Review of Die Hard 2 (1990) by Martin D — 20 Dec 2011

Very good sequel, and in the end he says what you have been whating for: Yippy ka yee motherfucker!

On Christmas Eve, two years after the Nakatomi Tower Incident, LAPD detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) is waiting at Washington Dulles International Airport for his wife Holly to arrive from Los Angeles. Reporter Richard Thornburg (William Atherton), who exposed McClane's identity to Hans Gruber in the first Die Hard, is assigned the seat next to 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 fight, 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 (William Sadler) 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 (Franco Nero), 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 (Art Evans) 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, killing the SWAT team. Before they can shoot Barnes, McClane bursts in through an air vent. After a shootout, McClane kills 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 (John Amos). 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 a plane and throws grenades into the cockpit. McClane escapes via the ejection seat. 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.