Die Hard 2, promotionally known as Die Hard 2: Die Harder,^[1] is a 1990 action film, and the first sequel in the Die Hard series. It was directed by Renny Harlin, and stars Bruce Willis, reprising his role as police Detective John McClane. The film co-stars Bonnie Bedelia (reprising her role as Holly McClane), William Sadler, William Atherton reprising his role as Richard (Dick) Thornburg, Dennis Franz, Fred Dalton Thompson, John Amos, and Reginald VelJohnson who makes a cameo appearance as Sgt. Al Powell.

Set once again on Christmas Eve, McClane is waiting for his wife to land at Washington Dulles International Airport when terrorists take over the air traffic control system. He must stop the terrorists before his wife's plane and several other incoming flights that are circling the airport run out of fuel and crash.

The screenplay was written by Steven E. de Souza and Doug Richardson adapted from the novel 58 Minutes by Walter Wager. The novel has the same premise but differs slightly: a cop must stop terrorists who take an airport hostage while his wife's plane circles overhead. He has 58 minutes to do so before the plane crashes. The film was followed by Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995, and Live Free or Die Hard in 2007.

Plot

On Christmas Eve 1990,^[2] John McClane is in Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C.. As he waits for his wife Holly to arrive from California, airport police tow away his in-laws' car and give him a parking ticket. Hanging out at an airport lounge, McClane sees a group of men, dressed in Army fatigues, and at least one of whom has a gun in his jacket, pass a package between them and two of them disappear into a baggage handling area. He follows, and a fight ensues in which McClane kills one of the men while the other one escapes.

McClane confronts the head of airport police, the Captain Carmine Lorenzo, who dismisses McClane's report as punks stealing luggage. McClane takes fingerprints from the corpse and faxes them to LAPD officer Al Powell to run through databases. Powell reports back that the man, named Cochrane, supposedly died two years ago, and McClane realizes that Cochrane was a mercenary and that something serious is about to happen.

U.S Army official Colonel Stuart launches his plan. He sets up an operational base in a nearby church and takes control of Dulles' communications and air traffic control. He orders Dulles controllers to keep all planes flying overhead and states that he wants to free Ramon Esperanza, a drug lord and leader of the fictional country of Val Verde. Esperanza is flying into Dulles for trial in the United States. He warns that any attempt to restore communications will result in dire consequences.

McClane enters the airport's control tower. He is forced out, but catches wind that the Dulles controllers plan to go to the Annex Skywalk, a new wing of the airport, to restore communications. McClane enlists the help of a janitor named Marvin to help him get to the Skywalk, as McClane anticipates that it is a trap and Stuart has already covered that area.

Meanwhile, Leslie Barnes, the communication director, and a team of SWAT men arrive at the Annex Skywalk. As McClane predicted, a group of Stuart's men attack them. All five SWAT men are gunned down and Barnes himself is about to be shot when McClane bursts through a vent and saves Barnes by killing the remaining men in a shootout. Moments later, the antenna outpost explodes. Stuart radios in and tells them that they were stupid to try to restore an obvious communication channel. He resets the ground level to be 200 feet lower than sea level on the Instrument Landing System and crashes a landing British airliner into the ground, killing everyone on board.

McClane returns to the underground maintenance level, where a two-way radio dropped by one of Stuart?s crew tells him that Esperanza is about to arrive. McClane rushes to the runway and briefly apprehends Esperanza before Stuart and his men show up to retrieve the general themselves. McClane hides in the cockpit of Esperanza?s plane to escape being shot at, but Stuart and his crew toss grenades inside. McClane straps himself into the pilot?s ejector seat and barely escapes the resulting blast by ejecting.

An Army Special Forces unit arrives at the airport. Their leader, Major Grant, once served with Stuart and claims to know his tactics. Barnes surmises that Stuart?s command post is near the airport, and he and McClane find the church where Stuart is hiding. Shortly after, McClane kills one of Stuart?s men and takes possession of his submachine gun. Grant and his squad show up and a gunfight ensues. Stuart, his men and Esperanza escape on snowmobiles. McClane chases after them, but the gun left by one of Stuart's henchmen doesn't appear to work. Stuart's men shoot at him and cause his snowmobile to crash. McClane checks the weapon and finds that the bullets are blanks and realizes that Grant is working for Stuart.

McClane returns to the airport police station and announces that Grant and Stuart are working together. Lorenzo thinks he is lying and attempts to arrest him. McClane fires his submachine gun (still loaded with blanks) at Lorenzo. Lorenzo looks upon the situation in shock, as he finally comes to his senses and summons all available officers back to duty. Lorenzo mobilizes his police to converge on the hangar containing the Boeing 747 that Stuart originally demanded as an escape vehicle.

Meanwhile, circling above the airport, Holly is on the same plane as reporter Richard Thornberg, who had appeared in Die Hard. Thornberg uses a radio and listens in on the tower communications. He then uses the airplane's phone to call his television network, who put him on the air. The broadcast panics the people at Dulles Airport. Holly zaps Thornburg with a fellow passenger's stun gun in mid-broadcast.

McClane hitches a ride in a news helicopter to the villains' plane, which is taxiing for takeoff. He manages to jump onto the aircraft's wing and finds himself in hand-to-hand combat with Major Grant. During the fight, Grant is sucked into one of the plane?s engines and killed. Stuart successfully kicks McClane off the plane. As McClane falls, he opens the fuel hatch on the engine, which starts to dump fuel. He takes out a cigarette lighter, once again says his catchphrase "yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker," and lights the trail of fuel, then he watches the fire blow up the plane and kill everyone on board. The ensuing fire becomes a landing light for other planes, which land safely. McClane and Holly reunite and the movie ends with the two of them being driven off by Marvin.

Cast

Reception

While lacking the huge impact of the original, the movie was a box-office success and received a reasonably positive critical reception. Roger Ebert, while noting the not-insubstantial plot credibility problems with the movie, described it as "terrific entertainment." Joel Siegel of Good Morning America stated that the film is "the best of the blockbusters" of 1990. The film had a budget of $70,000,000 and had a wide release in 2,507 theaters, making $21.7 million its opening weekend. Die Hard 2 has domestically made $117.5 million and $239.5 million worldwide, almost doubling that of the first movie.

MaximOnline.com named the British plane crash as #2 on their list of "Most Horrific Movie Plane Crashes" ^[3].

Production and promotion

Unlike Die Hard, which is relatively faithful to its source material (Roderick Thorp's novel Nothing Lasts Forever), Die Hard 2 has little in common with its source, Walter Wager's novel 58 Minutes. The only element to survive the transition from novel to film is the basic premise: a New York cop faces terrorists holding an airport's in-flight planes hostage in an effort to free political prisoners. No scenes from the film are taken directly from the novel.

Die Hard 2 was the first movie to have a digitally-manipulated matte painting. It was used for the last scene, which took place on a runway.^[4]

The movie was not filmed at Dulles, but at many other locations. Many of the airport terminal shots were from LAX in Los Angeles (one of the payphones has a "Pacific Bell" logo). Other scenes were shot in the terminal baggage claim drive through at Denver's now-closed Stapleton International Airport. This was done mainly because the producers needed an area that had frequent and consistent snowfall, which Denver has. (Ironically, according to the special edition DVD features, Denver suffered from an unseasonably unsnowy winter that year. In at least one scene, the crew had to make do with fake snow, including "snow" made from painted cornflakes.) Some runway scenes were also shot at Alpena County Regional Airport in Alpena, MI. When the film was shown at a cinema in Pretoria, South Africa, a light airplane was hoisted onto the roof of a local multiplex as promotion for the film.

One key plot point is that planes would continue to circle an airport waiting to land until they were unable to divert elsewhere. Under real-life flight regulations, planes must not only carry enough fuel to go to their destination or a pre-designated alternate airfield, but must also accommodate additional fuel to allow for en-route delays. In the densely populated northeastern United States, there are a considerable number of airfields with instrument-landing facilities that would have been available for landing.

Another plot point involves the terrorists crippling all of the airport's communication systems, so the airline pilots can only communicate with the terrorists. In real life, aviation AM band radios are common, and commercial airliners have numerous other communication systems to talk to their corporate headquarters, etc. Also, in the Washington D.C. area, there are several airports including Andrews Air Force Base and Langley Air Force Base within a few minutes' flight time that could communicate with and land commercial airliners in an emergency. (In one of the control tower scenes it is mentioned that "National just shut down", referring to Washington National.)

The scene where the Instrument Landing System glide slope is re-calibrated to be 200 feet lower than the ground level is impossible in real life. An aircraft flies towards the glide slope transmitter which is situated on the ground. The aircraft gets its height information from its own altimeter and radar altimeter.

References

External links

• Detailed Comparison between R-Rated and Workprint

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