Film Summary DCCLXII (Die Hard 2)

 

Can we take a moment to appreciate how quickly the title sequence is. 
DieHard! (Slap) 2! 
No fuss, no muss. No scrolling text or Superman title movies sequence. 
Just right into the action. 
Which really is the whole aspect of this movie. 

Die Hard 2 doesn't waste any freaking time. 
John McClane is waiting for his wife at the airport. He's mother-in-law's car gets towed by a dickish cop that's  just doing his job so whatever.

We get about 10 minutes of John McClane wandering around the airport calling his wife on the plane and then just sitting about smoking a cigarette. 
He notices some suspicious looking guys with pistols wandering around (presumably) getting up to no good. 
He was going to tell the police about it. But the only one he can find with the dick who towed his car so obviously nothing good is happening there. 
So John takes matters into his own hands, tracks down the guys himself and gets immediately involved in a shooting match. 
He takes one of the guys down and another one escapes. 
The police find John who is misplaced his badge somewhere within the luggage containers. 

This is where I thought; ''Oh God we're going to have one of those scenes.'' 
Where the protagonist (who was mainly in the right) is misplaced as a delinquent or a Criminal by the authorities because they don't believe his story of him being a cop. 
So they placed him under arrest until he has to convince them in a long series of bureaucracy that he actually is a cop. Wait for the situation to become so dire that they start believing him on his original story. 
Or he has to sneak away from the authorities, fight the bad guys himself and deal with the police and whoever else hunting him down making everything worse. 
But we completely avoid that scenario here. 
Then the next scene John has his badge back and he's perfectly fine. 
And later on they'll be plenty of moments where he gets pushed out of the action because various other authoritative people don't like him.

We get to have little tiny moments of everything that happened above without making it the crutch of the story. 
After that the movie is surprisingly straightforward and conventional for your Hollywood action flick. 

A group of terrorists hijack an airport shuttle everything down and making commands for a specialty plane be set up for them. So they can take a Bolivian* General who's arriving on a different Plane off of that plane onto the new plane and take off again for some unknown location.** 
It involves computer hacking and radio frequencies manipulation of ground-to-air navigations to screw up Plains. Bad weather and a bunch of other stuff. 
Honestly this movie really doesn't work out if you try to apply any amount of logic to it, but why would you want to do that. 
It's a die-hard flick. We want to see John McClane stop the bad guys and we want to see a ridiculous criminal plot reach its final conclusion. As to see all the weird little twists and turns that come about. This one's not as clever as the first movie obviously.
You can kind of guess how everything's going to go from the on that but it's still really enjoyable. There isn't a dull moment in Die Hard 2 and Bruce Willis is still giving a pretty darn good performance overall.

*I stayed above that it's a Bolivian General. When in actuality it takes place in a fictional country Val Verde. 
However when the plane comes down the flag is very clearly just a Bolivian tricolor that's had this artificial Black Eagle put over it. Honestly it kind of looks like the eagle from the Marvel Comics Shield organization. 
It even has this tacky little Thunderbolt over it. 
They could have just left that off and it would have been fine. 
The Black Eagle was Anonymous with all sorts of different locations throughout the Americas. 
It's an old Roman symbol that got acquired into the Holy Roman Empire and then pushed on by the Habsburg Dynasty when they had control in Spain. 
You don't really need an excuse to alter the symbol.



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