Die Hard 2 (1990)
I adore the original Die Hard. It is one of the finest action films of the eighties, the one that turned Bruce Willis into a superstar, and for years I carried around a memory of the sequel being even better. Sharper, bigger, more fun. So when I finally sat down to revisit Die Hard 2 after a gap of roughly twenty years, I was genuinely looking forward to it. What I got was a reminder that memory is an unreliable narrator.
This is exactly what happened to me recently rewatching another film I had long held in high esteem: I came back to it expecting to rediscover something great, and found instead that time had quietly airbrushed out all the rough edges. Die Hard 2 is still a perfectly enjoyable ride. Willis is as watchable as ever, wisecracking his way through the carnage with that effortless, rumpled charm that made the first film sing. The action sequences are slick, the pacing rarely lets up, and there is enough glossy Die Hard sheen to keep you entertained across its two-hour runtime. But the longer it went on, the more a single nagging thought refused to go away: this is basically the same film, only in a different setting.
Swap a Los Angeles tower block for a Washington airport and you have more or less everything you need to know. McClane, alone and outgunned again, picks off a gang of terrorists one by one while the authorities flap uselessly around him, and the story beats arrive in roughly the same order as before. There is even a version of the radio contact with his wife, the obstructive bureaucrat who will not listen, the moment where it all looks hopeless before our man pulls something improbable out of nowhere. It is not a remake, exactly, but it is close enough to feel like one.
The villains are where the sequel really struggles. Franco Nero, the legendary star of Django and a genuinely magnetic screen presence in his prime, is a welcome face, but neither he nor the turncoat colonel at the centre of the conspiracy comes anywhere near Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber. Gruber is one of the great screen villains, full stop. Witty, cultured, menacing, and utterly at ease in every scene. His absence hangs over Die Hard 2 like a shadow it can never quite step out of, and the film suffers for it more than anything else.
What you are left with is a competent, entertaining sequel that does everything the original did, a little less well, and adds nothing you have not already seen. It is not a bad film by any stretch. Put it on and you will have a perfectly good time, I promise you that. But it is a photocopy of something that was extraordinary, and photocopies always lose something in the reproduction. A fun but forgettable retread that mostly made me want to go straight back and watch the first one all over again.
Three stars.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1990 | Watched: 2026-08-29
Where to watch
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