There's a locked door between the character and his objective. What to do? Get out the lockpicks? Shoot the door? Nope. It's time to get out the drill.
Truth in Television: Locksmiths will sometimes do this as an absolute last resort if the door, safe, whatever absolutely has to be opened now.
Compare "Open!" Says Me for smashing the door. Subtrope of Cutting the Knot and Bullethole Door.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- In the Case Closed story "The Case of Ayumi's Illustrated Diary", the culprit takes advantage of renovation work going on in a cafe to dig underground to evade the security shutters. The watch shop's cameras and sensors were hacked and the electronic keypad with keylock was drilled through to get it open.
Film — Live-Action
- The cabal of thieves from Die Hard must drill through four locks on the Nakatomi Tower's vault to get at the bearer bonds inside. They succeed, but The Smart Guy points out that "Bam! The electromagnetic [lock] came down like a wall." The Chessmaster, however, has a Batman Gambit to defeat that.
- In Enemy of the State, the NSA attempts this when breaking into Daniel Zavitz's flat before simply kicking the door down.
- The Guns of Navarone: Captain Mallory and Corporal Miller get inside the cave where the guns are kept and close the armored door behind them. The German soldiers try several techniques to get the door open, including hitting it with sledgehammers and trying to drill through the lock with jackhammers.
- In The Italian Job (2003), Stella sort of does this when cracking safes. The hole she drills is for getting a borescope inside to have a look at the safe's locking mechanisms, though.
- Semi-example in No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh uses his bolt gun to punch the lock out of a hotel door.
- Rififi has a variant. During a jewel heist, the crew tips the safe over, and their safecracker Cesar drills a big hole in the back, so they can reach in and grab the jewels.
- Both robberies in Thief (1981) are simply brute forced. In the first heist, against a safe, Frank uses a drill with a magnetized plate to bore through the wall until the tumblers are exposed, which he then just knocks out with a hammer and screwdriver. For the second, more elaborate vault, Frank's crew uses a thermal lance, which not so much drills as it does just melts whole grooves in the vault door until they just pry a chunk of it loose so they can crawl inside. The drill was even genuine tool used by burglars, for authenticity.
- Happens in Uncle Buck while the title character was looking for Tia at the party. He scares the crap out of Bug and saves the girl he was with from being date-raped. It turns out Tia was elsewhere, however.
Live-Action TV
- The Brittas Empire: In "In the Beginning...", the staff are trapped in the leisure centre due to a blizzard, with their remaining food supplies locked with three padlocks in a locker. Trouble is that Colin's key was left in an area of the centre which froze overnight, so Brittas gets Colin to drill around the padlock to get into the locker. Unfortunately, alcohol was being kept in the locker, and it was the drill coming into contact with it which causes the locker to go up in flames, ruining the supplies.
- One Burn Notice episode has a group of bank robbers using a liquid nitrogen gun and an air hammer to drill out the locks on a safe deposit box vault. Michael sabotages the air hammer by sticking a match into the locking collar, which makes the piston shoot out and hit one of the robbers in the leg.
- Doctor Who: In "Survival", the Master is attempting to drill out the TARDIS lock when the Doctor, whom he thought he'd killed, returns for their final confrontation.
- Downplayed in season 5 of Game of Thrones when Sansa Stark uses a primitive hand drill to open a lock in the Bolton-held Winterfell. She does not drill metal per se, she just screws the drill in the lock mechanism and turns it forcibly.
- In the short-lived series Kaz, Martin "Kaz" Kazinsky is a former crook turned straight and is now a lawyer at a major law firm. He is Wrongfully Accused by a couple of car thieves of having taught them how to steal cars. As a part of his defense, at trial, they go out to the parking lot where the two thieves demonstrate the way they steal cars as allegedly taught to them by Kaz. They use an electric drill to drill through the lock, which takes upwards of 30 seconds to do. After their demonstration, Kaz uses a hand drill to pop the other lock in about 2 seconds, then hops into the car and hotwires it. The defense asks: if Kaz taught them how to steal cars, don't you think he'd have taught them the right way to do it?
- This is used in the third season of Line of Duty when Central Police launches a raid on the apartment of deceased firearms officer Danny Waldron to secure any evidence on his death. Since the man had no next to kin and no one to contact, the officers had to resort to drilling the lock on his apartment door to gain access.
- In the NCIS: Los Angeles episode "The Reckoning", Callen and Pembrook try to hide in a room in a makeshift server room that has a bomb and rustproof door meant to survive bullets. The Drone children try to breach it by using a powered drill to destroy the lock.
- In Occupied, Free Norway fighters drill the locked door leading to an indoor swimming pool in order to abduct Russian Ambassador (to Norway) Sidorova after killing her close protection officers.
Tabletop Games
- In The Great Kitchen Escape
, the object is to build a drill out of items found around the kitchen for this purpose.
Video Games
- In Call of Duty: Ghosts, during the "Clockwork" mission, the player character helps drill through the hydraulic seals of a vault door protecting an R&D facility. Players have to drill just far enough to avoid triggering the back trip plate countermeasure, and afterwards, thermite and explosives are used to blow the hinges.
- The first heist in Grand Theft Auto Online involves robbing the Fleeca bank. There are two members for this heist, with one making sure all of the witnesses are standing still and doing nothing to stop it, and the other opening a safe by using a drill on it.
- This is the default way of opening secure doors in PAYDAY: The Heist and PAYDAY 2. However, drilling is usually very loud (attracts attention from guards and civilians) and takes a long time, during which the drills must be protected against attackers.
Real Life
- In Real Life, a power drill equipped with a fairly large bit can utterly destroy common cylinder locks.
