The story begins on Christmas Eve, 1990, exactly two years after the Nakatomi Plaza incident. John McClane is at Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C.. As he waits for his wife Holly to arrive from California, airport police tow away his in-laws' car and give him a parking ticket. Hanging out at an airport lounge, McClane sees a group of men, dressed in Army fatigues, and at least one of whom has a gun in his jacket, pass a package between them and disappear into a baggage handling area. He follows, and a fight ensues in which McClane kills one of the men.
McClane confronts the head of airport police, the hotheaded Captain Carmine Lorenzo, who dismisses McClane's report as punks stealing luggage, despite the fact that one of the assailants was wielding a rare porcelain gun (supposedly) capable of evading metal detectors. McClane storms off to investigate on his own, taking fingerprints from the corpse and faxing them to his friend, LAPD officer Al Powell, who runs them through several databases. The resulting records indicates that the man had been declared officially dead even before the fight, leading McClane to suspect that he had been part of a plot to seize control of the airport.
Which is exactly the truth: as weather conditions worsen, a vengeful rogue US Army officer, Colonel Stuart, prepares to hold the approaching planes and their passengers and crew hostage until he can free a former Central American general and drug lord, Ramon Esperanza, as the deposed despot is arriving at the airport under guard for trial by the United States government. Stuart has set up his operational base in a nearby church and has hacked directly into Dulles' communications and air traffic control.
McClane sneaks into the airport's control tower and confronts the head of air traffic control, Trudeau, just as Stuart commences his operation and takes control of the airport controls. McClane is chased out from the tower; as he descends in the elevator with reporter Samantha Coleman, she tips him to the presence of Stuart. McClane slips out of the elevator and into the underground maintenance area of the airport, where he gains assistance from an airport janitor named Marvin.
Trudeau and his controllers contact the approaching planes and inform the cabin crews (without mentioning the terrorists) that they must circle the airport. Trudeau’s communications director, Leslie Barnes, takes a team to a new antenna outpost at the skywalk to restore unbugged communication with the planes. He and Lorenzo’s SWAT team are attacked by a detachment of Stuart’s men. Fortunately, McClane heard about the auxiliary outpost while in the tower, and just as Barnes is about to be killed, McClane emerges and kills Stuart’s men. Stuart retaliates by crashing a British jet, killing everyone on board.
McClane returns to the underground maintenance level, where a two-way radio dropped by one of Stuart’s crew tells him that Esperanza is about to arrive in his now-commendeered plane, who has killed his guard and the pilots. McClane rushes to the runway and briefly apprehends Esperanza, before Stuart and his men show up to retrieve the general themselves. McClane hides in the cockpit of Esperanza’s plane, but Stuart and his crew toss grenades inside, forcing McClane to strap himself into the pilot’s ejector seat and escape the resulting blast by engaging the eject function.
An Army Special Forces unit arrives at the airport. Their leader, Major Grant, once served with Stuart and claims to know his tactics. Barnes surmises that Stuart’s command post is near the airport, and he and McClane find the church where Stuart is hiding. Shortly after McClane kills one of Stuart’s guards and takes possession of his submachine gun, Grant and his squad show up and a gunfight ensues. Stuart, his men and Esperanza escape on snowmobiles. McClane chases after them, but his gun left by one of Stuart's henchmen proves strangely ineffective. McClane checks the weapon and finds that the bullets are blanks.
McClane returns to the airport police station and announces to Lorenzo that Grant and Stuart are actually working together. Lorenzo thinks he is lying and attempts to arrest him, but McClane fires his submachine gun (still loaded with blanks) at Lorenzo. Finally convinced, Lorenzo mobilizes his police to converge on the hangar containing the Boeing 747 that Stuart has demanded as an escape vehicle.
Meanwhile, circling above the airport, Holly has unexpectedly found herself in the same plane as Richard Thornberg, the reporter who had endangered her and John during their previous meeting. As the terrorists' plans unfold, both Holly and Thornberg begin to realize that something is amiss; culminating in Thornberg listening into the tower radio transmissions, learning about the crisis and making a live news report from aboard the plane. The crowds in the airport watching the report are thrown into panic, which greatly hampers McClane's and Lorenzo's efforts to apprehend Stuart. Holly zaps Thornberg with a fellow passenger's stun gun.
McClane hitches a ride in Sam Coleman's news helicopter to the villains' plane, which is taxiing for takeoff. He manages to jump onto the aircraft's wing and finds himself in hand-to-hand combat with Major Grant. During the fight, Grant is sucked into one of the plane’s engines and killed, but Stuart takes up the fight and kicks McClane off the wing. As he falls, McClane opens the fuel hatch on the engine and it starts to dump. He then delivers his classic catchphrase, "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" and uses his cigarette lighter to ignite the trail of fuel, exploding the plane and resulting in a fireball. The fire from the aftermath becomes a landing light for the other planes, which all make to the ground safely. Emergency services arrive and begin evacuating the air passengers, including Holly and a badly-shaken Thornburg. McClane and Holly joyfully reunite, Lorenzo tears up McClane's parking ticket as a Christmas gift, and Marvin drives the couple off
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