Another Christmas, another set of terrorists for beleaguered celebrity cop John McClane. All our hero wants is to collect his wife from the airport, talk his way out of a parking ticket and crash in a warm hotel bed. Instead, instincts get the best of him. Giving chase to suspicious characters, he exchanges gunfire in the baggage warehouse, butts heads with cocky local authorities and uncovers a plot to spring a political prisoner by shutting down air traffic control.

The airport represents an effort to expand McClane’s character beyond the claustrophobic confines of a high-rise office building, but the larger setting is probably a mistake. Where Nakatomi Plaza provided ready-made tension, with gunmen conceivably around every corner, the extended Dulles Airport is a sprawling, confusing set that rarely feels connected. The lead doesn’t really benefit from his new environs, either. While he remains personable, resourceful and daring, traits which made him appealing in the first film, his new status as a bulletproof action hero is a backwards step. John’s sense of self-preservation, careful caution in a dangerous situation, once made him sympathetic and real. Somewhere between the escalator shootout against overwhelming odds and his leap from a helicopter to the wing of a taxiing jumbo jet, that went out the window. He’s gone full Stallone / Schwarzenegger in the sequel, and mastered the art of clairvoyance to boot. Bruce Willis remains magnetic in the role, but this isn’t the same desperate, punchy character that powered the original. He’s lost a lot of that edge.

As generic action movies go, one could choose worse. Though this example is rife with obvious plot holes, it does go hard and the action scenes pluck all the right notes. The big explosions are appropriately bright and well-spaced; men are nearly run over on the tarmac, and one falls into a jet engine; the hero fires guns from all sorts of vehicles and vantage points. The terrorists’ big plot is far too twisty, though, and I think the narrative would’ve been better off without the cut-aways to McClane’s wife aboard a delayed, circling passenger plane.

>*"Just once i'd like a regular, normal Christmas... eggnog, a fucking Christmas tree, a little turkey... but, no, I got to crawl around in this motherfucking tin can."*

Nothing could ever beat the original but ***Die Harder*** is a great follow up and it's better than your average action movie for sure. It's a little less of a Christmas movie but there's a ton of snow. The stakes are higher this time, there's a lot more lives on the line including McClane's wife, which make McClane more desperate in a way and that's interesting.

They once again created some interesting new characters and storylines, I even liked Holly's storyline on the plane. John Amos as Major Grant was a standout as well and even Dennis Franz as Capt. Lorenzo. The villains aren't nearly as memorable as Alan Rickman and his gang but they're compelling nonetheless.

The action sequences are just as good as the first. The original had a lot of quiet moments in between the action sequences, well not this one, i'd say there's more action overall. More guns, more explosions, satisfying bloody kills, some of the best Ski-Doo chase sequences i've seen and lots of funny one-liners just like the first. Despite the long runtime it breezed by. Epic finale!

Great fun re-watching this after checking out the original for the first time. One of the very best filmic franchises out there, to be sure.

I was 10 in 1990, I loved Die Hard, and I hated Die Hard 2.

Now I'm 40 and I am rewatching this and.... compared to movies today it is pretty good. If this was made in 2020 it would be a 10 out of 10 star smash blockbusting hit that all of America raves about except the "everything is political all the time crowd."

But it didn't, it came out in 1990 and because of that it was a subpar sort of BS action movie that in no way lived up to the first one.

The thing is... I'm writing the review in 2020. Today it's a good movie if you compare it to most everything in the theaters today and especially to the new Die Hard movies.

If anyone were ever to need to write a training manual for terrorists that demonstrated how to maximise the chaos and destruction at a facility; then they could do a great deal worse than engage the services of Bruce Willis. In this cracking action adventure film, he is "Lt. John McClane" who finds himself amidst a hijacking - but this time it's not the plane that's being hijacked, it's the whole airport - and all so a drug-dealing general can escape justice with the help of some rogue highly trained military types. Willis has bags of charisma, and he needs it as he has to persuade sceptical authorities and other cops of the critical risk - and all before an incoming flight carrying his wife (with quite a fun little sub-plot of it's own) runs out of fuel. The dialogue is sometimes quite pithy, and Tom Bower is fine as "Marvin" (the janitor who gets roped in too). It does lack menace, maybe Willis' style of characterisation is just a bit too laid back; the smile and the glint - but it's still an end to end action thriller with plenty of pyrotechnics and near misses to fill a couple of hours in a world of mindless cinema. It's not quite as good at the first one, but there's not that much to it.