Die Hard 2

PLOT (spoiler alert!!!):

On Christmas Eve, two years after the Nakatomi Tower Incident, LAPD detective John McClane is waiting at Washington Dulles International Airport for his wife Holly to arrive from Los Angeles. Reporter Richard Thornburg, who exposed McClane’s identity to Hans Gruber in the first Die Hard, is assigned a seat across the aisle from Holly. While in the airport bar, McClane spots two men in army fatigues carrying a package; one of the men has a gun. Suspicious, he follows them into the baggage area. After a shootout, he kills one of the men while the other escapes. Learning the dead man is a mercenary thought to have been killed in action, McClane believes he’s stumbled onto some nefarious plot. He relates his suspicions to airport police Captain Carmine Lorenzo, but Lorenzo refuses to listen and has McClane thrown out of his office.

Former U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel Stuart and other former members of his unit set up a base in a church near Dulles after executing the church’s custodian. They take over the air traffic control systems, cutting off communication to the planes, and seize control of the airport. Their goal is to rescue General Ramon Esperanza, a drug lord and the dictator of Val Verde, who is being extradited to the US to stand trial on drug trafficking charges. They demand a Boeing 747 so they can escape to another country, and warn the IAD controllers not to try to restore control. Upon learning of this, McClane realizes his wife is on one of the planes circling above Washington, D.C. with too little fuel to be redirected, and will likely crash if the terrorists remain in control. He prepares to fight the terrorists.

Dulles communications director Leslie Barnes heads to the unfinished Annex Skywalk with a SWAT team to re-establish communications with the planes. Stuart’s henchmen, disguised as painters, maintenance employees, and airport staff, ambush them. In the resulting shootout, all five SWAT officers are killed, as is one of Stuart’s men. Before they can shoot Barnes, McClane bursts in through an air vent. After a shootout, McClane kills the last three of Stuart’s men. When Stuart learns of this, he responds by recalibrating the instrument landing system and then impersonating air traffic controllers to crash a jet, killing all 230 passengers and crew onboard the aircraft. In response, a Special Forces team is called in, led by Major Grant. A two-way radio dropped by one of Stuart’s henchmen tips McClane that Esperanza is landing. McClane gets there before Stuart’s henchmen, but Stuart traps him in Esperanza’s transport and throws grenades into the cockpit. McClane escapes via the ejection seat just as the aircraft explodes. Barnes is then able to help McClane locate the mercenaries’ hideout and they tell Grant and his team to raid the location. However, the mercenaries escape on snowmobiles during a shootout between Grant’s team and Stuart’s team. McClane pursues them, killing two more mercenaries and taking a snowmobile, but the gun he picked does not work. Stuart and his men shoot McClane’s snowmobile, but McClane flees just as it explodes. He realizes that the gun contained blanks and that the mercenaries and Special Forces are working together.

McClane contacts Lorenzo to send out officers to intercept the plane, proving his story by firing at Lorenzo with the blank gun. Thornburg, after learning about the situation through a radio transmission from Barnes, barricades himself in the airplane lavatory and phones in a sensational and exaggerated take on what is happening at Dulles, leading to panic in the airport and preventing the officers from reaching the plane. After learning of this, Holly enters the lavatory and subdues Thornburg with a taser.

McClane hitches a ride on a news helicopter that drops him off on the left wing of the plane, and he blocks the ailerons with his jacket, preventing the plane from taking off. Grant emerges and fights McClane, but is sucked into the outboard engine and ripped apart. Stuart comes out to fight next, and succeeds in knocking McClane off the plane, but not before McClane knocks open the fuel hatch. After landing, McClane uses his cigarette lighter to ignite the trail of leaking fuel, which races down the runway to the wing, ignites the rest of the fuel and destroys the jet, killing all on board. The other planes, circling in the air, use the lighted trail to land, and McClane and his wife are reunited.

REVIEW:

What is it about Christmas, terrorists and John McClane? Picking up a couple of years after the original Die Hard, Die Hard 2 has McClane at Washington Dulles Airport, again in the wrong place at the wrong time…or is it the right place at the right time?

Sequelitis, we all know about it, and certain films that suffer from it. Some examples, for those not familiar with this affliction, Home Alone 2, the non-Tim Burton Batman movies (thought that may have been more of a result of different directors),  all  the Police Academy movies after Mahoney left, House Party 3 + 4, anything relating to The Terminator following T2: Judgement Day, and a host of others.

That isn’t to say there aren’t good sequels. All the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films seem to improve on their predecessor. Spider Man 2 is widely regarded as the best entry in the trilogy (while 3 is considered the worst). However, I direct you the holy trilogy for the embodiment of how to do a franchise right (this is before George Lucas lost his damn mind and started messing with perfection). Empire Strikes Back is hands down the greatest film ever made. That is no opinion, that’s a statement of FACT!!!

Often times, it is the second film in a franchise, as you can see, that is revered as the best and brightest. Is this the case with this film?

Well, I can’t say that just yet. Still have 2 more entries into the franchise, but I can say that I think the first was better.

The plots aren’t the same, but they are close. Terrorists take over and threaten lives, only this time, instead of an executive building, they take over an airport. Well, not exactly. They take over a church a few miles down the road and through the use of some hi-tech (for 1990) gear, are able to take control of the tower and keep the planes in the air until a certain plan containing General Esperanza, a convicted drug lord, lands and he is escorted safely away.

Needless to say, this doesn’t sit well with McClane, especially since one of those planes up there has his wife on it, and not enough fuel to stay up too much longer. This is where the films kicks into what is supposed to be high gear.

The thing about that, though, is that it seemed to take too long to get things going. As a matter of fact, it takes the introduction of the Army Special Forces unit to get this film out of the molasses it seemed to be attempting to plod through.

Storywise, I was not a fan. I may have missed it, but I don’t believe the motivation was ever mentioned as to why the mercenaries were so gung-ho about Esperanza not being reprimanded to U.S. custody. I’m not one of those people who needs to know why every character does this or that action in film, but seeing as how these guys are more or less traitors to their own country, I think it wold make sense for us to know what drove them to do such a thing. For me that was sort of a big plot hole.

Big guns and lots of explosions are still the norm for this film. While the brawn is used quite effectively, it is the parts of the brain that really will pique one interest, especially if you’re more the intellectual type.

In conclusion, Die Hard 2 has its moments of up and down, but when it comes down to it, this is just a good film; a popcorn flick, if you will. Is it as bloody as many would like for it to be? Probably not, but hey, there are some nice kill scenes in here. Do I recommend it? Sure, but I wouldn’t put it high up on the list. Maybe something more near the top of the middle section?

3 3/4 out of 5 stars