Time to get more seasonal--well, in my own way. A couple of years ago, we had a look at a picture that's not only one of the greatest action movies of all time, but, most objectively and undeniably, one of the greatest Christmas movies. Incredibly memorable, tightly made--so of course, you gotta follow up a sequel that tries to do more or less the same thing, just not quite as well! It's another Mildly Contested Sequel with Die Hard 2--does it hold up in any way, and more importantly, does it even come close to being a Yuletide classic as its predecessor?
Well, the studio certainly didn't hold back in trying to capture the same gist as the original--perhaps a little too much. They bought back Steven Souza for the screenplay--though, crucially, not director John McTierman--and once again had Bruce Willis as beleaguered cop John McClane starting out at an airport on Christmas Eve. Crucially here, the airport itself becomes his battleground against some spontaneous terrorists being more of a nuisance than department store crowds, so they just cut out the middleman of him getting stuck in a skyscraper this time.
Who are the bad guys this time? Before we had suave Hans Gruber and his European terrorists shaking down Nakatomi Plaza for bearer bonds--here, we have a rogue US army unit lead by a Colonel Stuart (William Sadler), with an even more convoluted plan to recover a South American dictator (Franco Nero) being transported in. It's here that we get the first major and noticeable step down from the first film--Stuart and his cronies simply aren't anywhere near as memorable or delightfully diabolical as Alan Rickman and his henchmen. You got everything you you needed about Hans very quickly into his introduction--he's suave, sophisticated, and takes no shit, and it all stuck. Here, I get that Stuart is an asshole...and he's ruthless...and that's about it.
Likewise, his plan feels a little excessive to put it lightly. Before, when things were limited to a single building, you had a much more defined sense of geography, some good reasons why the authorities couldn't just intervene en masse, and so on. Here, they're taking control of an entire airport, trapping planes in the sky (because apparently there's no other landing spots around Washington friggin' DC), even bringing one down...for what they're really trying to achieve, it does make you wonder why they wouldn't just find a quieter way that wouldn't also see them get hunted to the ends of the earth.
Even so...on an individual basis, that's not to say some of the elements here aren't half bad, at least from an explosion-filled popcorn movie which drops as many F-bombs as it does bullet casings. Bruce still manages to play McClane enjoyable as a poor hapless schmuck who's also more capable than entire SWAT teams, there's some fun action on runways and on snow-covered hills, and the supporting cast does their best. The poor air traffic controllers, who do get some moments to shine, feel probably the most heroic in the film, as they're directly attempting to get thousands of people to safety.
The Christmas aesthetic is actually probably stronger here--being set on the East Coast this time, you get snow piled up, the bad guys have their base inside a church ironically, and there's the urgency of trying to get your family here on time (in a way again somewhat recycled from the first, down to the same asshole reporter, but oh well). As McClane himself points out, the odds of the same shit happening to the same person at the same time of year are a bit thin, but hey, it's what the studio wanted.
In the end, we get all the general ingredients for an early 90s action fest, with fistfights on plane wings, our hero running around like a demented lemming, and a few attempts to inject some plot twists to mix things up. It's not as tight or memorable as the first, but it gets the job done, if not much more than that. In fact, it'd be better if it wasn't trying to imitate the first that much--you have the same attempt for a triumphant holiday-themed ending, but it's undercut when you remember the airliner downed by the bad guys McClane failed to save, with hundreds of families in store for a miserable Christmas.
So, as far as a mildly contested sequel goes, how does Die Hard 2 rack for me? It's definitely inferior to the first, a little redundant at times, but just as its own thing, it's alright. The first redefined the genre, and this ironically joined the countless other films trying to imitate it over the years to come. Not terrible, but you can take it or leave it.
McTierman came back for Die Hard 3 in '95, generally considered by most to be the best of the sequels. Jeremy Irons as Gruber's brother made for a far more enjoyable baddie, Samuel L. Jackson was all kinds of fun as McClane's impromptu companion running across New York, and it had a sense of urgency permeating throughout that worked better and made more sense than this one. It had flaws--a studio-mandated change to the last act made it feel more stretched out than it needed to, ending on a note of mild exhaustion than triumph, though this is fixed if you watch the director's cut. Still...they dispensed with the Christmas theme this time, so take that for what it's worth.
When we next return to Mildly Contested Sequels, we'll be looking at another followup to an 80s 'alternate' Noel flick, that wisely decided to not only not bother replicating the first, but just go completely off the rails!
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