Merry Christmas 2: Merrier Christmas

 

Die Hard 2: Die Harder

1990

D: Renny Harlin

**********

Pros: Somewhat competent execution, Some clever moments, Good villain

Cons: Basically a clone of the first with inferior directing, The Glock 7

     I never thought of Die Hard 2 as a particularly good movie.  In fact, I always placed it in the dust bin of underwhelming and forgettable sequels.  It wasn’t until recently that I found out that other people seem to think highly of it, citing it as proof that the franchise could survive as a series.  It even scores higher on Rotten Tomatoes than the vastly superior Die Hard with a Vengeance, which I do believe to be a worthy follow up to the first.  In fact, I think this is my least favorite Die Hard movie because at least A Good Day to Die Hard had a really good chase scene to show for it. 
     The main problem with Die Hard 2 is that it's forgettable.  One could watch it multiple times without remembering what happened, except for a memorable dog-kicking scene, some nonsense about ceramic Glocks and a brief image of Robert Patrick.  This is because the movie sends out radiation the temporarily shuts down the brain's capacity for short-term memory.  These waves are strong enough to penetrate tin foil hats (I tried), and are used in many undisclosed intelligence operations.  Only repeated viewings and a strong will can defeat this effect.   

     Most of the gang from the first movie is back: John, his wife, the cop from Family Matters, that obnoxious reporter.  It even takes place during Christmas.  Die Hard 2 has most of what made the first movie a classic, and that’s really the main problem.  Great sequels are generally great because they continue the story while staying faithful, yet fresh.  Like many underwhelming sequels, it tries to repeat the formula of the first movie, only on a bigger scale.  Die Hard revolved around terrorists taking over a tower, and now an entire airport is held hostage.  However, the direction is clearly not as good as it was in the first movie; it just doesn’t have the surprise or the atmosphere.  The visuals and stunts were perfect in Die Hard, but the iconic jump from the Nakatomi Tower from the first movie has a transparently cheesy blue screen effect to compete with.     

Many of the memorable features of the last movie’s plot are absent despite the attempted déjà vu.  Holly’s role in Die Hard was very compelling, as she had to deal with the terrorists face-to-face while concealing her relationship to John.  Now she’s reduced to sitting the adventure out on one of the planes and eventually tasing the obnoxious reporter when he gets out of line.  Also, John McClane does not have a memorable hurdle to compete with his bare feet.  One annoying story arc maintained from the first movie is the presence of an Incompetent Local Authority (Dennis Franz, who lacks Paul Gleeson’s odd mystique in such a role).  I mentioned that Roger Ebert gave Die Hard a negative review as a result of Paul Gleeson’s character, but seeing as how Die Hard 2 plays that game too, I don’t understand why he thought it was an improvement.  But I can't stay mad at him because at least he was one of the few critics who gave Equilibrium a good review.      

      To the movie’s credit, it does have a solid villain, even if he lacks Hans Gruber’s charisma.  With his chiseled features and cold demeanor, William Sadler’s Colonel Stuart definitely looks the part of the villain.  He certainly was the most evil villain in the series.  After his gang of terrorists (which includes a rare pre-Terminator 2 sighting of Robert Patrick) takes over the flight control systems of Dulles Airport, he purposefully crashes a plane with 230 people on board (including O’Brien from Deep Space 9).  Though I don’t particularly like this movie, I have to give it this scene.  It’s one of the most effectively vile acts done by a movie antagonist.  Many other aspects of the terrorists’ plan are clever as well. Well, color-coding gun magazines for blanks and live rounds would be if you could do that.

      Die Hard 2 has one of the most infamous firearm inaccuracies in movie history.  This is a scene that makes every gun enthusiast in the world cringe.  I speak of course of the ceramic Glock scene.  After John McClane faces off against a terrorist, he utters this gem to the incompetent head of airport security:  

“That punk pulled a Glock 7 on me, you know what that is?  It’s a porcelain gun made in Germany.  It doesn’t show up on your airport X-Ray machines here and it costs more than you make in a month.”

1. There is no Glock 7.  Glock firearms started with the Glock 17, and the numbers have gone up since.  Rumor has it it’s called the Glock 17 because it was Glock’s 17^th patent, but I don’t think that’s substantiated.

2. Porcelain guns do not exist.  Ceramics cannot handle the pressure that a steel barrel can.  Even if it could, you’d still need metal to make springs and ammo.  Also, despite what it may look like in photos, the slide (er, top half) of a Glock is entirely made out of steel.  Anyone can tell just by touching it, which the people working on the movie obviously must have done.

3. Glocks do not come from Germany.  They are Austrian.  But then again, it’s not like the Glocks that the crew had to handle clearly had the word Austria written on them.  What makes this so frustrating is that this goof could have been fixed with one change of a word at the last second.

4. Even if this somehow magically worked, how would these mythical toiletguns be invisible to X-Rays?!!!!  Don’t you mean metal detectors?!!!!

5. Also, if my research is to be trusted, the head of security at an airport would make more than $4,000 a month at the time this movie was made, eight times the cost of a real-life Glock.   This would be a prohibitive cost for any tactical pistol.

I know Dennis Franz’ character was supposed to be the Incompetent Local Authority, but I can’t blame him for brushing McClane off after having to hear that fairy tale.  Now I don’t want to come off as too much of a stickler for technical accuracy in movies.  I love stylized, unrealistic gunfights.  I’m okay when a movie tweaks reality in order to be more fun or symbolic.  I’m a firm believer in Rule of Cool.  However, this is not cool, nor is it clever.  Cool would have been thinking of a genuinely imaginative and memorable way for the terrorists to sneak handguns into an airport.  This was just a lazy cop-out.  What’s worse, it was a lazy cop-out that pandered to a popular anti-gun myth at the time: that polymer framed pistols could defeat metal detectors.  This just dates the movie in a way that’s completely pathetic, since I haven’t heard even the most zealous gun control advocates have trying to play this card for years.  It’s like one of those old-timey superstitions like how people believed that owls were harbingers of evil.  Of course, now we know better. 

They are harbingers of David Bowie.

Since it’s an overall competent, but forgettable, action sequel, I would have given this movie a 5 or 6 out of 10 star rating if not for the Glock 7 nonsense.  It seriously cost the movie at least one star.  I know that in my review of Die Hard I said that you have to forgive flaws like this in a gem, but Die Hard 2 is not a gem.  Whereas Die Hard is diamond, Die Hard 2 is a lump of carbon.  It’s made of the same stuff and it’s a lot bigger than a diamond, but it’s simply not as good.