Review of Die Hard 2 (1990) by Chezlyn A — 21 Apr 2011

I'm not going to contest the impact that the Die Hard franchise has made on the action genre. The first movie is a bona fide macho classic that, like a Hitchcock film on steroids, took an unsuspecting everyman and thrust him into a situation that required calm under fire, ingenuity, and massive balls of steel. It employed never before seen set pieces and special effects, it gave us a wickedly memorable villain in Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber, and it launched Bruce Willis into an action star orbit previously only occupied by Stallone and Schwarzenegger. But for all its ante-upping and ingenuity, Die Hard wasn't immune to sequelitis, that damnable disease that plagues most high-grossing, blockbusting summer crowd pleasers. Die Hard 2: Die Harder might as well have been subtitled Try Harder, as it adheres to the bigger-faster-harder- more follow-up philosophy, resulting in an over-bloated experience that's sloppier, more tedious, and infinitely less memorable than its game-changing predecessor. It's still decent, lazy Sunday afternoon entertainment if you're feeling particularly non-discerning and just want to turn your brain off for two hours, but that really isn't saying much, is it?

"Another basement, another elevator," says Willis's John McClane. "How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?" Well, I'll tell you how. It's clear that screenwriters Richard E. de Souza and Doug Richardson were either at a loss for where to take the story, or they just decided to take the easy way out and reuse the film's first premise - renegade cop rescues his wife and others from a group of terrorists - and simply reset it in a new location, Dulles International Airport. Even the Christmas Eve time frame is recycled without any questions of implausibility. If I were a superstitious man, I'd make damn sure I was as far away from John McClane as possible on the night before Christmas. Thankfully, the series moves away from its Yuletide oriigns in later installments, but in Die Harder we're left to scratch our heads along with McClane and wonder why we're given almost the exact same set-up as last time.

The variables, of course, are slightly different. Instead of a charming East German terrorist, we get William Sadler as Colonel Stuart, an ex-military man who is introduced doing Tai Chi - naked, buttocks tightly clenched - in front of a hotel mirror. These are the kind of people we're dealing with. Colonel Stuart has an intricate plan to rescue a deposed Latin American general - a Fidel Castro look-alike - who is set to arrive at Dulles and be transferred into U.S. custody. Basically, the plan is to set up a truckload of high-tech equipment at a nearby church - we know it's high-tech because there are lots of flashing lights - and hack the air traffic control system so that he's effectively holding every airborne passenger on the eastern seaboard unknowingly hostage. As it so happens, John McClane's wife (Bonnie Bedelia) is aboard one of the planes, and if there's one thing that potential terrorists shouldn't do if they want to successfully carry out their sinister agendas, it's take John McClane's wife hostage. Seriously, it's not going to get you anywhere.

For Die Harder, directing duties were handed off to Renny Harlin, then a hotshot Finnish helmer with style to burn, and now unfortunately recognized as a guy who's pretty good at making big budget garbage like Exorcist: The Beginning, The Covenant, and Deep Blue Sea. (One wonders what Alien 3 would've been like had he saw it to completion, as was 20th Century Fox's original intent.) Harlin handles the action quite competently here, actually, but despite bigger-should-be-better explosions, some crazy shootouts, and even an ejector seat moment straight out of a Looney Tunes episode, a stale air pervades the film and keeps the sequences from being as memorable as anything the first Die Hard had to offer. The film is at its best when McClane is playing hardball with the local law enforcement, led by a somewhat overzealous Dennis Franz as Captain Lorenzo, or making his way alone through the labyrinthine hallways beneath the airport. Willis is a dependable presence with his tender tough guy shtick, and he's always fun to watch, but the obligatory one-liners and quick retorts aren't nearly as punchy here. It certainly doesn't help that the film is much longer than it needs to be, spending far too much time on an initial set-up that requires very little. Tension sags at several points, and what suspense the film does manage to ratchet is unspooled by plot holes, implausibility, and continuity issues.

If anything, Die Harder is good for a dose of late '80s, early '90s nostalgia, especially if you're pining for the days when fax machines were novel, hacking a computer network was an original plot device, and airport security was much more lax. At one point, both McClane and a hot-for-the-scoop journalist (Sheila McCarthy) waltz up into the air traffic control tower, no questions asked. Try that now and you'd probably get deported to Guantanamo. Even the film's brand of ultra right-wing terrorism - the Fidel Castro look-alike is actually anti-communist - seems quaint in retrospect, especially because the villain's goons are all of the you know I'm bad because my hair is slicked back variety. And William Sadler's Colonel Stuart really is the film's undoing. Where Hans Gruber was a worthy and intelligent adversary for McClane, Colonel Stuart is merely sour and mean-spirited. When he brings down a 747, killing all passengers on board just to make a point, it becomes increasingly more difficult to find humor in Die Harder's goofier moments. Renny Harlin ups the gore quotient and gives us more sprawling action sequences, but without a wily foil for McClane, bigger is simply bitter, not better.

Die Harder is definitely the black sheep of the Die Hard franchise, and I don't really mean that in a good way. Director Renny Harlin kicks the action up a notch, but the film's darker tone means the first film's characteristic humor is noticeably dampened.