July 4, 1990 | At the end of the slam-bang thrill-o-rama that is Die Hard 2, our reluctant hero, John McClane (Bruce Willis), has a tearfully happy reunion with his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), on the runway of Dulles International Airport. It’s been a busy evening: John has had to battle cold-blooded terrorists, thickheaded bureaucrats and a full-scale, Christmas-season snowstorm, while Holly hovered above the landing area in an airliner perilously low on fuel.
For most people, this would be the adventure of a lifetime. For the McClanes, however, it’s deja vu all over again. “John,” Holly says, amazed at the replay of painfully familiar events, ”why does this keep happening to us?”
Good question. And there are several million good answers, all of them noted in the profit margin of the box-office records for the first Die Hard. In that smashingly successful 1988 release, New York cop John McClane tried to patch things up with his estranged wife, a business executive newly transferred to Los Angeles, and wound up trapped inside a high-rise office tower with a team of high-tech terrorists. Armed only with wits, resourcefulness and a police-issue handgun, McClane was the right man in the wrong place at the right time. He triumphed, but just barely, and a large degree of the film’s irresistible appeal stemmed from his vulnerability, his frustration and, sometimes, his naked terror. (”Oh, God, please don’t let me die!”) Forget about Stallone or Schwarzenegger — Willis played McClane as a life-sized hero, a regular guy who, deep down, just knew he was no match for the well-armed villains, but who kept plugging away because, hey, there was no other way to keep himself and his wife alive.
Die Hard 2 makes McClane a bit less reluctant, and a lot more decisive. But he’s still a regular guy, not a pumped-up super hero, and he still looks mighty scared when the bullets start flying so dangerously close. Willis plays McClane with the same high-octane mixture of wisecracking humor and cockroach-tough resilience, all the while making it perfectly clear that McClane feels jumping through windows, ejecting from grounded airplanes and dodging automatic-weapons fire are not life-enhancing activities for rational adults.
Like its predecessor, Die Hard 2 offers many explosions, some heart-stoppingly exciting shoot-outs, and a great deal of loud, chaotic, sensationally well-photographed action. But in his reaction to bloody violence, Willis’ McClane demonstrates once again that he’s not your average action-movie hero. When McClane is forced to finish off an attacker by stabbing the guy in the eye with a conveniently placed icicle, the camera lingers an extra second or two — not on the corpse, as you might expect, but on McClane’s expression of — yeee-uck! — flinching disgust. As he did in the first Die Hard, Willis works hard to give all the sound and fury some heart and soul.
The sequel, inspired by a novel by Walter Wagner, has McClane waiting for his wife at Dulles Airport (no, the movie wasn’t really shot there) so they can enjoy Christmas with his in-laws. He spots some suspicious activity near a restricted area, and, since this is a multi-million-dollar summer-season blockbuster, you know he’ll find something much worse than baggage theft going on. Sure enough, McClane uncovers the bold plot of a rogue U.S. military officer, a stony-faced Oliver North type who thinks it would be a neat idea to free a Latin American dictator charged with major-league drug dealing.
Col. Stuart (William Sadler) has an inspired plan: tap into the airport’s control center, take command of the runways and radar screens, override the ground-to-air communications network, and, in effect, hold every plane in the sky for ransom. To save the passengers, airport officials must agree to turn over the captured General Esperanza (Franco Nero), who’s being flown to Dulles through a raging snowstorm. Time, naturally, is of the essence. ”After two hours,” notes the airport boss, ”those planes aren’t gonna be circling — they’re gonna be dropping on the White House lawn.”
It’s a devilishly clever scheme, one that accounts for every possibility except the unexpected presence of a hard-bitten New York cop. (Actually, McClane is an LA cop in Die Hard 2 — he got a transfer to be near his wife and kids — but nothing much is made of this.) McClane is the angrily buzzing fly in the ointment, a role he understands. ”It’s OK,” he tells a dumbfounded TV reporter (nicely played by Sheila McCarthy) as he scoots through the ceiling of an elevator car. ”I’ve done this before.”
Once he’s alone, though, McClane isn’t so cheery. ”How can the same bleep happen to the same guy twice ?” he wails.
Die Hard generated a lot of its sweaty-palmed suspense by remaining trapped inside a single, claustrophobic setting, a high-rise brimming with terrorists. In Die Hard 2, the parameters are expanded — McClane rushes out to observe a plane crash, races off to a secluded cabin for a gunfight, pursues the bad guys through the woods in a high-speed snowmobile chase — and the tension is slightly dissipated. Worse, none of the villains here is as flamboyantly colorful as Alan Rickman in Die Hard 1.
Even so, director Renny Harlin (Nightmare on Elm Street 4 ) does his utmost to keep the sequel thundering along, faster than the speed of thought. A good thing, too: If the movie weren’t so exhilaratingly paced, so full-throttle exciting, you would have too much time to consider the holes in the plot devised by scriptwriters Steven E. de Souza and Doug Richardson.
Die Hard 2 is a wild, rude rollercoaster ride, the most stimulating rush you’re likely to experience in a moviehouse this summer. The whole thing is shamelessly contrived, especially as it labors to find a good reason to bring back (briefly) Reginald VelJohnson as the LA beat cop who helped McClane in the first film. But the contrivances — and, indeed, the very idea that such tumultuous things would happen to the same guy twice — are presented with a sly wink, as though the filmmakers wanted to share a few private jokes with the audience while delivering the sure-shot, dead-serious spills and chills. It’s a tricky mixture, but in Die Hard 2, it works.
William Atherton returns as Thornberg, the amorally eager TV reporter who sneered his way through the first Die Hard. And once again, the sharp-witted Bonnie Bedelia gives him his comeuppance. Standouts among the newcomers include Dennis Franz as a surly airport security chief, Art Evans as a control-tower whiz, Fred Dalton Thompson as the understandably gloomy airport air-traffic controller, and John Amos as the leader of an Army anti-terrorist squad. It’s meant as high praise to say each of these actors manages not to be completely upstaged by the death-defying stunt work and the eye-popping special effects.
