesome action sequences. Harlin puts and keep the viewer right on the edge of their seat. Overall, Die Hard 2 is a damn good action flick and a worthy follow up to a classic of the genre. It rocks hard, just not quite as hard as the original.
