Die Hard 2
Categories: Christmas Reviews, Featured, Movie Reviews
Written By: Eric Jensen
Rating: 
Die Hard is every testosterone-crazed male’s favorite Christmas movie, but we mustn’t overlook the fact that Die Hard 2 also takes place on December 24th. Thus, it falls into that wonderful “Christmas movie on a technicality” category that’s perfect for early in the season.
I only liked the first half of Die Hard with a Vengeance and didn’t like Live Free or Die Hard at all, but this first sequel was a worthy successor to the original. It knew what ingredients were needed to make not just an action movie but a Die Hard movie, things like John McClane (Bruce Willis) having to work essentailly alone to stop the bad guys and the action involving a relatively localized, confined space.
Granted, the movie’s totally absurd, even by the bonkers standards of big action flicks. We’ll accept that John McClane is involved in another terrorist hostage-taking situation. That kind of improbability is the nature of sequels. But then there’s the fact that this takes place on the precise anniversary of the events of the previous film, and that’s a little tougher to swallow. Add in the fact that McClane’s wife (Bonnie Bedelia) is again one of the terrorists’ captives and that the reporter from the first movie (William Atherton) just happens to be on her very airplane, and the implausibilities have really started to mount.
But all this pales in comparison to the lunacy of the villains’ actual plot. The leader of the baddies is Colonel Stuart, who plans to set free a Central American drug lord being extradited to the United States. To assure that the authorities allow the incoming prisoner to escape unmolested, Stuart takes control of Dulles International Airport using computer magic. By sending all the planes coming into the airport false instrument readings, he can cause them to fly right into the ground.
Because there’s a blizzard, you see. This entire plan hinges on pilots being so blinded by snow they can’t see where the ground is. The terrorists have to have a blizzard for their scheme to work. But it’s not like they’re just holding all the passengers for ransom and can wait around for any old snowstorm to execute their plan. They’re springing a prisoner who’s flying into a specific place at a specific time. What if there’d been no blizzard? The whole plan would just trickle right down Colonel Stuart’s leg.
And let’s not forget the many facets of the scheme—obviously thoroughly planned long in advance—that are used solely to trick McClane and put him off the trail of the bad guys, even though nobody had any idea that he’d be there.
But none of that really matters. What matters is that Bruce Willis hustles through the airport for two hours, blowing things up and killing henchmen and saying bad words. He’s the great American hero.
Stupid Chiefs try to stand in his way, as they do in all movies of this type, but a Stupid Chief is no match for John Friggin McClane.
Even henchmen like Meat from Porky’s and the T-1000 cannot stop our hero from saving the day. Nothing can stop John McClane.
Well, except a really bad fourth movie, that sort of stopped him for me.
But in 1990, you can be damn sure that nothing could stop John McClane. This movie, despite its various absurdities, is absolute boatloads of R-rated action fun. The original Die Hard is the greatest action movie of all time, says I, and Die Hard 2 lives up to its name. Nothing could quite match the original, but this one comes as close as any sequel could.
Most importantly, all that snow and all those Christmas trees mean that, yes, this is a Christmas movie. So all you guys out there, when your girlfriend says “Let’s watch a Christmas movie,” but you don’t quite feel up to Jimmy Stewart learning an important lesson, throw in Die Hard 2 and say “You have to watch it, it’s technically a Christmas movie, neener neener.”
As Tiny Tim famously said, “Yippe ki yay motherfucker, everyone.”
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