First great Die hard of the trilogy

Rating: 8/10 (16 July 2017)

The second and third Die Hard movies were better than the first. I rated 2 and 3 an 8 and the first one a 6. "Three" was great with Samuel Jackson and Jeremy Irons as "Simon", the nursery rhyme cracking psycho.
The second film is great with the addition of "NYPD blue"'s tough, temperamental, no nonsense Dennis Franz. Bruce Willis is his usual tough wise cracking cop who is always either on vacation or suspension, and his marriage to Holly (Bonnie Bedella) is always on the rocks.The bad guy here is William Atherton who's hungry to have a huge Christmas Eve power trip controlling Washington DC's Dullus airport. They plug in their communications network at a nearby church, of course after murdering the caretaker there. William and his men have a soft spot for South American dictator Franco Nero (who does look like Fadel Castro, Roger Ebert was right) who's getting transported to the USA for major drug smuggling charges. William, in order to free his buddy,is willing to hold up the entire airport,leave planes circling for hours including Holly's plane, and cause a plane full of innocent English passengers (since when does an English narrow bodied plane fly to the US?) to crash (I don't like how they made the passengers and attendants on that plane so pleasant and nice when two minutes later were a fiery death).I like how on Holly's plane, smarmy,annoying passenger William Sadler, who the flight attendants can't stand, re unites with Holly after a previous incident. Flight attendant to Holly: " what did you do to him?" Holly: "I knocked out two of his teeth". Attendant: " champagne?" I liked that. I also liked a lot of the action with Willis and his enemies at Dullus, first in the baggage handling areas, there were several shootouts, and a very narrow escape from a grounded plane with fresh grenades just thrown in and Willis catapulting straight up into the air on a parachuted ejector seat.
I also liked the back and forth banter between Willis and Franz (some of it really played out like an "NYPD blue" episode). Franz did not like a badass with an L.A. badge preforming his own style of active duty in his airport. Franz tells Willis off in his office after gunning it out with a couple of bad guys, and does not care that Willis was only shooting in self defense. He tells him "you're in my little pond now,and I'm the big fish who runs it". Willis then in the control tower, fails to convince Franz and the control tower head that there's a plot going on. Then when they all see the runway lights shut off and they get a dictation over the intercom from the terrorist about his demands, everyone can now see what's really happening. But instead of Franz acknowledging to Willis he made a mistake by not believing him, he just pushes him away saying "we got a first class unit, SWAT team and all, we don't need no Monday morning quarterback!" Like he told him before, that LA badge didn't mean s*** in his airport.
There's also the annoyingly over chatty Washington D.C. press news anchor who gets the same words from each person she comes to with her microphone when she says "just give me two words", the words in response being " f***" and "off". It is annoying that while during a terrorist crisis, you don't want some bubbly news anchor coming to you chatting your ear off. She even says to Willis at one point "who-y who?" after not hearing a name Willis mentions. Overly talkative people seem to want to not just increase the amount of words they say but also embellish their words like saying "who-y- who" instead of just "who" or "givetty- give" instead of just "give". I've meet overly chatty people in real life who do that, and it does annoy some people.
I did like Willis saying while showing his ring finger "just the fax" to a pretty woman offering to take him out for a drink, after helping him fax some papers to L.A., to his Twinkie eating friend who was seen doing just that several times in "Die hard 1". I also noticed the addition of what's his name, the cop who gave Willis a parking ticket at the beginning of the movie playing his usual wise*** character.