Headscratchers / Live Free or Die Hard

• There's a scene where the Big Bad reads aloud all the info about John McClane. That is his cop pension and family information, but NOTHING about John being a virtual superhero, who fought off three terrorist threats in the past. For that matter, how did John manage to remain a regular detective after all of the events in previous films?
  • The purpose of that scene is that Big Bad reads information that should be secure as a way of telling John just how good his hackers are in order to intimidate him. Everyone knows John McClane saved the hostages at Nakatomi Plaza, so there's no point in saying that. He then blanks those accounts to try and use it as leverage—immediately after, he tells John that if he kills the kid, he'll put it all right back and then wipe out his debts on top of that because he's just such a nice guy. Sure, it's a little bit of Wrong Genre Savvy that the guy doesn't realize that he's following in the footsteps of three dead guys, but that's pretty standard for a villain.
    
    As for managing to stay a regular detective, well, what else is he supposed to do? Life goes on even after stopping a terrorist threat a couple times, so he's going to continue doing his job. Stopping three attacks over the span of a decade is, yes, somewhat above average, but it doesn't make you a "virtual superhero"—especially considering he almost certainly had to spend weeks recovering from each—and it doesn't mean you can just retire and live the high life. As the third movie showed, even being John McClane and saving your wife from two terrorist attacks doesn't mean you can even save your marriage.
    • Not to mention that while John thrives in a crisis, from what we see of his life outside those crises he does struggle to manage his day-to-day life. His life, frankly, is a self destructive mess; it is more a miracle he manages to stay a detective in the first place. It is likely all his juice as a celebrity is spent on just not getting himself fired. Sure a smarter and less self destructive person might be able to parlay those events into promotions and maybe even a speaking tour and (ghostwritten) book, but that person ain't John McClane.
• In Die Hard 4.0, the bad guys have hired a whole bunch of hackers to get their code in place, but to stop them talking have placed bombs in their computers that go off when they press a particular key after delivering the code. Wouldn't it have been easier to use a remote detonator? It's not as if they were short of resources as they even had a hit squad in place to take out the target in case they avoided the bomb.
  • Most people aren't really smart enough to realize that computers don't just blow up. A squad of guys filing out of a van is more suspicious than a critical hardware failure.
    • True, but the point is the bad guys did set up the hackers' computers to explode but in a really stupid way - if you assume that the hackers aren't going to notice the bomb (which our hero didn't) why not have it set off remotely so you don't need to send in the SWAT team? And if you can't, for some reason (the receiver would have to be too big, or something) then at least have it activated by a key that he's much more likely to press (like the "Space Bar"). Team Evil's actions only served to point John McClane in the direction of the plot!
    • To answer why they didn't use space, it's because the bomb (or possibly something they programmed into the computer) caused the system to hang. What's the first thing they do when the computer hangs. Control alt delete.
    • Yes, we know how the bomb works, but the point is, making a bomb that requires the target to detonate it is a stupid thing to do when it's entirely possible to make one you can blow up whenever the hell you feel like it.
    • Even size doesn't excuse it. Considering that they were obviously able to get into the targets' homes, get to their computers, and plant the explosive without being noticed, they could just as easily have planted a remote bomb elsewhere in the home or room. Or even have placed a secondary bomb in case the first one failed for some reason (like it did here).
    • They pull up in the van, and they activate/upload some kind of "virus" which causes the computer to lock up. When the hackers hit the delete key to try and clear the bug for whatever reason, it detonates the block of C4. They try and focus it a little, to make sure they get the guy. If for whatever reason the C4 doesn't detonate, they call in the French guys to finish the job. It's a little convoluted, but then again, this is from the mind of a guy who initiated the world's largest ever cyberterrorism attack as a cover to stealing loads of money.
    • This seems to prove that they can not only plant explosives in the house but also send just about whatever transmission into the house while sitting outside. The reason this is [Fridge Logic] is that by making the bomb contingent on pressing a button on the keyboard it means that the hacker is near the computer when it explodes, which seems sensible. But that's negated if you have a guy in a van outside watching the house who can see the hacker and tell when he's near the bomb.
    • I always thought the explanation was disturbingly simple. Gabriel is an arrogant, sick, fuck who simply enjoys the thought that these other lesser nerds will actively end their own lives by failing to notice he is the uber-nerd and has rigged their own computers against them. The whole thing is as much about his salving his wounded ego as it is about the money.
    • Blowing the computer served a secondary function. It ensured that if any of the hackers kept a record of what they'd done, it was destroyed, and that no one investigating the blast would find anything about the kids' doings.
    • Simple. Setting up the bomb to go off when you hit the delete key ensures that the hacker is in proximity to the bomb. Remote detonating it with your own gear runs the risk that the hacker might get up to take a piss or lean back or otherwise be in a position to not get exploded. But if he's leaning over his keyboard and hitting the delete key, he's right there up close to the bomb.
    • Yeah, but they've got a dude right there on the next roof watching anyway. It's not like they'd be remote detonating it at random, they seem to be pretty easily able to look into the rooms, so they oughta be able to tell when the guy's around.
    • Now, see, at this point I've given you a perfectly good reason for why to hook it up to the delete key, and you're just saying "But they still could have done it some other way!" So frankly it looks less like you're asking "Why did they do it this way?" and more like you're saying "I've caught the scriptwriters being dumb! Praise me!" and don't want to listen to other thoughts on the matter.
  • The virus wasn't transmitted by the van. It was transmitted in the final transaction between Gabriel's people and the hackers. The van was just there to make sure it went off and to observe.
    • Except that it was transmitted from the van. There was even a fancy pop-up that said "uploading virus."
  • There's another possible explanation - they're trying to avoid leaving evidence. Yeah, the exploded hacker smeared across the walls is a bit suspicious, but as mentioned above, it seems like a lot of people don't know that computers don't just blow up. Identifying chemical residue as plastic explosive takes longer than identifying some debris recovered from the site as a remote detonator or a timer. Rigging it to the computer itself so the hacker detonates the bomb himself eliminates that evidence. The end effect is it buys them a little more time to enact their plan. It's still a stretch, but less so than "we just wanted to make it complicated."
    • Or maybe the intention was to make it look like the hackers has rigged their own computers with explosives as a self-destruct mechanism - a drastic means of destroying evidence if they came under suspicion of individual online crimes - but had accidentally triggered a premature and far larger explosion than they'd planned. It wouldn't be the first time a novice bomb-maker blew themselves up by mistake, after all.
• The fighter pilot just launching missiles at McClane's truck in busy traffic with many civilian vehicles around, and not asking basic questions as to why isn't local police dealing with this or not calling his actual flight controller on verification.