Die Hard 2 (1990) on Netflix
John McClane waits at Dulles International Airport during Christmas week for his wife Holly's plane. Armed men seize the airport's air traffic control, and flights above circle with little fuel.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.2/10410,075 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes69%
Trailer
Plot summary
During Christmas week, a plane carrying General Ramon Esperanza, who is being extradited to the United States on drug charges, heads for Dulles International Airport. LAPD lieutenant John McClane is there to meet his wife Holly. After an officer writes him a parking ticket, he spots two men behaving oddly and trails them into a baggage sorting area, where shots are exchanged and one of them dies. McClane's friend Sergeant Al Powell checks the dead man's fingerprints, and the name matches a soldier reported killed two years earlier in a helicopter crash. The airport's police chief, Carmine Lorenzo, and Ed Trudeau, who directs air traffic control, both dismiss his concerns. Then the airport loses radio contact with incoming airplanes and the runway lights go dark.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Die Hard 2 (1990)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Actor Franco Nero said producer Joel Silver cast him after spotting his movie posters in their mutual accountant's office; Nero didn't want the part because he disliked the script and had already committed to the film Breath of Life, so Silver arranged the shooting schedule so Nero could do both.
- Budgeted at $40 million, the production reportedly ballooned to $60-70 million amid claims that producer Joel Silver overspent; Bruce Willis was paid $7.5 million to return as McClane, and Silver was said to have been stripped of his day-to-day producing duties by the end of filming.
- Screenwriter Steven E. de Souza later admitted that the film's mercenary villains were modeled on America's Central American interventions, primarily the Iran-Contra affair.
- For its climactic runway scene, Die Hard 2 became the first film to use digitally composited live-action footage combined with a traditional matte painting that had been photographed and scanned into a computer.
- The screenplay was adapted from Walter Wager's 1987 novel 58 Minutes, which follows the same plot with a different hero: police officer Frank Malone must stop airport terrorists holding hostages while his daughter Kate's plane circles overhead, giving him only 58 minutes before it crashes.
- The film set a record for the largest pre-opening gross, earning $3.7 million from 1,828 theaters, a mark that stood for six years until Independence Day surpassed it in 1996.
- When it hit home video in January 1991, Die Hard 2 became the most-rented video of its first week, beating Navy SEALs and selling a record 505,000 units for rental.
