Not nearly as good as its predecessor.The first Die Hard is an action movie classic. It created the sort of everyman hero, where you didn't have to be some musclebound freak to be the good guy. Bruce Willis became a bona fide movie star with the first one, and that was good. But he also decided to very rarely take chances as an actor, and that was bad.
Anyway. Die Hard 2 (subtitled - badly, I might add - Die Harder) opens with John McLane (Willis) in Washington DC, awaiting the arrival of his wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia). It's Christmas. It's a busy airport. And there are terrorists. This time they want to free a military leader who's going to be landing. So they hijack the computers in the control tower and divert the plane. If anyone tries to stop them, they'll cause the commercial planes, circling above the airport and already low on fuel, to crash. Only one man can stop them.
John McLane.
It's more violent than the first, but it's not necessarily better. William Sadler, as the bad guy, isn't nearly as evilllle as Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber was, and the movie seems muddy while the first one was much more crisp in it's look and feel. I attribute that more to the directors (John McTiernan in the first, Renny Harlin in this movie). And McLane loses some of his everyman feel here, and that takes away from the character. He's not the normal average joe who's just in the wrong place in the wrong time. Here, he's supercop. Willis is all right, he's got the action thing down. I just wish we'd see him flex his acting muscle a little more frequently.It's OK, but the first and third are better movies.
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