The new review will be posted here in full as it gives an update on a surprising event from last week & my health:
Pardon me for revisiting another film related to the holiday season but there’s another reason this was chosen. The airport setting does relate to a sight I saw at the Wichita airport last Wednesday as I left to return home. A runway full of firetrucks, ambulances and police cars is never good yet that’s what I witnessed. From general knowledge, I know that isn’t an automatic sign of an impending tragedy or that the plane might not make it. Turns out, it was serious: once arriving home, the news broke that the United Airlines flight diverted on its route from Newark to Denver because… of an engine problem that turned into an engine fire upon landing!
Aircraft that size have fire suppression systems for engines but that is still a soil your seat sort of terrifying. Thank heavens I’ve never had a disaster of a journey any of the (rare) occasions I’ve been on aircraft. Point is, as everyone was fine there is no bad taste in sharing this little anecdote and it allowed me to discuss this film again. As I’m just about recovered from my illness that left me feeling like a bag of A-holes, this was an easy watch.
I’ve reviewed the movie before. To reiterate, it is a big dumb loud vulgar action movie (naturally, it’s from Renny Harlin. That is not meant as an insult) where it is a little bit hard to believe that the same s*** can happen to the same guy twice. Presumably, the villains would have had much more difficulty attempting to use “technology” to hijack a major airport’s air traffic control on Christmas Eve like Dulles International in Washington, D.C. There’s also a very controversial plot point that even received flack at the time.
Be that as it may, it still has plenty of famous faces (William Sadler, Franco Nero, Dennis Franz in a real Dennis Franz role, John Amos, Fred Dalton Thompson, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Art Evans), some of whom were just on the precipice of becoming much more famous, like Robert Patrick, Mark Boone Jr., & John Leguizamo.
It was for certain a movie of its time; an obvious inspiration for the plot was the Iran-Contra Affair. The full explanation is on Wikipedia but it’s yet another example of the United States government looking rather terrible due to its actions. Without being compared to its antecedent-one of the best genre examples ever made-Die Hard 2 is still a pretty solid R-rated action extravaganza where the viewer can easily root for our everyman hero as he tries to save thousands of people that could become collateral damage in an elaborate scheme to free a foreign general in custody… including his wife. I can always enjoy the movie and its uncommon airport scenario.
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