Die Hard 2 / YMMV - TV Tropes

Angst? What Angst?:
- Stuart's men are not particularly shaken by Grant's run-in with their plane's engine turbine in their last moments before the craft is destroyed; by comparison, the cold-blooded Stuart is shown to at least be somewhat perturbed by this last-second setback.
- Earlier in the film, a news reporter on TV points out that General Esperanza, who is smiling and waving as he's being escorted in chains onto a military aircraft, looks surprisingly chipper for a dictator who's about to spend the rest of his life in an American prison. This is obviously because he knows there are men waiting to free him from captivity.
Adaptation Displacement: The film is based on the novel 58 Minutes by Walter Wager.
Ass Pull: McClane surviving the explosion of Esperanza's plane; who knew hand grenades took their sweet time exploding? Or subsonic cargo planes had ejection seats?
Catharsis Factor:
- Seeing Stuart (even though his death scream is not shown), Esperanza and the others get blown up in the plane when McClane lights the gas is incredibly satisfying and matches Hans's demise as well in awesomeness.
- The deaths of the other villains like Baker and Grant are also pretty satisfying, since they're all such evil bastards that their brutal deaths are entirely deserved.
- After watching him be a completely unhelpful obnoxious loudmouth asshole for most of the movie, seeing Chief Lorenzo get the shit scared out of him by a blank-loaded machine gun aimed directly at him can be quite satisfying.
Complete Monster: Colonel William Stuart is an anti-communist ex-military mercenary, who supported the politics of the cruel dictator and drug lord General Ramon Esperanza. After General Esperanza was imprisoned by US and prepared to be moved from South America to Washington Dulles International Airport to be imprisoned, he paid Stuart to gather up a squad of ex-soldiers and free him. To achieve this, Stuart organized the takeover of the airport, taking control of all the systems and rendering the planes above the airport—one of which carried McClane's wife—unable to land in a strong snowstorm. Holding the entire airport hostage, Stuart became angry when the airport tried to regain control of their systems, acting against his orders; in retaliation, Stuart caused a plane to crash, killing 230 people. Killing several more people, Stuart is determined to get his cash, at one point not even lifting a finger to help his old friend and partner Major Grant in his fight against McClane and ready to cause hundreds of more deaths if the airport refuses to follow his demands.
Crosses the Line Twice: John's little quip after getting the prints off of Cochrane's corpse, which has already hit rigor mortis by the time John releases his hand: "I don't think this one's gonna make it, boys".
Evil Is Cool: The martial artist Big Bad Colonel Stuart and his special forces-trained henchmen (including a Retroactive Recognition Robert Patrick, in a role that would lead him to his Star-Making Role one year later in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and a voice-dubbed John Leguizamo) in the second film.
Fridge Brilliance: When Major Grant gets on the walkie talkie and snarls threats at Stuart, Stuart and his men are smiling broadly, seemingly unaffected. But the revelation that Grant is working with Stuart has it make a lot more sense as they're enjoying how Grant is hamming it up around Lorenzo and the cops to sell the act.
Hilarious in Hindsight: The old lady sitting next to McClane's wife on the plane complains that she "should have taken the bus." Well, actually... And then in With A Vengeance, he has to stop a bomber from exploding a bomb on a subway. It would seem Speed is even more like Die Hard (On A Bus and Subway Train) than first supposed.
- Now we know why O'Brian hates Sloane.
Love to Hate: William Sadler has said that he takes it as a compliment whenever someone tells him how much they hated his character Colonel Stuart in this movie, because even he interpreted the Colonel Badass character he was playing as an absolutely evil irredeemable bastard.
Memetic Mutation: The tagline/subtitle has been popular for parodic snowclones on the formula " X Something 2: X Harder", such as Desert Bus for Hope 2: Bus Harder.
- "My name is not important..."
- Everyone ripping on the poorly researched "Glock 7" scene ^note
- The inexplicable dub of "Mr. Falcon" over "Yipee-kay-yay, motherfucker" in the TV edit.
- However, this is averted with regards to its similar themes to the previous film: even though it's also set during Christmas (even though it was released during the summer—in this case, on top of that, being part of the Fourth of July 1990 holiday release window), it does not share Die Hard's memes about being a Christmas film. At least, nowhere near as insistently.
Moral Event Horizon:
- Colonel Stuart undoubtedly crosses it when he guides a plane full of innocent passengers into crashing into the runway. All because McClane had the audacity to kill the men they had stationed at the annex skywalk.
- Thornburg tops what he did in the first film by creating a massive panic in the airport that injured many people and likely killed many others, just to give a news story.
Narm: Stuart and his men marching out of their hotel rooms in perfect unison, a package ready in every hand and each sporting a Death Glare. It's so Obviously Evil that it ends up being unintentionally hilarious in how deadly serious it was probably meant to be.
Retroactive Recognition:
- The mook O'Reilly is the T-1000. In fact, it was in this film where James Cameron first saw Robert Patrick and offered him the role that would make him famous.
- Another terrorist, Burke, is played by a young John Leguizamo.
- Mark Boone Junior, best known for his work on Sons of Anarchy, plays a mook known in the credits as Shockley. He bears the distinction of being the only bad guy not killed by John in the whole film, as he is gunned down by the SWAT team during the ambush in the annex skywalk.
- Chief O'Brien is the pilot of the crashed British Airways plane.
So Okay, It's Average: Widely agreed to be an okay sequel and a decent film in its own right, just not in the same league as the first or third Die Hard entries. Still, it's a less divisive film than Live Free or Die Hard, and way, way higher-regarded than A Good Day to Die Hard.
Special Effect Failure: During the firefight in the annex when McClane sends a scaffold falling atop one of Stuart's mooks, it's pretty hard to miss that he's been replaced by a rather cheap-looking dummy in some shots. The fact that it looks nothing like the actor just makes it more obvious.
- The moment where McClane ejects from the exploding plane was never particularly believable; a sharp eye today can see that Willis is simply inserted over the footage of the explosion.
Tear Jerker: Col. Stuart crashes a plane full of innocent people just to make it clear that he's in charge. John tries desperately to avert this, but fails, and bitterly weeps Manly Tears for them in his most vulnerable and humane moment in the franchise. You can even hear a woman in the control tower crying.
Unintentional Period Piece: The film primarily takes place at an airport, and the relaxed security would appear astounding to modern audiences. John smokes a cigarette at an airport cafe, and a passenger onboard an aircraft casually reveals a stun gun in her purse. After John gets in a gunfight and kills a terrorist in the luggage area, the police refuse to close down the airport or seal off the area.
- There's also how people are allowed to wait in the main terminal for hours on end to pick up/greet passengers, something almost no modern airport today would permit, and John and Al treating fax machines as some amazing new technology.
- Really, the entire plot qualifies with clear parallels to both Oliver North and the Iran-Contra scandal and Esparanza being an amalgam of Manuel Noriega and Pablo Escobar, all major figures and stories that were fresh in audiences' minds at the time but would be less well-known to younger viewers now. There's also Colonel Stuart's central motivation of believing Esparanza is an invaluable ally in the fight against Communism when the USSR collapsed and disbanded nearly a year and a half after the film was released. All in all, it's a film that's basically impossible to imagine being made at any other time than when it was which is part of why it's not held in as high regard as the first or third entries which are unattached to then current events.

YMMV / Die Hard 2

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