Director: Renny Harlin
An action sequel can be difficult to pull off, especially if it's quite similar to the first film. There's a point in the movie where any reasonable person would ask, if they were in the same circumstances, "How is this happening to me again?" The writer has a choice about whether to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation or to just ignore it. Die Hard 2 chooses to acknowledge it. I don't think either is a good choice, but then again, a lot about Die Hard 2 is a poor choice, a film that appears to have been constructed via heavy focus group work on the first film. Want Reginald VelJohnson's affable desk-bound cop to return? He's here. Want William Atherton to reprise his slimy journalist routine and let anyone who's thinking about the irony of the film's insistence that people who stick cameras in people's faces during tragedies are wrongheaded while creating false tragedies into which a camera is stuck?
The film really slips up with its villain, who does not have the rogueishness of Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber. In all, all of the elements of Die Hard 1 are here in Die Hard 2, and that's precisely the problem with the film.
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