Bruce WillisOur Last Line of Defense

Rating: 7/10 (24 May 2010)

Die Hard 2, subtitled Die Harder, barges Bruce Willis into an obstacle course of rapid brutality, and he finishes in front in each one, such as in mortal tussles for guns, leaps onto conveyor belts, a discharge from a cockpit, leaping onto the wings of planes about to take off and fighting with cops and bureaucrats. All in one day! Why is Willis so persuasive in a movie like this? Perhaps he associates a roughly strapping build with the bearing and behavior of Everyman. The title of the movie characterizes the essential story material: Here is a man who will not bail out, who will not concede failure, who determinedly persists through the threat of catastrophe. The trials and hazards he encounters would dishearten a Jason Bourne or a 007, but for this guileless cop with the receding hairline, there is no option. When all is said and done: "My wife is on that plane!" McClane seems to have the worst holiday luck I've ever heard of as he's in Washington's Dulles airport expecting his wife's flight to land on a congested Christmas Eve. And scheduled into the same airport simultaneously is a military jet bringing a South American drug overlord to justice. An expert crew of terrorists, led by a former CIA operative, plots to take command of airport operations by mechanically circumventing the control tower. They'll interfere with the airport lights, leave dozens of planes circling overhead and then bring about fatalities, as a heads-up. What they want is a standby plane prepared to shanghai the fascist away.
Willis, who has a cop's seasoned eye, pegs one of the accomplices, follows him into a luggage-handling area and finds that a plot is brewing. Regardless, he can't get anywhere with the chief of airport security Dennis Franz, who begrudges an outside cop in his jurisdiction. After a death and countless other indications including a plane crash, the security chief ultimately concedes he may have a dilemma to deal with. But even then Willis' work is not finished, and by the end of the movie he is still virtually unassisted contending with entire planeloads of militants in mortal combat.
This is the archetypal big-budget blockbuster Hollywood action movie with rapid cutting and a fast-moving, bombastic narrative. Since it is so capably hammered out and well-directed, it cultivates a propulsion that hoists it past various and sundry plausibility fractures, indeed canyons, that should have toppled it. Exhibit A, at some point at roughly the middle of the movie we find out that "there are 18 planes up there but only 5 of them have those phones." OK! Great! Now the pilots can inform each other that the airport is in the midst of a siege and they shouldn't listen to the phony tower. Yet, because the script insists that they remain in peril till McClane saves the day, they all heed the same approach tower frequency. What's more, how about the scene where the tower apprises the circling airplanes that they'll be out of radio contact for a couple of hours, and the jets should simply continue circling? Why can't those planes just get on the horn with other ground broadcasters, and be redirected to other airports? Weeeellthen Willis' wife wouldn't be up there in the sky and in grave trouble, that's why.
But a more fundamental issue concerns the entire liberation undertaking itself. Who would ever have the funds, the apparatus and the conviction to stage such an enormous and problematic terrorist operation just to bail one drug-connected dictator? However, be that all as it may, I don't care. Die Hard 2 is as absurd as the Bond pictures, and as much fun. And during a Hollywood period (the '80s and '90s) when violence and mayhem are sanctioned to usurp creativity and substantial drama, this is a particularly skillful picture. It tells a story we can relate to, it has many colorful peripheral characters and it handles the action sequences---not to mention location shooting in extreme conditions---with seemingly effortless purity.
There is a plane incident to which degree we weren't sure things would go as far, and it's quite shocking. Another fun moment features a mercenary's opportunity to get an up-close look at an icycle. Another shot places the camera's eye hundreds of feet waaay up in the air and then flings Willis up until his nose just about butterfly-kisses the lens before he begins to fall to Earth again. The director of this snug $70 million comfort food is a Finn named Renny Harlin, whose other credits include the unrealistic but exciting Cliffhanger, the tiringly escapist but hilariously gruesome The Long Kiss Goodnight and the excitingly ridiculous Deep Blue Sea. Like Dutchmen Paul Verhoeven and Jan de Bont, Harlin took Hollywood commercial movie-making, churned it and endowed it with fresh momentum.