Another Christmas, another set of terrorists for beleaguered celebrity cop John McClane. All our hero wants is to collect his wife from the airport, talk his way out of a parking ticket and crash in a warm hotel bed. Instead, instincts get the best of him. Giving chase to suspicious characters, he exchanges gunfire in the baggage warehouse, butts heads with cocky local authorities and uncovers a plot to spring a political prisoner by shutting down air traffic control.
The airport represents an effort to expand McClane's character beyond the claustrophobic confines of a high-rise office building, but the larger setting is probably a mistake. Where Nakatomi Plaza provided ready-made tension, with gunmen conceivably around every corner, the extended Dulles Airport is a sprawling, confusing set that rarely feels connected. The lead doesn't really benefit from his new environs, either. While he remains personable, resourceful and daring, traits which made him appealing in the first film, his new status as a bulletproof action hero is a backwards step. John's sense of self-preservation, careful caution in a dangerous situation, once made him sympathetic and real. Somewhere between the escalator shootout against overwhelming odds and his leap from a helicopter to the wing of a taxiing jumbo jet, that went out the window. He's gone full Stallone / Schwarzenegger in the sequel, and mastered the art of clairvoyance to boot. Bruce Willis remains magnetic in the role, but this isn't the same desperate, punchy character that powered the original. He's lost a lot of that edge.
As generic action movies go, one could choose worse. Though this example is rife with obvious plot holes, it does go hard and the action scenes pluck all the right notes. The big explosions are appropriately bright and well-spaced; men are nearly run over on the tarmac, and one falls into a jet engine; the hero fires guns from all sorts of vehicles and vantage points. The terrorists' big plot is far too twisty, though, and I think the narrative would've been better off without the cut-aways to McClane's wife aboard a delayed, circling passenger plane.
The airport represents an effort to expand McClane's character beyond the claustrophobic confines of a high-rise office building, but the larger setting is probably a mistake. Where Nakatomi Plaza provided ready-made tension, with gunmen conceivably around every corner, the extended Dulles Airport is a sprawling, confusing set that rarely feels connected. The lead doesn't really benefit from his new environs, either. While he remains personable, resourceful and daring, traits which made him appealing in the first film, his new status as a bulletproof action hero is a backwards step. John's sense of self-preservation, careful caution in a dangerous situation, once made him sympathetic and real. Somewhere between the escalator shootout against overwhelming odds and his leap from a helicopter to the wing of a taxiing jumbo jet, that went out the window. He's gone full Stallone / Schwarzenegger in the sequel, and mastered the art of clairvoyance to boot. Bruce Willis remains magnetic in the role, but this isn't the same desperate, punchy character that powered the original. He's lost a lot of that edge.
As generic action movies go, one could choose worse. Though this example is rife with obvious plot holes, it does go hard and the action scenes pluck all the right notes. The big explosions are appropriately bright and well-spaced; men are nearly run over on the tarmac, and one falls into a jet engine; the hero fires guns from all sorts of vehicles and vantage points. The terrorists' big plot is far too twisty, though, and I think the narrative would've been better off without the cut-aways to McClane's wife aboard a delayed, circling passenger plane.