Die Hard 2

So, I was home alone with my autistic son tonight and I decided to watch Die Hard 2 with him.  This is a movie that I haven’t seen in a while, and that I just bought in the five dollar bin at Walmart.  I remember it as being good, but it seems I was mistaken.  It was so stupid and unrealistic!  Now, I know the Die Hard films are not exactly known for their realism, but in a post 9/11 world, just about every detail seemed wrong to me.  And I KNOW that even though security at airports used to be more lax, it was never as lax as it was made to seem in this movie.  If you haven’t seen this movie, proceed carefully because there are SPOILERS below!

The first thing I noticed was that no one had cellphones!  That was really strange, but not unrealistic, as this movie takes place in 1990.  So the set up is that John McClane, a cop on vacation from LA is at Dulles airport in Northern Virginia to pick up his wife Holly from the airport.  It is Christmas Eve.  His beeper goes off and he goes to a payphone to call the number back and it’s his wife talking on the phone from the plane.  They will be delayed so he goes to a lounge to wait.  He’s smoking (SMOKING INSIDE!) and waiting and he becomes suspicious of something that no one else would be suspicious of.  He follows the man who goes into a secure area.  The door is locked so he flashes a badge at a janitor and the janitor lets him in.  While he’s in there, he confronts the man he followed in there who pulls out a gun and begins shooting at John.  Then his friends begin shooting at John.  So John pulls out HIS gun and begins shooting back.  Nevermind that he’s in an airport and there’s no way he’d have his gun because he was just picking his wife up! Even pre-9/11 you couldn’t have guns in the airport.  And whoopise,  he KILLS one of them.    During this scene he pauses to reload.  Remember this, this will be important later.  When confronted by cops, he has lost his badge (not a badge form Virginia, but from California, mind you.)  Next scene they are handing him back his badge and gun and he’s free to go.  Because it means nothing to just kill a strange man in a closed area in an airport where you have no jurisdiction anyway!

He begins telling the other police how to do their jobs (you need to seal off this area!  It’s a crime scene, man!)  During the rest of the movie, he gets shot at by machine guns on multiple occasions, but is never hit once.  He has one gun and an apparently endless supply of bullets.  Every so often, he pulls out the used magazine and relods his gun with a fresh one.  So not only did he come to the airport to pick up his wife, but he came loaded for bear!  He might as well have been wearing on of those bandolers or something.  He traipses around the secure areas of the airport, he gets involved in an investigation, he kills about 15 people AND he lights a plane on fire with aobut 25 people on board (they are all bad guys though, and bad guys don’t count) and it explodes on the runway, thus lighting the way for all of the other planes just circling endlessly to land safely too.  Except that there would be no room on one runway for multiple planes to emergency land (Holly’s plane actually puts out the little slides so they are BLOCKING the exact runway that the movie states that all the other low on fuel planes need to land on).  Anyway, after all of this carnage, he finds his wife in the wreckage and they hug and then they leave.  All that happens is that the head cop tears up a parking ticket that John got at the beginning of the movie and says “Merry Christmas.”  Because there’s no paperwork on Christmas no  matter how many dozens of folks you have just massacred.

Oh, and a woman has a taser on the plane in her purse.  I really doubt you were ever allowed to have a taser on a plane.  And they USE it on a man, which is assault.  And it knocks him unconscious for quite a while, which I’m pretty sure tasers don’t do.  Oh, and John keeps getting in fights with Special forces military men and winning in hand to hand combat because he’s such a bad ass.

This was so disappointing.  Why did I ever think this was a good movie?  Man, I could write a better movie than that.  At least I would be sure to get all the facts right.  Can’t screen writers at least try to get details right?  Because as much as I like the character of John “Alpha Male” McClane, it pulls you right out of a movie when you realize that things can’t possibly happen like that.  My son actually enjoyed the movie though.  He has very eclectic taste and you can never guess what he’ll like.  His very favorite movie is “Spice World” (Yes, with the Spice girls in it).  I have seen this movie well over 100 times and I can recite it.  I’m so proud!) Anyway, he liked Die Hard 2,  so I’m sure I’ll get to know it even better over the next few weeks… Sigh.

Remember, there will be no blog posts Saturday night or Sunday night.  My next blog post will be on Monday sometime, during the day.