PLOT

On Christmas Eve 1990, two years after the Nakatomi Tower Incident, former NYC police officer John McClane now working for the LA Police Department is waiting at Dulles International Airport for wife Holly to arrive from Los Angeles. Reporter Richard Thornburg, who had exposed Holly's identity to Hans Gruber in the Nakatomi Tower, is assigned a seat across the aisle from her.

In the airport bar, McClane observes two men in Army fatigues behaving suspiciously and pursues them into the baggage area. After a shootout, McClane kills one of them, Oswald Cochrane, while the other escapes. Learning Cochrane was believed to have been killed in action while serving in Honduras, McClane tells airport police captain Carmine Lorenzo, who dismisses his concerns.

Former U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel William Stuart and other former members of his unit establish a base in a church near Dulles. They hack into the air traffic control systems, sever communication with the planes, and deactivate the runway lights, leaving Dulles ATC unable to land aircraft. Their goal is to rescue General Ramon Esperanza, a drug lord and dictator of Val Verde, being extradited to the United States to stand trial on drug trafficking charges.

They demand a Boeing 747 cargo plane so they can escape to another country with Esperanza, and warn the airport controllers against restoring control. With his wife on one of the planes circling above Washington, D.C., with too little fuel to be redirected, McClane prepares to fight the terrorists, allying himself with a janitor, Marvin, to gain greater access to the airport.

Dulles communications director Leslie Barnes heads to an unfinished antenna array with a SWAT team to re-establish communications with the planes, but they are ambushed and killed in the firefight, though McClane rescues Barnes and kills Stuart's men. Stuart retaliates by crashing a British jetliner. A U.S. Army Special Forces team led by Major Grant is called in. By listening in on a two-way radio dropped by one of Stuart's henchmen, McClane learns that Esperanza, having killed his captors is now landing his plane.

McClane reaches the aircraft before Stuart's men. Trapping him in the cockpit, they throw in grenades, but McClane escapes via the ejection seat seconds before they detonate. Barnes helps McClane locate the mercenaries' hideout, and they tell Grant to raid the location, but the mercenaries escape. McClane pursues them but is stunned to discover the mercenaries' guns are loaded with blanks, concluding that the Special Forces team are in fact Stuart's subordinates.

McClane demands Lorenzo intercept the Boeing 747, the mercenaries' escape plane; but he refuses to listen until McClane fires at the Captain with the blank gun, fed-up and proving his story. On Holly's flight, a suspicious Thornburg, monitoring airport radio traffic, learns about the situation from a secret transmission between Barnes and the circling planes. He phones in and broadcasts a sensational and exaggerated take on what is happening, leading to panic and preventing officers from reaching the escape plane, until Holly subdues Thornburg with a stun gun.

McClane gets on a news helicopter that puts him on the wing of the taxiing mercenaries' 747, preventing it from taking off. Grant, fighting McClane, falls into a jet engine. Stuart knocks McClane off the plane and frees its wing, but doesn't notice the fuel hatch was open. McClane ignite the trail of fuel, leading up to the jet, and causing it to explode. The circling planes use the fire trail to help them land. As the passengers are rescued, Holly and McClane happily embrace.

CAST

Bruce Willis as John McClane

Bonnie Bedelia as Holly Gennero McClane

William Atherton as Dick Thornburg

Reginald VelJohnson as Sergeant Al Powell

Franco Nero as General Ramon Esperanza

William Sadler as Colonel William Stuart

John Amos as Major Grant

Dennis Franz as Captain Carmine Lorenzo

Art Evans as Leslie Barnes,

Fred Dalton Thompson as Ed Trudeau,

Tom Bower as Marvin

Sheila McCarthy as Samantha 'Sam' Coleman

Robert Costanzo as Sergeant Vito Lorenzo

Colm Meaney as Windsor Pilot

Additional cast members include Stuart's henchmen: Don Harvey as Garber, John Costelloe as Sergeant Oswald Cochrane, Vondie Curtis-Hall as Miller, John Leguizamo as Burke, Robert Patrick as O'Reilly, Tom Verica as Kahn, Tony Ganios as Baker, Michael Cunningham as Sheldon, Peter Nelson as Thompson, Ken Baldwin as Mulkey, and Mark Boone Junior as Shockley. Patrick O'Neal appears as Telford, Major Grant's radio operator.