Die Hard was a game changer in the action genre, in ways both large and small. The wise-cracking everyman hero in the John McClane mold replaced an era of Schwarzeneggerian excess. More specifically, action merchants imitated Die Hard’s revolutionary structural creation, and soon dozens of pictures arose about a lone hero over a short timeframe defeating a band of terrorists in a limited location. This new action subgenre was so connected to Die Hard, there’s not even an alternate name for it. Instead, these various movies are known as “Die Hards on an X,” with the location the sole true variable. A few examples:
Under Siege: “Die Hard on a battleship.”
Under Siege 2: Dark Territory: “Die Hard on a train.”
The Rock: “Die Hard on Alcatraz.”
Cliffhanger: “Die Hard on a mountain.”
Speed: “Die Hard on a bus.”
Speed 2: Cruise Control: “Die Hard on a cruise ship.”
Sudden Death: “Die Hard at the Stanley Cup finals, of all places.”
Phone Booth: “Die Hard in, well, a phone booth.”
The Taking of Beverly Hills: “Die Hard in the Hamptons, I think.”
Toy Soldiers: “Die Hard at a prestigious boarding school filled with Sean Astin.”
The Negotiator: “Die Hard in another skyscraper, only this time the hostage taker is the good guy.”
Passenger 57: “Die Hard on a plane.”
Con Air: “Die Hard on a PRISON plane.”
Air Force One: “Die Hard on the PRESIDENT’S plane.”
Executive Decision: “Die Hard on a plane. Just a normal plane. Again.”
Snakes on a Plane: “Motherfucking Die Hard on a motherfucking plane. With motherfucking snakes.”
Home Alone: “Die Hard with a kid. And we’ve now stretched the definition too far.”
Add to all that a panoply of lesser efforts, many DTV, such as Crash Dive, Gridlock, Icebreaker, Terminal Rush and Demolition High, and others lost to time, with assorted settings such as submarines, nuclear power plants, high schools, oil rigs, ski resorts, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics (?!), malls, theme parks, and occasionally just more skyscrapers when originality fails.
Though many (most) of these weren’t out yet in 1990 when Die Hard 2 (aka Die Harder, starting this series’ marvelous fascination with awful sequel titles) came about, but this was the market an official Die Hard sequel now had to distinguish itself in. Die Hard 2 went with “Die Hard at the airport.”
The challenge for Die Hard 2 is mostly twofold. First, it must justify creating a direct sequel to a movie which was founded upon a one-time coincidence. Instead of addressing this issue, Die Hard 2 simply ignores it. Mostly. Though it’s another Christmas Eve, and another terrorist takeover of a major facility with Bruce Willis’ John McClane at the center, it just occurs randomly. McClane alone seems aware of this déjà vu unlikelihood, but his occasional voicing of the fact does little to negate the fact that it is a problem.
Die Hard 2’s other challenge is to be something more than the morass of Passenger 57s in its wake. It does this by adopting two standard sequel approaches: escalation and repetition.
That repetition is part and parcel of being a “Die Hard scenario” movie. As such, it is a more effective imitator than most clones, partly because much of the original Die Hard team (i.e. producer Joel Silver, writer Steven E. de Souza – now joined by Die Hard neophyte Doug Richard) returns, and they are most familiar with the format.
The escalation comes partly of setting this story at the airport (Washington D.C.’s Dulles, specifically – though we never get a glimpse of Saarinen’s marvelous architecture). They’ve traded up from a single building to a complex of buildings. There is a greater potential variety of action set pieces, with locations such as the luggage belts, terminals, runways and hangars all doing their duty. Sadly, we lose that essential claustrophobia which so benefited Die Hard, as the new scenario makes it more difficult to seamlessly justify sudden action sequences in each new location.
Aiding in the escalation is director Renny Harlin, whose most successful movie until that point was A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. Harlin is a generic student of the “bigger is better” school, and often makes stylistic choices to that effect. Consider the air traffic control tower. A realistic depiction was deemed uncinematic by Harlin, who turns it instead into a multi-level bleeping high tech sit room, like a submarine meets a starship. This destroys much of the verisimilitude John McTiernan lent to Die Hard, which nicely distinguished it from the cartoonish pack of standard action monstrosities. Harlin also lacks a playful craft towards how he stages the action, which is always appropriately big, but never as distinct or memorable. A shame, because an airport is a great setting.
Actually, never mind, the airport is a major hurdle to get over. Working again from an unconnected novel (Walter Wagerson’s “58 Minutes”), the writers chronicle how a small group of elite commandos commandeers control of air operations – without disrupting normal terminal activity. This is a major shakeup, as they’re not directly hostage-taking like Gruber’s men in Part One. Instead, they’ve simply used dubious means to wrest air traffic operations away from the tower, and from imminent U.S. Senator Fred Thompson (this is some seriously distracting casting, though non-actor Thompson acquits himself better than most of the actual performers – Harlin’s Finnish fault, I’d wager). Thus the runway lights are shut down, and all the airplanes overhead become, without their even knowing it, hostages.
Of course, the hoops of logic making this possible do not hold up to scrutiny. No commercial airliner is ever necessitated to land at its original destination. If they were, hell, I would’ve died from a Die Hard 2 scenario at some state, necessitated by unlandable weather throughout the Chicago area. But planes can redirect, something Die Hard 2 mostly hopes we don’t think of. It uses exposition (awkward, awkward exposition, in contrast to Die Hard’s supreme elegance) to claim a major winter storm makes this impossible, but that rather begs the point. And that storm! The baddies’ plan wouldn’t even work without it, so lucky for them that it happened.
Furthermore, by taking control of the airport in this manner, it puts hero McClane in constant contact with every single authority figure struggling to resolve the situation: Thompson’s Trudeau, FBI-replacement U.S. Army Major Grant (John Amos), airport police chief Lorenzo (Dennis Franz, another monumentally distracting casting choice, here a vulgar precursor to his “NYPD Blue” role). Without McClane in isolation, he isn’t the same McClane. And by his Part One actions, I doubt McClane would so eagerly court shootouts and explosions as he does here, not when he doesn’t have to.
Oh, but he does have to, as his wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) is again under terrorist care, as she’s a passenger among the planes trapped overhead. And, as I’ve said, it’s Christmas Eve. And newsman Dick Thornburg (the dickless William Atherton) is there too, repeating his Die Hard function, greatly compounding the coincidences. Holly’s airplane chronology is questionable, actually, considering the landing ETA, the timing of Thornburg’s reseating (near Holly, whom he’s filed a court order against), etc. All these are signs that Die Hard 2 was fairly rushed, not allowing de Souza et al the leisure to craft a crackerjack mechanism like the first.
But because Holly is in need, McClane fights, using his right as the designated hero to outguess all other emergency personnel at all times. For instance, Lorenzo’s SWAT team tries reaching an alternate transmitter in a construction terminal (“under construction” is movie parlance for “action sequence waiting to happen”). An obvious terrorist ambush easily kills them all. Then McClane easily kills the terrorists. He’s a bit more of a supercop than before. Of course, John McClane is always awesome, even with awkward and forced one-liners and a Bruce Willis who’s rather unimpressed with the script. These are nitpicks in an overall enjoyable rampage of violence, as Die Hard 2 is fun enough as a silly action spectacle.
I’ve yet to say anything about those terrorists, as it’s just assumed a Die Hard movie will feature random terrorists. And why does one take over an airport anyway? Oh, because a deposed drug-smuggling anti-Communist ex-dictator of a fictional banana republic is being transferred via military plane to Washington. You know, that old sawhorse. So there’s no heist, but an act much closer to genuine terrorism (fun!), about rescuing one man in order to do…something. This lacks the joy de vivre of Hans Gruber’s plan to murder 50 innocent people in order to steal $600 million.
William Sadler’s Colonel Stuart, of the U.S. Special Forces, isn’t an iota the antagonist Alan Rickman was. He’s a more generic action movie baddie, a tough and a bully. No part of Stuart’s vague persona clashes against McClane quite as marvelously as Gruber, with his culture and snobbishness. Stuart makes for a more adequately physical villain, versus Gruber’s intellect, but he’s otherwise a complete blank slate. All these ex-military mercenaries are equally bland, chosen just because they’d be an adequate challenge for McClane, not interesting villains in their own right.
Part of this is intentional, as (for misguided reasons) Harlin & Co. strive to not directly compete with Gruber’s greatness. They stack the deck in other ways in regards to Stuart’s villainy, and the result of phenomenally ugly. Now, it is a fact that many Die Hard clones feature occasional cold-blooded executions of innocent hostages, sacrificial lambs to impress the villain’s threat. Die Hard itself kinda had this, but wisely ensures all its victims are jerks, and usually to blame for their own demises. (The death of Ellis, e.g.) Stuart goes the opposite route, and becomes a genuine monster.
Here’s the setup. As “punishment” for the successful completion of another action sequence, Stuart decides to crash one of the planes by recalibrating sea level. In the original script, this was to be an industrial plane with minimal crew – enough to prove Stuart’s capabilities, but with minimal human collateral. Credit Renny Harlin specifically for changing this to a commercial airliner, with 230 passengers. Now, few disposable action movies are so bloodthirsty as to actually off a huge number of innocents halfway through for little reason. Not Die Hard 2, as Stuart succeeds in his sickening mass murder. You know what, FUCK YOU RENNY HARLIN! (It’s no wonder this guy was hired to violence-up Paul Schrader’s underwhelming Exorcist prequel!)
Now, I likes me some shameless gunplay and carnage, which has an aesthetic value which overpowers the moral qualms. (John Woo’s Hard Boiled is a great example of this stylized form.) This, however, is just desperation, a not-fun effort to lend gravity to a fairly popcorn actioner. This makes later goofball action sequences harder to swallow, as McClane does marvelous things like escape from an exploding military plane via ejection seat. (This is the evident parallel to his fire hose jump in Part One.)
(We must ignore such a plane wouldn’t have an ejection seat, but stretched credibility shouldn’t be much of an issue if you’ve made it this far with Die Hard 2.)
Still, Die Hard 2 begins the whole raison d’etre of the Die Hard franchise: escalation to an almost ridiculous degree. There is a reason this particular brand name is associated with pure action above all else. There are some really fun bits in here. John McClane kills the T-1000, in the role which got him hired as the T-1000. John McClane does an icicle eye-sickle, a gag so good Harlin redid it with a stalactite in Cliffhanger. He (McClane) goes on a snowmobile chase – the possibility of a chase sequence is a perfect example of Die Hard 2’s broader scope. And McClane tops things off with a classic hand-to-hand scrap aboard the wing of a moving 747!
Those moments, and others like them, are enough to make Die Hard 2 quite acceptable as a sequel. It is a very good action movie, though never transcendental or archetypal like Die Hard. It is Renny Harlin’s career-best effort, partly owing to the advantage of John McClane, a great character in any scenario. Though Harlin does his share as well, with fun spectacle. His efforts to ape McTiernan are not successful (“Finlandia” is not an adequate substitute for Beethoven’s Ninth), but there’s a lot to like here.
Actually, with all the sequel escalation, it becomes a little difficult at times to keep Die Hard 2 focused. Part One took until nearly its 40th minute for its first action sequence (and yet rebounded to become the genre’s all-time champion); Die Hard 2 foregoes foreplay and bangs a larger gunfight out in the first 10 minutes. The overall amount of action is roughly the same in the two movies, but this forces Die Hard 2 to spread it all out. Without a tense cat-and-mouse scenario to take advantage of, these moments appear more in isolation, less connected to the greater plot workings. The story is the biggest failing; forcing the plot beats of Die Hard into a new location removes their focus. Though resolution comes eventually, it is never apparent how fighting the bad guys will accomplish it. Even during the no-doubt-final confrontation, it’s never clear how killing Stuart will automatically rescue the planes above. It does, but through luck and coincidence – the same coincidence which necessitated this scenario in the first place.
A franchise cannot be built on compounded coincidence, not in the long term. This is a first sequel ploy, and often one doesn’t see further sequels when this happens. John McClane, unlike most action heroes, doesn’t have a job which automatically generates further adventures. I mean, sure, he is a cop (LAPD in this entry, as opposed to his usual NYPD, in another minor miscalculation), but that doesn’t specifically lead to Die Hard scenarios. And what’s Die Hard if not a “Die Hard on a ______?” We shall see.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 Die Hard (1988)
• No. 3 Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)
• No. 4 Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
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