The first 40 minutes are excellent

Rating: Null/10 (5 January 2003)

While this film starts off well, adding more depth to Bruce Willis's now familiar character and setting up an interesting storyline, it falls flat as soon as Jeremy Irons appears as Hans Gruber's less interesting brother. In fact as soon as he appears the film tries to retread the same points of the first film in EXACTLY the same way:
We have an "intelligent" bad guy, who is nowhere near as charismatic as Alan Rickman was as Hans Gruber.
We have the villan's scheme revealed as a disguise for a robbery.
And finally the film tries to make us feel happy when the terrorists get the lucre.
The problem here is that a) these plot points don't fit in with the first 40 minutes of the movie and b) the "bad guys" torture of our hero comes across as cold and sadistic. As such we are unable to even be charmed by them, let alone empathize with them.
Saying that, the film does have its good points, Samuel L. Jackson is a still a treat to watch and some of the action scenes are pretty inventive. But overall there is nothing to top the excellent balance of Die Hard 1 just yet.