So now that the annual “is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” thread has reappeared I want bring up a line dialogue that always irks me when I watch the film. Right after Guber shot Takagi he goes to the hostages and informs them that Takagi won’t be “joining them for the rest of his life.” surely it should be “the rest of your lives” i.e. the hostages lives. Takagi is already dead at this point, there’s no rest of his life anymore.
The scene on YouTube:
The line works, even if the logic doesn’t.
The baddys shoot out the glass partitions and McClane leaves a bloody trail to the bathroom where he picks out the shards. Why didn’t they follow the blood?
Not real likely McClane could get enough traction to crawl into an air vent while bouncing downward inside the main shaft, either. Didn’t Mythbusters test the physics of that once? :dubious: 
Come on- somebody can fan wank an explanation for this.
They were busy - they all had jobs to do to complete the robbery, and McClane was mostly an annoyance (I don’t remember if they knew he had the detonators then?).
So he was contained/slowed down, and they went back to their assigned tasks for a bit. Of course, as in villian monologuing, it turned out to be a bad choice.
The carpet/tile/concrete was red, man! [fanwank]
More to the point, the glass was an interior window, which is required to be safety glass.
Why did the C4 detonate when he dropped it down the shaft? It needs a detonator, or fire and an impact. Not just an impact; kinda why they designed it that way, so it doesn’t go off if you get shot in the C4 pouch.
Why the hell didn’t he just toss all the c4 and detonators out one of the open windows? Removes all possible chance that they could be recovered by the terrorists/thieves.
McClane put the C4 on an office chair, poked some of the detonators into it, then put a computer monitor (the big, old kind) on top of that and wrapped the cord around the chair. Then he pushed the chair down the elevator shaft. I don’t know if that would be enough to trigger a detonator, but they were present.
Maybe I’m giving McClane too much credit, but I always figured he put the monitor on top specifically to activate the detonators. Old CRT tubes can let off a mighty electrical discharge under the right circumstances. I thought he’d added the monitor in the hope that, when it smashed, it would release enough electricity to activate the detonators and set off the C4.
This sounds like something an English teacher would nitpick over.
Mama plant taught English. I still haven’t figured some things out.
It is a Christmas movie for me. It beats the hell out of Miracle on Something Street and It’s a Wonderful Life.
My biggest issue is a single block of C4 isn’t going to be as destructive as shown.
Yeah, but the baddies were using a rocket launcher, so the C4 may have detonated the spare munitions.
McClane himself appears surprised, as well. They take the trouble to show/film Willis looking down the shaft, spotting a fireball coming up toward him, so that he can look surprised and dive out of the way. (I think his shirt is already torn by this point.)
Gruber. The man’s name was Hans Gruber.
I think he’s surprised that he can see a fireball that’s approaching him at 26,000 ft. per second.
Is that the terminal velocity if C-4?
Unladen C-4?