Die Hard 2 Die Harder

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."

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, killing everyone on board.