Die Hard 2 (Renny Harlin, 1990): Let's remind ourselves, lest we forget: not all sequels have to suck. I need this medicine this week after suffering through Mission: Impossible II, a film that brought back memories of other such travesties like Alien 3 and Robocop 2. Throw in Return of the Living Dead 2 and Another Stakeout and it's enough to make you cynical. Hell, I'm one of six guys on earth who thinks Godfather II is a lousy picture.

So we must repeat these names like the ritual babbling of an autistic: Superman II, Lethal Weapon 2, A Shot in the Dark, Aliens, Terminator 2 . . . And finally, we can say with some confidence that not all sequels suck.

Here's another good one: Die Hard 2. Granted, the pic ain't as good as Die Hard, but that's like complaining that Britney Spears' second album "Oops! ... I Did It Again" can't compare to her smash debut "Baby One More Time" . . . You can't ask someone to improve on perfection--all you can ask is that, like with Die Hard 2 or the "Oops!" music, they come up with something fresh and awesome the second time around.

At the start of Die Hard 2, cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) has joined the L.A.P.D. in order to be closer to his wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia). He's waiting for her at Dulles airport, again at Christmas, when--bum luck--a team of highly-trained terrorists show up again. Although actually, this time they really are terrorists with a political agenda, and not just common thieves. They take over the communications for the airport and turn off the runway lights, forcing the planes above to circle, slowly running out of fuel. If their demands to have some South American dictator freed are not met they will crash every place up there, and they crash one big one, filled with hundreds of passengers, to show how they'd do it.

And of course, since Holly is up on one of those planes (amusingly and coincidentally seated next to William Atherton's Richard Thornberg from the first film), John has got to figure out a way to thwart the terrorists, convince the local authorities that there are terrorists, and get the planes safely on the ground. Once you get over the unlikelihood that McClane would find himself involved in two so similar, consecutive Christmases (and the film makes fun of this several times on its own to defuse the issue), Die Hard 2 features some great set pieces, as McClane storms a runway, ejects himself from an exploding plane, and Holly gets to zap Thornberg with a stun gun. The first one blew you through the back wall of the theatre--this one will blow you sky high, or something to that effect.

The downsides: well, the picture ain't as tight, with the action being more spread out than the single-building locale of Die Hard. My main complaint was in the casting: director Renny Harlin doesn't have the eye for good characters that John McTiernan has, so rather than Argyle, Hart Bochner, Alexander Godunov and Alan Rickman, we get dully familiar character actors like John Amos, Art Evans, Dennis Franz, Senator Fred Dalton Thompson and the forgettable William Sadler as the villain. It's like Harlin was afraid of having anyone on the set with more personality than himself.

But still, if you didn't know about Die Hard, you'd think Die Hard 2 was a great pic. And even as a sequel, it does a fine job of delivering the entertainment and not fucking up the characters (for a sequel that then goes and fucks up the characters, look no further than the barely-related Die Hard With a Vengeance).

This is a good picture to rent to wash away the nasty taste of MI2. See it again.