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Die Hard 2: Die Harder
Die Hard 2 theatrical poster
Directed by	Renny Harlin
Produced by	Charles Gordon Lawrence Gordon Joel Silver
Written by	Novel: Walter Wager Screenplay: Steven E. de Souza Doug Richardson
Starring	Bruce Willis Bonnie Bedelia William Atherton Reginald VelJohnson Franco Nero William Sadler John Amos
Music by	Michael Kamen
Cinematography	Oliver Wood
Editing by	Robert A. Ferretti
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	July 4, 1990
Running time	124 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$70,000,000 (est.)
Preceded by	Die Hard
Followed by	Die Hard with a Vengeance
IMDb profile

Die Hard 2 (also known as Die Hard 2: Die Harder), is a 1990 film, the second in the Die Hard series. It stars Bruce Willis, reprising his role as police detective John McClane, and co-stars Bonnie Bedelia (reprising her role as Holly McClane), William Sadler, William Atherton, Dennis Franz, Fred Dalton Thompson and John Amos.

Set once again on Christmas Eve, McClane is waiting for his wife to land at Washington Dulles International Airport when terrorists take over air controls. He must stop the terrorists before his wife's plane and several other incoming flights that are circling the airport run out of fuel and crash.

The movie is based on a novel by Walter Wager entitled "58 Minutes". The novel has the same premise: a cop must stop terrorists who take an airport hostage while his daughter's plane circles overhead. He has 58 minutes to do so before the plane crashes.

Die Hard 2 was followed by Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995, and Live Free or Die Hard in 2007.

While lacking the huge impact of the original, the movie was a box-office success and received a reasonably positive critical reception. Roger Ebert, while noting the not-insubstantial plot credibility problems with the movie, described it as "terrific entertainment."

Taglines:

• Die Harder
• They say lightning never strikes twice... They were wrong
• John McClane, terrorist and in an airport. Nothing can go wrong this time
• Last time, it blew you through the back wall of the theater. This time, it will blow you sky high!
• Yippee Ki Yay, all over again!
• I hate it when I'm right.
• Look who's back in the wrong place at the right time.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Cast 3 Production and promotion 4 References 5 External links

The story begins on Christmas Eve, 1990, exactly two years after the Nakatomi Plaza incident. John McClane is at Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C.. As he waits for his wife Holly to arrive from California, airport police tow away his in-laws' car and give him a parking ticket. Hanging out at an airport lounge, McClane sees a group of men, dressed in Army fatigues, and at least one of whom has a gun in his jacket, pass a package between them and disappear into a baggage handling area. He follows, and a fight ensues in which McClane kills one of the men.

McClane confronts the head of airport police, the hotheaded Captain Carmine Lorenzo, who dismisses McClane's report as punks stealing luggage, despite the fact that one of the assailants was wielding a rare porcelain gun (supposedly) capable of evading metal detectors. McClane storms off to investigate on his own, taking fingerprints from the corpse and faxing them to his friend, LAPD officer Al Powell, who runs them through several databases. The resulting records indicates that the man had been declared officially dead even before the fight, leading McClane to suspect that he had been part of a plot to seize control of the airport.

Which is exactly the truth: as weather conditions worsen, a vengeful rogue US Army officer, Colonel Stuart, prepares to hold the approaching planes and their passengers and crew hostage until he can free a former Central American general and drug lord, Ramon Esperanza, as the deposed despot is arriving at the airport under guard for trial by the United States government. Stuart has set up his operational base in a nearby church and has hacked directly into Dulles' communications and air traffic control.

McClane sneaks into the airport's control tower and confronts the head of air traffic control, Trudeau, just as Stuart commences his operation and takes control of the airport controls. McClane is chased out from the tower; as he descends in the elevator with reporter Samantha Coleman, she tips him to the presence of Stuart. McClane slips out of the elevator and into the underground maintenance area of the airport, where he gains assistance from an airport janitor named Marvin.

Trudeau and his controllers contact the approaching planes and inform the cabin crews (without mentioning the terrorists) that they must circle the airport. Trudeau’s communications director, Leslie Barnes, takes a team to a new antenna outpost at the skywalk to restore unbugged communication with the planes. He and Lorenzo’s SWAT team are attacked by a detachment of Stuart’s men. Fortunately, McClane heard about the auxiliary outpost while in the tower, and just as Barnes is about to be killed, McClane emerges and kills Stuart’s men. Stuart retaliates by crashing a British jet by tricking its systems into thinking the ground is 200 feet lower than it actually is, killing everyone on board when it reaches the ground before it's ready.

McClane returns to the underground maintenance level, where a two-way radio dropped by one of Stuart’s crew tells him that Esperanza is about to arrive in his now-commandeered plane, who has killed his guard and the pilots. McClane rushes to the runway and briefly apprehends Esperanza, before Stuart and his men show up to retrieve the general themselves. McClane hides in the cockpit of Esperanza’s plane to escape being shot at, but Stuart and his crew toss grenades inside, forcing McClane to strap himself into the pilot’s ejector seat and escape the resulting blast by engaging the eject function.

An Army Special Forces unit arrives at the airport. Their leader, Major Grant, once served with Stuart and claims to know his tactics. Barnes surmises that Stuart’s command post is near the airport, and he and McClane find the church where Stuart is hiding. Shortly after McClane kills one of Stuart’s guards and takes possession of his submachine gun, Grant and his squad show up and a gunfight ensues. Stuart, his men and Esperanza escape on snowmobiles. McClane chases after them, but his gun left by one of Stuart's henchmen proves strangely ineffective. McClane checks the weapon and finds that the bullets are blanks. At that same moment, Grant slits the throat of the only member on his team unaware of his true plan: he is in on Esperanza's escape with Stuart.

McClane returns to the airport police station and announces to Lorenzo that Grant and Stuart are actually working together. Lorenzo thinks he is lying and attempts to arrest him, but McClane fires his submachine gun (still loaded with blanks) at Lorenzo. Finally convinced, Lorenzo mobilizes his police to converge on the hangar containing the Boeing 747 that Stuart has demanded as an escape vehicle.

Meanwhile, circling above the airport, Holly has unexpectedly found herself in the same plane as Dick Thornberg, the reporter who had endangered her and John during their previous meeting. Thornberg gets upset, because he filed a 50-yard restraining order against Holly after she decked him, resulting in a loss of two of his teeth. As the terrorists' plans unfold, both Holly and Thornberg begin to realize that something is amiss; culminating in Thornberg listening into the tower radio transmissions, learning about the crisis and making a live news report from aboard the plane, trying to get a Pulitzer Prize. The crowds in the airport watching the report are thrown into panic, which greatly ruins McClane's and Lorenzo's efforts to apprehend Stuart. Holly zaps Thornberg with a fellow passenger's stun gun.

McClane hitches a ride in Sam Coleman's news helicopter to the villains' plane, which is taxiing for takeoff. He manages to jump onto the aircraft's wing and finds himself in hand-to-hand combat with Major Grant. During the fight, Grant is sucked into one of the plane’s engines and killed, but Stuart takes up the fight and kicks McClane off the wing. As he falls, McClane opens the fuel hatch on the engine and it starts to dump. He then delivers his classic catchphrase, "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" and uses his cigarette lighter to ignite the trail of fuel, exploding the plane and resulting in a fireball. The fire from the aftermath becomes a landing light for the other planes, which all make to the ground safely. Emergency services arrive and begin evacuating the air passengers, including Holly and a badly-shaken Thornburg who is insulted by the Stun Gun Passenger (and probably gets fired as a reporter altogether). McClane and Holly joyfully reunite, Lorenzo tears up McClane's parking ticket as a Christmas gift, and Marvin drives the couple off.

Actor	Role
Bruce Willis	John McClane
Bonnie Bedelia	Holly Gennero McClane
William Sadler	Colonel Stuart
Dennis Franz	Captain Carmine Lorenzo
Reginald VelJohnson	Sergeant Al Powell
William Atherton	Dick Thornburg
Franco Nero	General Ramon Esperanza
John Amos	Major Grant
Art Evans	Leslie Barnes
Fred Thompson	Trudeau
Tom Bower	Marvin
Sheila McCarthy	Samantha "Sam" Coleman
Don Harvey	Garber
Tony Ganios	Baker
Peter Nelson	Thompson
Robert Patrick	O'Reilly
John Leguizamo	Burke
Tom Verica	Kahn
Vondie Curtis-Hall	Miller
Mark Boone Junior	Shockley
Colm Meaney	Pilot of Windsor Airlines plane
Robert Costanzo	Sergeant Vito Lorenzo

Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (June 2007)

Die Hard 2 was the first movie to have a digitally-manipulated matte painting. It was used for the last scene, which took place on a runway.^[1]

The movie was not filmed at Dulles, but at many other locations. Many of the airport terminal shots were from LAX in Los Angeles (one of the payphones has a "Pacific Bell" logo), other shots were from many runways of other airports, such as of Denver's now-closed Stapleton International Airport. This was done mainly because the producers needed an area that had frequent and consistent snowfall, which Denver has. (Ironically, according to the special edition DVD features, Denver suffered from an unseasonably unsnowy winter that year; in at least one scene, the crew had to make do with fake snow, including "snow" made from painted cornflakes.) Some runway scenes were also shot at Alpena County Regional Airport in Alpena, MI. When the film was shown at a cinema in Pretoria, South Africa, a light airplane was hoisted onto the roof of a local multiplex as promotion for the film. This advert backfired as the sight of the airplane caused serious car accidents near the cinema.

MaximOnline.com named the British aircraft crash in the film as #2 on its list of "Most Horrific Movie Plane Crashes."^[2]

• Die Hard 2 at the Internet Movie Database
• Die Hard 2 at Rotten Tomatoes

v • d • e Die Hard series
Die Hard • Die Hard 2 • Die Hard with a Vengeance • Live Free or Die Hard
Cast	Bruce Willis • Alan Rickman • Bonnie Bedelia • Reginald VelJohnson • William Atherton • William Sadler • Dennis Franz • Samuel L. Jackson • Jeremy Irons • Timothy Olyphant • Justin Long • Maggie Q • Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Crew	John McTiernan • Renny Harlin • Lawrence Gordon • Joel Silver • Roderick Thorp • Steven E. de Souza • Doug Richardson • Jonathan Hensleigh • Michael Kamen • Len Wiseman • David Marconi • Mark Bomback • Marco Beltrami
Video games	Die Hard • Die Hard Arcade • Die Hard Trilogy • Die Hard Trilogy 2: Viva Las Vegas • Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza • Die Hard: Vendetta
Related articles	John McClane • Fox Plaza • Nothing Lasts Forever • Val Verde • Washington Dulles International Airport