Die Hard 2

When you get to five films in a franchise it can sometimes be hard to remember who did what to whom, where, and why. I had to refresh my memory about this one. Okay, it’s happening at Dulles Airport, it’s Christmas Eve again, and the baddies are about nine hundred and ninety-nine renegade soldiers, including most of the people we were led to believe are good guys, who want to free a Latin American psychopath they see as a “freedom fighter.” (No, the leader of the group is not piece-of-shit traitor Ollie North. Just somebody like him.) Once again John McClane bleeds a lot. Once again his wife just happens to be in peril on one of the planes that can’t land because the baddies have shut down all the electronics at the airport. Once again William Atherton plays the piece-of-shit television reporter. This time he is so unprincipled and downright stupid that he endangers his own life in his frantic need to fulfill the people’s right to know. (The people have no such right when lives are at stake, asshole, but idiots like you always seem to believe that.) Like all of these machine-gun freak-out Die Hard movies (except the last one), it’s fun to watch if you disengage all the critical-thinking circuits in your brain.