Customer Reviews
a smart and sophisticated thriller - By: Stampy, 24 Aug 2008 
In the sequel to Die Hard, John McClane is in trouble again when a group of criminals take control of an airport to bring an evil General safely & discreetly into the country.
After the success of the first, a sequel was inevitable & the action, the claustrophobia & most importantly, John McClane were alll still there.
Bruce Willis (The Sixth Sense) has made John McClane into the ultimate male action hero, with a slick & sarcastic attitude towards life, & most importantly bad guys, & improvising a lot of his own work has made McClane an icon in the genre.
The support cast are also on top form, & provide plenty of tension to justify the scenarios, not to mention the extra humour they bring to the plot.
Though no sequel will ever top the first Die Hard, which will be one of the best action thrillers ever made, Die Hard 2 has a sensible & action orientated plot to keep it's feet on the ground & not go overboard, & is the ultimate sequel any fan could have wanted.
The plot is fast & intelligent, justifying the genre exceptionallly well. Perhaps there was one too many action sequences, which does down step the realism, but nonetheless they are alll pin point accurate on the
entertainment factor.
As with the first, the plot is driven by an ultimate deadly scenario, & using claustrophobia do we get a sense of the situation. The first was set around Nakatomi Towers, & this sequel is focused around an airport.
Keeping within limits adds to the intense & dramatic scenario.
The direction is well established to gain the ultimate action feel, & as McClane utters the ultimate catchphrase, do we see the best part of the entire film.
The ending to Die Hard 2 is far less cheesy than the ending to its predecessor which was a relief, & you will be left smiling having seen one of the best action sequels ever made.
8.5/10
AS GOOD AS THE 1ST ONE - By: M. A. MENENDEZ, 26 Apr 2008 
FOR ME THIS FILM IS AS GOOD AS THE FIRST ONE. I DON'T CARE IF IT'S A CASH IN. IT'S STILL BRILLIANT ACTION
The weakest of the series, but still great fun - By: Kaylee, 29 Mar 2008 These films never let you down, aways supplying the audence with one more explosion. The classic movie 'Die Hard' has a classic sequel. I like it, but if I compare this one with the first, third & fourth, I find myself thinking it's the weakest of the series. With another unlucky Christmas for John McClane comes another setting, this time an airport. With some more evil baddies & another white vest Mr McClane goes on a one man mission to save the world, but with a few minor obsticles in his way. As he ducks & dives he can still find the time to make these films stand out from the crowd by making them funny. It's appealing to alll those who like action adventure movies & want to see John McClane save the day again. I think that the only thing this film lacks is the co-star that Bruce Willis can bounce his humour off, for example in the first film he has Alan Rickman, the third Samuel L Jackson & in the fourth Justin Long. I still think that it is a fabulous action movie & that Bruce Willis' performance makes this movie stand out from others in the genre. Well worth watching, I think that everyone will like his film.
Ho hum sequel - By: Syleroth, 22 Sep 2007 
Die Hard is probably the best action film ever made.
Die Hard 2 "Die harder" is a run of the mill sequel cash in. The surviving cast of the first film are brought back for no purpose other than that they were in the first film. Present are Bonnie Bedelia as Holly McClane, Reginald Veljohnson as the nice over weight cop & William Atherton as the slimy reporter, alll to no affect at alll. They are present only because this is a sequel, & sit through the movie with almost nothing to do.
The humor & the smalll character touches which made the original film so enjoyable are completely absent.
There are numerous action sequences, alll of which are slow, predictable & dull by the comparison to the first film.
This is simply a by the numbers, run of the mill action film with none of the flair which made the original Die Hard so enjoyable.
If you thought that Die Hard was one of the best action films then avoid this poor sequel at alll costs.
ANOTHER ESSENTIAL ACTION FILM TO ADD TO YOUR DVD COLLECTION - By: stuart, 07 Aug 2007 Series note: It is not necessary to watch Die Hard (1988) before this film. However, that is the better film & it will give you a better introduction to the continuing characters, so it is still recommendable to watch the first film before this one.
Set an unspecified number of years after Die Hard (I'll calll it "Die Hard 1"), Die Hard 2 has John McClane (Bruce Willis) just outside of Washington, D.C. on Christmas Eve, where he is waiting for his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), to arrive at Dulles International Airport from Los Angeles so they can visit her mother for the holidays. Holly callls John from the plane to tell him that they're a half-hour behind schedule. While he's waiting in the crowded airport, he first sees a man he recognizes but can't place (it turns out to be one of the villains), then sees a couple other suspicious men heading into the restricted baggage area. He follows them in, has a confrontation, & eventuallly learns that one is a special ops military guy whose records say he's been dead for two years. That cues him in to the fact that something big is going to go down (as if he couldn't tell based on the fact that he's in another Die Hard film). Since a bigwig cocaine dealer from Latin America is on his way to Washington for extradition, that's a pretty big clue regarding what is about to go down. Shortly after chaos ensues, as "terrorists" take control of Dulles with dozens of planes in the air & no place to land--they're not able to talk to the tower, use their instruments properly or conduct a visual landing. How will they resolve the situation?
I'm not one to subtract points for a lack of realism, or "real world believability" in films. Because of that, Die Hard 2 poses a very interesting case study for me. Real world believability is very difficult to not think about when watching this film. Why wouldn't the planes just reroute to other nearby airports? There are a bunch less than an hour's flight away, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, the three New York City-area airports, & so on. Why wouldn't they be able to calll another close airport, or the Pentagon, or somewhere else nearby to have them contact the planes? They're near Washington, D.C., after alll (don't forget that Dulles is 26 miles away from D.C., in Virginia, making it unlikely that planes out of fuel would begin "dropping on the White House lawn"). It seems like maybe this film should have been set somewhere like Salt Lake City, Utah instead. Why wouldn't they be able to show the runways through some other means, like a line of emergency or police vehicles with their sirens on? If the "terrorists" started shooting at the vehicles, or trying to blow them up, at least they'd be given an indication where the fire is coming from/given their location. Just how likely would it be that there's a big storm in the area on the day when General Ramon Esperanza (Franco Nero) is being extradited? How likely is it that he'd be extradited on Christmas Eve? Why the hell is John standing out on the runway in the snow waving a couple of flaming poles--just what does he think that will do? And we can go on & on.
In the above, it becomes clear that maybe the problem isn't real-world believability but internal logic, although to an extent, some of the internal logic is extremely difficult to separate from facts we know about the real world that aren't mentioned in the film. But Die Hard 1 was an extremely taut film that had impeccable internal logic. The film itself gave reasons for the dilemmas that arose, & they were justifications that made the dilemmas inevitable. It doesn't matter that some of the "facts" or situations in Die Hard 1 were contrary to our beliefs about the real world. The film defined things to be the fictional way it defined them, & the logic was consistent & valid (in the formal sense) from within the film.
However, it becomes clear, not too far into Die Hard 2, that perhaps looking at it for things like real-world believability & logical consistency/validity is misconceiving it. My belief is that this film is meant to be a spoof of action films as much as it is meant to be a serious action film. _That's_ why John is standing out on the runway waving around flaming poles like a maniac. That's why baddies can easily shoot & kill 20 or so highly trained, highly armed S.W.A.T. team members wearing bulletproof vests but can't hit John, who is wearing street clothes & rolling around on the floor with a pistol. That's why the planes are stuck over D.C. with no options & the film doesn't even try to justify this. That's why there are scenes of John "riding explosions" like a cowboy (yippee-ki-yay mf'er indeed). That's why there are a number of "wink-wink" cracks about being in another Die Hard film. That's why there are a few scenes that look oddly similar to Airplane! (1980). That's why the film so frequently, joyously embraces silliness.
Director Renny Harlin & his bulletproof vested army of scriptwriters & producers apparently set out to make a cartoonish satire of action films, while still making a serious action film. In 1990, action films were just at the tail end of their domination of the U.S. box office, so it was a ripe time to spoof them. Harlin & company succeed fairly well. It might have been even more artisticallly successful if they had more firmly committed to one angle (cartoonish satire) or the other (serious actioner), but the performances are pretty good, the fistfights, gunfights, explosions & chases are very good, & the film is frequently funny if you have a taste for the absurd.
