Not Enough Respect for the Audience

Rating: 6/10 (13 September 2004)

Okay, I have one big problem with this sequel to Die Hard. The movie was entertaining at times with McClain taking on more bad-ass terrorists and their ultra-elaborate plan. But unlike the first film in this series, this particular entry was utterly preposterous. Sure, the action of the first was huge and explosive itself, but in the scheme of the movie it always basically made sense. In Die Hard 2 though, there were individual scenes that made no sense, and a plot with holes so big you could fly a 747 through them. I do not mean to be the overly discriminating film reviewer who knit-picks at technical details and writes the movie off as a result. No, if you see one or even a handful of discrepancies, things that violate reality, you dismiss them. But this movie is just a series of them, over and over and over. I mean, how can you shut your brain off that much and just sit back and enjoy the action, when the movie couldn't happen in a million years for reasons that you don't even have to be some kind of expert to be conscious of. For example, at the beginning of the movie, National Airport is shut down because of the snow and you hear airport controllers discussing how they will be taking over its flight load. So my question is, if the terrorists disable Dulles, couldn't the reverse occur? How could the terrorists have counted on National being shut down for a snowstorm when they'd been planning for months? And then of course there is Baltimore Washington International Airport (BWI), which was never even mentioned of course, that may have come in handy for people trying to land planes circling over DC. Also, how can they expect us to believe that the planes circling overhead are doomed to crash in two hours when they run out of fuel, when a flight from DC to Memphis, Philly, New York, or Atlanta takes less than that. And of course, why couldn't the controllers have transmitted to the planes using radios in planes that were already on the ground? My point is, you just can't sidestep reality in such a plethora of ways and expect an audience to follow you through the whole plot. If you have to do that so much to make your movie work then perhaps it never should have been made. Oh yeah, and having John McClain simply say at one point, 'How can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?', doesn't successfully negate the fact the odds on that are too infinitesimal to even be contemplated. So, bottom line, it had too many holes to be enjoyable, even though it was only trying to entertain with a series of explosions. The first movie was so much more plausible, and that's why people actually buy the first one by itself. I have a feeling the vast majority of Die Hard 2 owners bought it as part of the trilogy set, mostly as a means of seeing the other two.
P.S. I almost forgot about the grenades that took 20+ seconds to explode. Riiiiigghhht.