An unlucky day...again

Rating: 7/10 (11 April 2018)

Two years after the immensely successful Die Hard, John McTiernan, Bruce Willis, and Twentieth Century Fox teamed up to unleash another John McClane adventure onto the world. Many people do not realize this, but twenty years ago sequels were not usually the bigger and better masterpieces that they always seem to be today. Back in the day, a sequel was often times thrown together to make a quick buck and only the biggest movies ever got the budget to live up to the quality that the first one produced. Die Hard 2: Die Harder was given this royal treatment, but despite everything working in its favor, this one fell short of its predescessor.
I guess what disappoints me in this one is the guys' unwillingness to do anything different. A good sequel should be bigger and better than the original and add something more to the overall series, something fresh and interesting if you will. Die Hard 2 falls short in this category. This one seems like a simple rehashing of the same story. John McClane gets unwitting caught up in a terrorist attack and he comes through to save the day despite overwhelming odds against him. This one again takes place on Christmas in Washington D.C. instead of L.A. The story really does not give us anything new, nor do we see anything but the same John McClane. Unlike the other three movies in the series, John plays exactly the same person who has not grown at all since the last time we seen him.
With that being said, Bruce Willis stills gives creedence to the character that he made famous. Returning from the first movie, Bonnie Bedlia as his wife, Holly, and William Atherton as the arrorgant TV reporter, Richard Thornburg give us a bird's eye view of the terrorist attack from the skies, but that sub plot seemed to drag down the movie a little for me. Good performances were given by Art Evans playing Leslie Barnes and by Republican presidential nominee Fred Thompson as Trudeau, the man running Dulles Airport. However, William Sadler gave a weak performance as the movie's protagonist, and he kind of makes you wish that John McClane had not killed Hans Gruber in the first one.
So, Die Hard 2: Die Harder did little to recapture the power that the first in the series seemed to sweat out of ever pour. It was basically the same movie with a slight twist in situation to make it feel fresh. Still, this is a Die Hard movie, and it gives us enough humor and action packed adventure to leave us satisfied after the whole experience is over. Unlike so many sequels that, back in the eighties and early nineties, seemed tired and useless except to bring the overall feel of the first movie down, Die Hard 2: Die Harder is worth the 124 minutes to catch up with an old friend.