Beware plot holes

Rating: 6/10 (15 January 2004)

This is a decent followup to the first "Die Hard" movie. It lacks a villain with personality like Alan Rickman, but the action is pretty good and for the fans it follows the same formula as the original.
What bothered me while watching a tape of it recently were the gigantic plot holes in the story, some of them big enough to fly a 747 through.
For instance, the whole mission to rescue General Esperanza was awful time consuming. They were on the ground nearly an hour before finally making their escape. Seems to me if you were gonna get away with this, you'd have to have him off the plane and out of the airport within minutes, not an hour.
And how could they have foreseen a snow storm fouling up visibility? The bad guys must have planned this months in advance and couldn't possibly have know what the weather would be like. If it had been clear and mild that evening, there wouldn't have been enough confusion to allow the escape to drag out so long.
Also, if the control tower was knocked out, would the planes continue to circle Dulles for hours? If you were the pilot, would you just go round and round til you ran out of fuel? Washington is close enough to Philadelphia and Baltimore, where the airports could have handled the planes forced to divert from Dulles.
Finally, even if terrorists took over the airport communications system, the regular phone lines were still up. If they were cut also, then someone would have had a cell phone. Why didn't anyone on airport security call in the cavalry?
These flaws in the story line kept nagging at me while I was watching the movie, but if you can suspend your belief in reality, this isn't such a bad movie to sit back and enjoy.