Die Hard 2

Skippable, and the film knows it. McClane says the quiet part out loud early on, asking how the same thing can be happening to the same man twice, and the script has no answer beyond the box office receipts of the first one.

It is the same film with the building swapped for an airport: an enclosed site at Christmas, a team of professionals with a hidden agenda, an incompetent authority figure who refuses to listen, a sympathetic voice on the radio, and McClane crawling through infrastructure. Renny Harlin shoots it bigger and colder, and the snow gives it a look of its own.

What is missing is vulnerability. The first film works because McClane is a man who should not survive. Here he is already a legend, people recognise him, and the sense that he is out of his depth is gone. The villains are soldiers with a plan rather than thieves with a cover story, so none of them is remotely as interesting as Gruber.

It is also notably nastier. A passenger aircraft is deliberately crashed with everyone aboard, shown in full, and the film moves on from it within a minute. The icicle is the one piece of staging anybody remembers. Competent, loud, and unnecessary: if you are watching three of these, this is the one to drop.