Interesting, that fine line. The ONLY uncomfortable moment for me was sitting next to my 15 1/2 year old daughter and watching the opening scene where the boy clearly grasps her boob a few times.
But I did love that she said, NO !! 
The F35 or Joint Strike Fighter is in development. Certainly not fielded yet. The movie must have been set in the future. I think they have a prototype now. The Marine variant is supposed to be a short-takeoff/vertical landing (STOVL) jet. It is not being designed to fight like an attack helicopter like it was shown in the movie.
I forgot to mention the one thing that really took me out of the movie. And it was completely in my head. Whenever I saw Zeljko Ivanek on screen I expected him to be a traitor working for the bad guy. It had nothing to do with what was on screen it had everything to do with all the weasely characters he has played in the past.
Thanks for that.
Of course it must have taken place in the future. When’s the last time the on-ramp to 695 wasn’t jammed with traffic? 
I thought the same thing. I wanted to yell out “Don’t trust him, he’s a DRAZEN!”
The only thing that could have improved it:
John Hodgeman as the villain.
I asked a friend who works for Lockheed as an aerospace engineer, and who had seen the movie, about the scene with the fighter. He basically said that the capabilities of the jet were stretched a bit, but not fabricated. However, there’s no way it would have missed a heat source as big as that truck with its missiles, and no way the truck would have survived a near-miss.
Zeljko Ivanek. I love that McClane called him “Waxworks.” Funny stuff. The trouble I had was seeing Bully from Once Were Warriors as good guy Bowman. That’s a dude I can really hate.
Did anybody else catch McClane’s reaction to having an Agent Johnson (“no relation”) be his FBI escort? 
Anyhow, it was a fun ride, but I agree that the F-35 stuff seemed out of place, like a 4-minute Pentagon ad: “We need more funding! We can get it off the ground but our targeting systems are for shit!!”
Apparently, when all the phone systems are down and the entire East coast is in a panic OnStar will still be up and running and the operators will cheerfully help you with your car.
I think the main point (at least the one I was making) was that the jet wouldn’t have needed to GET that close…it could have stood off, oh, say a mile or two and engaged from there. Thats assuming it was going to just go into Harrier mode in the first place…which I can’t see why it would. If they required that kind of thing they would have sent in a gunship…which would have stood off a few miles and engaged from there. 
Well, everyone knows that OnStar is a highly secure network, more robust and hardened (and self correcting) than even the finest military network in the world! 
(at this point in the movie my wife was giving me the elbow because I was literally shaking with silent laughter…it was a real effort to keep the snorts of mirth contained so as not to disturb my fellow movie go-ers :)).
-XT
Well, it’s a matter of taste, of course, but I’d say skip No. 2 and rent the third movie, Die Hard With a Vengeance. That one has Samuel Jackson, and some great interplay between him and Willis as they run all over New York.
The second movie wasn’t just stupid, it somehow just didn’t feel right, at least to me.
Just saw the movie a second time, with my brother. When Hacker Lad was getting the nice lady to start the car, I leaned over and said, “The FBI should route everything through OnStar!”
*Late to the party & I’m sorry (like I ever get to see anything even close to opening night) *
Q: In the car, when Bruce Willis is driving, it shows him in profile a Lot. As it did, I noticed something wierd: His nose lookes really different. Maybe I’d never seen him from that angle before, but it looked like someone had sanded down the front/side of the tip of his nose with an axle-grinder to make it form a pointier point. I really don’t ever remember his nose looking like that. At all.
Q: Was there an accident on a set that I didn’t hear about?
All I can picture is Willis a la Chief Inspector Dreyfus hiding behind a desk and yelling "Shut up, you fools, and help me find my Nose!!!
Sorry to zombify this thread but I just got this one from netflix and wanted to comment on it. I thought it was merely a passable action movie and definitely not as good as the other Die Hards. The story was ludicrous, the plot was swiss cheese, and all the classic Mclane antics felt tacked on. This script definitely didn’t start its life as a Die Hard movie.
A few gripes:
The assassins kill hackers by loading their computers with C4, which detonates after they give it a virus and the user hits the delete key. Could they think of a more convoluted or less reliable way to kill someone?
Mclane’s asked at 3 in the morning to pick up a suspect and he just happens to have no less than three loaded clips on him. What plain clothes cop carries that much ammo on them?
The director gave it the same damn blue-green filter he used in his Underworld films (which are also mediocre by the way).
The super criminal’s second in command is a smoking hot babe; he has an army of faceless henchmen, and a secret, technology-laden base. This isn’t supposed to be a Bond flick.
Mclane knocks a guy out of a helicopter with a blast of water from a hydrant and then destroys the helicopter by launching a car off a ramp at it. What happened to him just crawling through air ducts and shooting people?
Every cell network in the country is down, but when the airbags in a BMW go off the onstar still works and they can talk to an operator.
The VTOL plane scene was done before (and better) in True Lies. Other cliché bad guy deaths; frozen by liquid nitrogen, fall into a shredder, and kicked down an elevator shaft.
I can suspend disbelief… within limits.
Good point. Most of the cops I’ve known have carried about 5. (Along with a back up piece, and either pepper spray or a kubaton.)
Saw this on DVD recently, and thought the best thing about it was the *Die Hard * music video as an extra: I presume this was on the region 1 release also?
I just watched it again on DVD over the thanksgiving holidays. I actually liked it a little better the second time I saw it. Mostly I caught more one-liners and commentary between McClaine and the kid from the Mac/PC commercial.
That was the biggest problem I had. The whole point of the Die Hard films is John McClaine is this working class Everyman outmatched by a bunch of sophisticated terrorists with no support from his incompetant peers in the police department. He’s badass and has a lot of street smarts so one on one, he can take them out, but he has to spend a lot of time crawling through tunnels and jumping down elevator shafts. He’s not supposed to be this superhuman Schwartziniggerian killing machine who can throw cars at helicopters.
Overall, Odd numbered Die Hards where McClaine fights euroterrorists led by one of the Grubber brothers = awesome. Even numbered terrorists where McClaine fights turncoat government agents who hack into shit = meh.
I went into it thinking “This is a live-action cartoon,” and was not disappointed in the least.
This was actually one of the nicer fine points in the movie.
They didn’t intend to whack them. The bad guys were going to originally try and schmooze them and take over just by showing up and waving badges, but once they were stopped and the guards said “the heck you are” they figured it was just easier to blow them away. C’est la vie.
I barely know how to turn a computer on and the computer stuff annoyed the hell out of me- ten seconds after detecting someone trying to breach the security on the east coast power grid, they are have a face to face with the culprit :rolleyes:
Also, a “Whaat?” two “Oh Brothers” and a “Ghaa” for the helicopter bit. And Bruce Willis driving up the parking ramp into a building he’s never been in before, and ramming into the bad girl, while knowing his ally was in same building and not knowing his whereabouts.
Why so many?