The laziest way to make a sequel is to simply repeat the plot of the first movie. In Home Alone 2, Kevin McCallister’s family once again leaves him on his own during their Christmas vacation. In The Hangover Part II, the non-Doug members of the Wolfpack once again get drugged during a bachelor party and wake up with a person missing. And in Die Hard 2, John McClane once again has to defend a building full of innocent people from a terrorist takeover.
But, while Die Hard 2 is mainly remembered for rehashing the plot of the first movie with the skyscraper swapped out for an airport, the 1990 sequel is still a hugely entertaining action gem that perfectly recaptures the McClane character and packs a couple of surprising twists along the way.
McClane’s characterization is what makes the Die Hard movies so great. The first movie defined him as a regular underdog who gets beaten up and cuts his feet on broken glass, which offered a refreshing subversion of the musclebound supermen played by stars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger that populated ‘80s action cinema. He’s constantly exasperated, making sarcastic comments to himself as he crawls through vents, and he has relatable human flaws like self-loathing and being a negligent husband.
While recent entries like A Good Day to Die Hard have completely missed this aspect, recharacterizing McClane as an invincible bonehead, Die Hard 2 gets the character just right. His cynical attitude is even used for a few meta nods to the sequel’s rehashing of the original premise, like his hilariously self-aware line, “How can the same s*** happen to the same guy twice!?”
At the beginning of Die Hard 2, McClane arrives at Dulles International Airport to pick up his estranged wife Holly. While he’s waiting for her plane to land, he notices some suspicious activity and ends up caught in an intense firefight amidst the luggage on the conveyor belts. Since the airport security and local cops turn out to be useless, McClane takes it upon himself to investigate.
After the first movie pitted McClane against a band of Eastern European terrorists, the second movie pitted him against a highly trained team of battle-hardened soldiers committed to saving a Central American dictator from facing justice. In both cases, McClane’s efforts to pick off the team lead to a bunch of memorable action sequences. In that department, Die Hard 2 has inter-snowmobile shootouts, visceral hand-to-hand combat, and a couple of giant passenger planes going up in smoke.
When McClane is joined by a team of Special Forces operatives in tactical gear, it seems to set up a generic shootout that foils the villains’ evil plan. However, this instead leads to a shocking plot twist that significantly raises the stakes. McClane learns that his gun is firing blanks and notices that the magazines have been color-coded with tape, uncovering the Special Forces’ secret involvement in the bad guys’ plot. Like all the best Die Hard stories, this leaves McClane completely on his own, with nothing but his wits to use against the villains. He’s totally outmatched and barely stands a chance, but that doesn’t stop him from giving it his best shot.
Throughout the first Die Hard movie, Holly was sitting in her office with all the other hostages, waiting for her husband to save the day. The second one puts her in a higher-stakes situation as her plane circles around the unlit runway with dwindling fuel. In the first movie, McClane could pretty much take as long as he needed to thwart Hans Gruber and his goons, but in the second one, Holly’s plane will crash if he doesn’t stop the bad guys fast. This added a suspenseful ticking-clock element to the conflict.
There are some scenes in Die Hard 2 that require the audience to suspend their disbelief. At one point, McClane is trapped in the cockpit of a plane and the bad guys toss all their grenades in there. He jumps in the ejector seat and narrowly escapes the explosion as he soars through the air, which is one shade less ridiculous than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’s fridge-nuking sequence. But this is easily overlooked, as viewers would be hard-pressed to find any action movie that doesn’t require a suspension of disbelief.
While none of the Die Hard sequels have lived up to the greatness of the 1988 original, some of the franchise’s entries are action-packed gems. Die Hard with a Vengeance, which paired up McClane with Samuel L. Jackson’s hotheaded shopkeeper Zeus Carver as a kind of “buddy cop” duo, is undoubtedly the best of the bunch. But Die Hard 2 is a lot better than most fans remember.