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They say lightning never strikes twice... They were wrong: Once again it's Christmas and John McClane is about to have a very bad day. This time he's at Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C., anticipating the arrival of his wife, but before she even makes it to the ground a group of terrorists have seized control of the main tower and are threatening to crash the planes unless their demands are met.

Die Hard 2: Die Harder feels like its predecessor in the sense that McClane acknowledges his lack of luck, crawls through ventilation shafts, and starts taking out the bad guys one by one; the great shame, however, is that none of this is particularly exhilarating. This first sequel feels inferior in every way to 1988’s awesome spectacle; what it's most lacking is John McTiernan's sense of style, which results in a rather large number of underwhelming action scenes (check the part where McClane is ejected from an exploding plane as a result of the slowest detonating grenades, like, ever).

Die Hard 2's bad guys are equally as disappointing. I'm a big fan of John Amos (Lock Up), and he's pretty good here as the corrupt general of the group, but aside from him it's frustrating that everyone else is underwritten and ends up being one-dimensional. William Sadler is the main villain that McClane has to contend with, but his character never really has the menace to reach the level set by Rickman in the first movie. When McClane comes face to face with the terrorist at the end, the suspense is considerably lacking as a result of this (remember how gripping the conclusion was when McClane and Gruber finally met in the first Die Hard? Well, it's nothing like that here.)

Willis is still McClane, though, in humour and heroicness, and that's a definite selling point of the film. He's always watchable -- still a cut above most action heroes -- and gives this sequel at least a little credibility. It's just incredibly disappointing, on the whole, that Die Hard 2 doesn't have the ambition to topple, or even come close to matching, that original I choose to keep going on about.

(C) Andy Carrington, 2009.