DIE HARD 2 is a Christmas movie, actually
John McClane's second holiday adventure is dumb, but fun
Every year, some film nerd thinking they’re clever pulls out the “Die Hard is a Christmas movie” card. I discussed this last year, mostly as an excuse to write about one of my favorite movies (Christmas or no), but my TL; DR view is that if you want Die Hard to be a Christmas movie, then it’s a Christmas movie. If not, that’s fine, too. There’s never a bad time to watch Die Hard.
But this year, let’s welcome John McClane back for another question: Why do we celebrate Die Hard as a perennial Christmas classic and not Die Hard 2?
It’s not for the sequel’s lack of trying. Die Hard 2’s writers were certainly aware of the importance of the Christmas setting to its predecessor’s success (ironically, both films were actually July releases). Why else would it take the strange approach of not only dropping John McClane into another terrorist situation, but doing it, once again, on Christmas Eve? As McClane himself notes, “how can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?”
Die Hard 2 goes in even harder on the Christmas trappings. It’s set on Christmas Eve, not in a quiet office building but at a bustling airport. It takes place not in sunny Los Angeles but in Washington, DC, during a snowstorm. Its bad guys operate out of a local church. There’s a snowmobile chase and, at one point, McClane offs a henchman with an icicle. You can almost hear director Renny Harlin cackling “I’ll show you a Christmas movie.” These trappings could, arguably, make Die Hard 2 a more appropriate Christmas movie than its predecessor.
And yet, every year, it’s Die Hard that the revival houses pull out. It’s quips from the first movie that adorn ugly Christmas sweaters and memes. My Advent calendar has Hans Gruber falling from the Nakatomi Plaza, but as far as I know, there’s not one that features William Sadler plummeting from a jet (confession: would buy).
So why is Die Hard the Christmas classic while the arguably more Christmas-y Die Hard 2 goes unmentioned?
I mean…if you’ve seen Die Hard 2, you already know the answer.
‘Die Hard’ for dummies
I’ll state at the outset that this isn’t going to be a straight-out Die Hard 2 hate piece. I don’t think it’s an awful movie, and we’ll get to some of its redeeming elements later. It can’t touch the precision and craft of the first film, and I think Die Hard With a Vengeance (which maybe I’ll argue sometime is a Christmas in July movie – released in May) is actually the only sequel in the franchise to get it mostly right. There’s no escaping that Die Hard 2 (which, in the film’s one show of restraint, is actually not subtitled Die Harder, no matter what marketing tried to make you think) is a watered-down, much stupider carbon copy of the first film.
The template is almost exactly the same, just with specifics changed. McClane is alone, waiting for a (much happier) reunion with his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia, in her final appearance in this franchise), who’s flying in from L.A. He gets wind of a terrorist attack that’s underway and, upon realizing that he’s the only one who can stop it, navigates the labyrinthine airport to stop the bad guys and save his wife. There are shootouts, fist fights, explosions, crawls through tunnels, angry local police, a few allies for McClane, and William Atherton returning as a dickish reporter. The film even ends with John and Holly riding off into the night as the camera pulls back and “Let it Snow” plays over the credits.
But the way the film colors inside this template feels off. Die Hard 2 understands the surface issues that made Die Hard a genre-defining classic, but doesn’t have the finesse to make the sequel feel like anything more than a pale imitation.
The film is in too much of a hurry from the start. Where Die Hard has a slow build, introducing its characters, building tension between John and Holly, and touring the building in which we’ll spend the next two hours, Die Hard 2 rushes into its story. It starts in motion, with McClane’s car being towed by a brusque airport cop. Only a few minutes after that, he sees some suspicious men behaving, well, suspiciously, and decides to investigate matters for himself. The first fight occurs 15 minutes into the movie; the first bad guy is dispatched before the 20-minute mark. By contrast, the terrorists don’t even enter Nakotomi untill about 30 minutes into the first movie. That patience is key to its success; by the time the movie starts, we understand the conflict between John and Holly and feel properly situated inside Nakatomi. In Die Hard 2, we hop from airport bar to luggage-handling room to terminals without much sense that McClane is doing much more than following his instincts.
And that, in and of itself, is a step back from what we know and love about John McClane. The Bruce Willis hero was so beloved in the first film because he was a regular guy who didn’t want to get involved. McClane spends much of the first film running and hiding, engaging only when he’s being stalked. It’s only when he realizes the cops and FBI lack the expertise to properly handle the situation that he takes on the role of hero. He spends much of the film, beaten, bloodied, cut up and scared, and Willis’ big moment comes when McClane tearfully asks his comrade on the ground (Reginald VelJohnson, wasted in one scene here) to deliver an apology to his wife because he fears he won’t make it out alive.
Here, McClane is too quick to play the hero. As soon as he sees some men at the airport trading glances, he assumes the worst. He does try and notify airport police, but holds back when he sees it’s the same cop who (rightfully?) towed his car in the opening scene. He flashes a badge to gain access to the luggage room and whips out his gun at a moment’s notice. As soon as that first perp is dead, McClane doesn’t hand the situation over to the authorities — and there’s a strong federal law enforcement presence because a notorious cartel leader is being flown in that evening — but rather takes on the role of an unpaid, unwanted anti-terrorism consultant, sticking around the officials long enough to hear exposition and then taking off on his own to John Wayne this shit up.
And I get it. This is a Die Hard movie. The whole idea is that audiences want to see John McClane playing the lone hero, taking down bad guys on his own. Much of the stupidity of the official law enforcement is just blatant “because then the movie wouldn’t happen” plot gymnastics (although Dennis Franz is a lot of fun as the head of airport security, who might relish his F-bombs more than Willis), but it all feels a bit lazy. The script tries to give McClane a sense of urgency by keeping Holly on one of the planes circling Dulles, but it’s not until the film’s final 10 minutes that her plane is in any real danger.
The film takes the Die Hard format and then lays a snowier, stupider story on top of it. It makes sure to hit all the blatant beats and then just make them louder or bloodier. Die Hard saw McClane trapped, barefoot, in a room filled with broken glass; Die Hard 2 strands him in an airplane cockpit pelted with grenades. Die Hard featured a giant explosion that ripped through two stories of a high-rise; in Die Hard 2, the bad guys literally crash a plane. McClane’s partnership with Al Powell in the first film was its emotional heart; here, McClane has two allies — a sympathetic air traffic control technician and a janitor living (?) in the bowels of the airport — who are basically exposition machines. And then the film jumps to the skies where Atherton’s reporter spars once again with Holly, a subplot that never once works, even when she blasts him with a taser in the airplane bathroom.
And where McClane was a sympathetic guy in the wrong place at the wrong time in the first one (a phrase they try to trot out here), Willis takes the character into jerkass territory in this sequel. It’s not as bad as Ugly American McClane from A Good Day to Die Hard (nothing in this film is as dreadful as a second of that movie), but McClane is a bit ot a prick here. He cracks jokes about a dead villain’s rigor mortis, seems all too eager to pick fights with Franz’s air security officer (although the line “what sets off the metal detectors first…the lead in your ass or the shit in your brains” is pretty great) and constantly second-guesses every person in authority, even when their intentions are good. Much of our affection from McClane in the first movie came from his vulnerability; he’s constantly ignored or dismissed by the cops or sticking his foot in his mouth. Here, he’s just often a jerk; and just because he’s right doesn’t make him less of one (Die Hard With a Vengeance unpacks his pricklier side to much better effect).
It all adds up to a movie that seems to know the lyrics of the first Die Hard, not the music. It feels off. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily worth switching the channel.
Yippee Kai Yay…again
Like most sequels to classics, Die Hard 2 can never recapture the spark of its predecessor, but if you’re willing to accept that, it still is a bit of fun. If Die Hard is the movie you watch on Christmas Eve, when the excitement’s at a fever pitch, you just opened a glass of wine and can give it your rapt attention, Die Hard 2 is what you have playing in the background after the presents have been opened, you’re sitting in a food coma and about six beers deep. It works on a lazy, empty level, and, on that level, it can be quite satisfying.
As jerky as McClane can be, I appreciate that Willis still plays him as a smartass with a sense of charm and humor, rather than the stoic and grumpy codger he’d become by Live Free or Die Hard. He’s still affable enough that a clerk at the counter flirts with him (“just the fax, ma’am”) and he’s still packed with a bevvy of one-liners that usually work (at one point, Al asks him “You pissing in someone’s pool” and Willis’s response “yeah, and I’m fresh out of chlorine” is funny while also making zero sense). Willis was now firmly ensconced in his movie star phase (Die Hard had been followed by Look Who’s Talking, and this film still coasts on that smartass charm), but he understands that his appeal is as a drinking buddy, not The Terminator. The longer he was in this role, the less he’d understand how important McClane’s humor was to the whole endeavor, but in this and the third movie, he’s still firmly in control of the character.
No one was ever going to top Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber, and the film attempt to at least match him by throwing three villains in this story, with William Sadler’s Col. Stewart, Franco Nero’s cartel commander, and John Amos as a duplicitous Army general. None of them work quite as well, mostly because of the amount of fun Rickman had as a thief masquerading as a terrorist, but they’re all fine. I particularly like Amos, who gets one over on McClane by presenting himself as the kind of brash, take-charge leader he’d cotton to (“I’m your kind of asshole”), and there’s a flinty edge that Sadler brings that I enjoyed (look at his eyes; you truly do believe this man would crash an entire plane). They’re also more directly physical threats than Rickman ever was, which leads to the film’s thrilling fight on the wing of a jet aircraft (followed, of course, by McClane’s most famous bon mot).
Renny Harlin is no John McTiernan, but there was an era in which he was the go-to guy if you couldn’t get him. He’s known for big, loud and often stupid actioners, and he’s made a few bona fida classics, like Cliffhanger and The Long Kiss Goodnight. He doesn’t have McTiernan’s innate sense of tension and geography, but he compensates with volume and violence. Die Hard 2’ action sequences never top the white-knuckle tension of the first movie’s leap from the 30th floor of Nakatomi, but they’re still fun. There’s a great shootout in an under-construction airport terminal, a brutal brawl outside the church that ends with the aforementioned icicle death, and a fast-paced snowmobile chase in the third act. And while the plane crash is in pretty bad taste (the film makes sure we know that old people and kids are on there), it is one of the franchise’s more spectacular explosions. And the movie moves briskly; there’s always a fistfight or shootout just about five minutes away, or else a scene of Bruce Willis smarting off to Dennis Franz or Sadler.
It’s all fun, but again, it’s not Die Hard. And that’s why the original is still the one that gets mentioned on “Friends” or played while we’re wrapping Christmas gifts. Die Hard 2 is a fun piffle; Die Hard’s a classic. And while I think there’s an argument to be made that the sequel might be the more aesthetically appropriate Christmas pick — and, let’s be honest, the one that probably works better played in the background with sound off during a party — I don’t know that there’s really an argument for picking Dulles Airport when the Nakatomi Tower is right there.