Die Hard 2 1992, Rated R 20th Century Fox

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Starring Bruce Willis.

Needing a dosage of mayhem and violence, I instantly turned toward Bruce Willis. Willis returns from the original Die Hard (which also happened at Christmas, but with distinctly less snow on the ground) as, well, Bruce Willis: a tough-as-nails cop who smokes a carton or two of Marlboro's a day, drinks all night long, swears he is going to quit both of them (usually while lighting up or doing a shot), disdains authority, and can shoot bad guys with remarkable precision while log rolling down a moving escalator. Willis, while at Washington DC's Dulles International Airport to pick up his wife, uncovers a terrorist operation masterminded by Colonel Stuart, played by William Sadler, to rescue a convicted South American drug lord from a military plane transporting him to U.S. soil. The rest of the film follows like Die Hard in an airport, with Willis running around in areas that are normally publicly inaccessible, asking himself how so much "stuff" can be going wrong for him again (except that Willis doesn't say 'stuff' either), while generally wreaking as much havoc as he can with the bad guys' plans.

There isn't as much suspense, or edge of your seat excitement as there was present in the original Die Hard, but director Renny Harlin makes up for this with more gun fights, grenade throwing, and bad guys getting killed when Willis tosses them through jet engines.

The action at hand is both inventive--Willis stabbing a terrorist through the eye with an icicle was particularly cool--and shown constantly throughout the film. There are no little sub-plots as there were in Lethal Weapon dealing with Willis' wife's poor cooking, or how Willis is coping with the death of a loved one, which doesn't do much to help the amount of character development in Die Hard 2. But this is a Bruce Willis action film entitled Die Hard 2, sub-titled Die Harder, and if I found any character development beyond Willis smoking or saying things like "you're going to pay for that," I'd keel over dead from the shock. This is where Die Hard 2 is most different from Lethal Weapon; Lethal Weapon's screenwriter, Shane Black, at least makes an attempt to understand the motivations, pain, and personalities of the principle characters, while Die Hard 2 is content to rest its laurels on rising body counts and blowing up 747's as they take off.

Normally in a situation such as this, I'd give my nod to the more substantial of the two films--in this case Lethal Weapon--but the subject matter of Lethal Weapon was so dark and troubled that, for purposes of being entertained, I'd suggest you turn toward the glossy, superficial, and bullet-riddled Die Hard 2: Die Harder. Of the two Bloody Christmas Action Flicks, see this one.