Headscratchers / Die Hard with a Vengeance

• We get a big speech about how safe the binary liquid bombs are until they are mixed and they'll never explode. Which begs the question why none of the characters on finding a bomb that hasn't mixed yet doesn't simply rip out the mixing tubes (or in the case of the bomb in the school, take a fire axe to the tubes.) Remember, till they mix, there's nothing to explode.
  • Well, the one guy mentions something about the one in the school probably being booby-trapped, but that aside, yeah. You'd think someone would at least lampshade what seems to be a fairly obvious weakness in the bomb's design.
  • Even with booby traps, they should be able to drain the fluid from one of the tanks. I don't think there is a booby trap that triggers the bomb if someone drills a hole in one of the tanks. If they're worried about the decreased weight of the tank triggering the bomb, they could either replace the fluid with water or drain it really fast so there isn't enough liquid left for the bomb to explode.
    • Hmm, this idea sounds familiar...
    • They may not have wanted to risk it.
  • And let's not forget that, if you cut the mixing tubes, it doesn't even matter if it's booby trapped or not. If the liquids don't mix, the bomb won't work.
    • Let's not forget that McClane and Zeus were specifically confronted with a puzzle bomb where they had to match an exact amount of liquid. So the bombers clearly know how to set a bomb triggered by fluid weight and the cops couldn't risk a similar device triggering the school bomb.
  • This is probably overthinking it, but it could theoretically be booby trapped to destroy or release the contents of all canisters if the device is messed with. Considering that the mixed substance is detonated by physical shock rather than ignition (or a mix of the two) it would still be pretty dangerous if mixed together outside of the bomb. (And say, all over the floor around your feet.)
    • Or, the bomb could simply be booby-trapped with a small amount of C4. It doesn't blow up the school, but it at least takes out the EOD tech, and usually one fatality is enough to make the person in charge at the scene say, "hold on, let's wait for someone to think of something else."
    • Not to mention, if the "small amount of C4" goes off, the holding tanks would be breached. Back to the "all over the floor around your feet" theory.
  • Another problem is that, being the expert bomb makers they are they might have had a kind of motion sensitive trap, basically any kind of vibration over a certain amount say by, drilling a hole into the tanks, may activate the bomb, moving the bomb doesn't activate it but the continual vibration of a drill might have.
• McClane and Zeus defuse a bomb in a park, and then carry it with them because some kids might be hurt. When they hand it over to the bad guys' Mooks, posing as cops, one starts to leave it behind when they're called back to base, only for his partner to berate him for leaving it where it could hurt some kids. When it later turns out the bomb planted in a school was a distraction, Simon points out that he could never hurt children, as he's not a monster.
  • Also note that the bombs he *does* set off are in a storefront before business hours and in the subway station under Wall Street, neither of which would likely have any kids in it on a work day.
  • However, when the first fake cop is finished berating his friend for considering leaving it, they take it with them. They later use this bomb to blow up the dam, flooding the aqueduct. It was a live bomb. Simon may be a monster after all. That said, he may have anticipated the Good Samaritan's actions.
    • Think of Simon's plan: he wants McClane to succeed all the way, only failing at the near impossible task of cutting across town to reach the destination train station. As part of this plan, the bomb's not going to go off, is it?
• When they evacuate the school, there is still a group of kids locked in a classroom(including Zeus's... nephews?) so two of the cops run in and get them out the locked class, then, for some reason, they decide to take the kids to roof, on the chance they could leap to the next building, which turns out to be too far, why didn't they just backtrack out of the school, going by the timeframe it took them longer to get to the roof than it would to run back downstairs and out?
• How did Simon figure out what school Zeus's kids were attending to place the fake bomb or that they existed in an extremely limited timespan, especially when apparently it was delivered to the school that same morning?
  • He didn’t. They were at that school by chance.