Bruce Willis wonders aloud how it could happen to him again, but dons the white singlet anyway for this second hugely entertaining slice of action hokum. Director Renny Harlin makes no attempt to re-create the intriguing battle of wits in the original between Alan Rickman and Willis, and instead cheerfully piles on the increasingly grand explosions and set pieces. This time Willis uncovers a terrorist plot on the ground and in the air, as he waits for his wife to fly in to a snowbound Washington airport. Bonnie Bedelia is once again Willis's jinxed spouse, while Reginald VelJohnson and William Atherton reprise their roles from the original. There are also welcome appearances from 1960s star Franco Nero and Dennis Franz from NYPD Blue.

One year after his heroics in Los Angeles, John McClane is an off-duty cop who is the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. On a snowy Christmas Eve, as he waits for his wife's plane to land at Washington Dulles International Airport, terrorists take over the air traffic control system in a plot to free a South American army general and drug smuggler being flown into the US to face drug charges. It's now up to McClane to take on the terrorists, while coping with an inept airport police chief, an uncooperative anti-terrorist squad, and the life of his wife and everyone else trapped in planes circling overhead.