Who was it, who was a bomb expert here? Say the name and I’ll remember.
Letal Weapon 2 is on TV. Earlier, Danny Glover was on a toilet that was rigged with a bomb. It looked like a block of C4 with the associated electronics. You see this kind of bomb a lot in movies.
Question: Why doesn’t anybody simply remove the detonator from the block of C4? Sure, an exploding detonator is dangerous; but at least the main charge wouldn’t explode.
You mean the obvious looking detonator attached to the wire? That’s really a switch that will set it off immediately.
I’ve noticed this several times. The caps fully exposed with no trip devices, stuck in the plastic explosive blocks. Just remove them from the blocks first. Also, the plastic explosive blocks also seem to have no trip devices attached. Then also remove the now inert blocks, away from the caps that you have just removed.
Not Tripler. The one I’m thinking of died after a motorcycling injury.
Santo Rugger? I didn’t remember him being a bomb tech though he and Tripler were close friends.
I suspect the real answer is: it’s a dramatic movie, not a documentary, and “rule of cool” nearly always supersedes “accurate depiction of reality.”
It’s also why it’s often hard to enjoy a movie that depicts something that you know a lot about, because it’s hard to shut off the part of your brain that wants to scream “it wouldn’t work that way!”
That’s him.
Yes. It often requires the suspension of belief/facts to enjoy a movie. Usually it is not so bad. Especially if the rest of the movie is of good quality in plot, acting, etc…
But sometimes it just isn’t worth the effort. The makers just did not put in the equal effort.
What is with the "Cut the red wire…No, the blue wire!! " crap? Are detonator wires really color coded that way?
Maybe the mass-produced bombs you can get at The Home Depot are. But some mad bomber working in his basement can use any color wire s/he wants.
So yeah, it’s bullshit.
On the TBS series “Wrecked” (which was sort of a spoof of “LOST”) there was a character who had claimed to have seen every action movie ever made. There was one scene where he stepped on a land mine, and was talking another character through defusing it before he stepped off. He tells the guy “Cut the red wire. It’s always the red wire!” The other guy pops open the mine, and inside it’s just a tangle of red wires. 
I’m guessing the ‘Cut the [colour] wire’ trope began with a bomb expert and another bomb expert or someone else disagreeing over the circuitry. Tension mounts as the audience wonders who is correct. The correct wire is cut, and the bomb is defused. Continuing my guess, this trope was modified by having a non-expert having to defuse a bomb. Over a phone or a radio, he describes what he sees to the expert, and the expert tells him which wire to cut.
But, myself not being a bomb expert, I look at the movie bombs and say, ‘Just pull out the detonating charge!’
It’s even more simple. If you have a detonator stuck in the C4, and it has two wires, just cut them. Then nothing will explode. No one goes to the trouble of making fake detonators with secret continuity circuits.
Given that, Juggernaut was a great movie. But in that case the bomb maker crafted the bombs to harass the bomb disposal men, Richard Harris specifically. He wanted revenge, not ransom.
I don’t know if it was the origin of that meme, but that was essentially the climax of the movie Juggernaut. Someone planted 7 bombs on a cruise ship demanding a ransom. A team of bomb experts led by Richard Harris were brought on board to defuse them. The bombs were full of traps - at least one of them detonated white they were trying to defuse it. They got to the point where there were 2 wires, a red and a blue - one would defuse the bomb, one would detonate it. They had in the meantime captured the bomber (who turned out to be the bomb expert who had trained Richard Harris), and he told them to cut the blue wire. At the last second Harris cut the red instead, which turned out to be the correct choice.
Here’s the clip of the scene. It also had a really young Anthony Hopkins & Ian Holm apparently.
Arghh - Ninja’d by JAQ. But leaving for the links.
It’s worth it. I love that movie.
The cast is just nuts - Omar Sharif, Richard Harris, Roy Kinnear, Ian Holmes, Anthony Hopkins, Julian Glover. And directed by Richard Lester!
One of my favorite Internet cartoons - Dog Fort - covers the bomb defusing perfectly"
The joke being that the land mine had wires in it? 
I always thought the “cut the XXX wire” would have come from defusing unexploded bomb in WWII where they would have come from a factory producing them by the 10,000 count batch. And there were enough unexploded around for people to get experience in defusing them.