Basic Trope: A plot in which the villain takes over a location, but at least one person is overlooked and fights back using guerrilla or other unconventional tactics.
- Straight: Emperor Evulz seizes the facility Bob works in, capturing everybody but him. Having managed to slip under the radar, Bob must now figure out how to defeat Evulz using only himself, the element of surprise, and anything he currently has at his disposal.
- Exaggerated:
- Evulz takes over an entire country à la Live Free or Die Hard before getting foiled by Bob without ever learning of his existence.
- The site the Die Hard rip-off takes place in is actually designed to facilitate the heroes' struggle in said situations.
- Thirty thieving gangs and terrorist conspiracies attack the building at the exact same time. One third of the cast is playing John McClane, one third of the cast are the befuddled hostages, and the final third of the cast is trying to figure out how to split the building and hostages evenly when they're not trying to kill each other.
- Downplayed:
- Evulz takes over a bus that has Bob as a passenger. He needs to figure out how to disarm him without endangering the passengers.
- Evulz breaks into Bob's apartment (or his car) and takes him hostage. Aside from a couple of attempts to escape, for the most part, it is a psychological game of cat and mouse.
- Justified: The good guys are Crazy-Prepared enough that they have a standard operating procedure and guerrilla training for hostile takeovers.
- Inverted: The good guys have won and taken over Evulz' fortress... but it turns out that the 'Evulz' they captured was Actually a Doombot and the real Evulz is the one doing the guerrilla fighting.
- Subverted:
- Bob thinks Evulz has overlooked him and has managed to put together something resembling a plan, but right as he's about to start his counterattack, Evulz cuts him off and kills him, having known what he was doing all along.
- Evulz and his goons were planning on performing that hostile takeover of a building to steal a priceless item, only to discover far too late that a localized Zombie Apocalypse killed everybody inside.
- Double Subverted:
- ...But then we learn that he has genuinely overlooked Alice, who was left in a similar position as Bob and picks up where he left off.
- But it turns out that Bob, the Sole Survivor of the building's security forces, is trapped inside and he is still determined to protect the item at all costs. The zombies are a pretty nasty obstacle for both sides, but it does nothing to dissuade them from their goals, and may end up being weaponized at differing points.
- Parodied:
- The whole situation is a Whole-Plot Reference to Die Hard, even copying many signature scenes... only made sillier, such as the billions in bearer bonds being instead highly-priced skateboards, the hostage takers making stupid demands like naked pictures of Whoopi Goldberg (or Bea Arthur), and the 'removing glass from feet' scene being the clipping of a chipped toenail.
- Die Hard in the Giant Vegetable Competition of Tottington Hall, with the hostages being the giant vegetables (and no humans). The hostage takers are still labeled as monsters.
- Zig Zagged: The story makes use of multiple Decoy Protagonists and Evulz playing Hot Potato with the Villain Ball as he spends various amounts of time overlooking the heroes, contending with them, killing them, and going ahead with his plan unchallenged without him or the audience knowing that someone else is still fighting back somewhere, such that it's never clear how many non-hostages are still left in the facility or if Evulz has killed all of them.
- Averted:
- Everyone is captured, leaving no one to fight back against Evulz.
- Bob doesn't plays guerrilla. He just charges in and kills all of the hostage-takers in a fell swoop. The situation probably doesn't lasts more than a few minutes.
- Enforced: "Die Hard was a really popular movie. Let's write a similar plot for Bob!"
- Lampshaded:
- "Damn, we're basically living out Die Hard right now!"
- "Now I know how John McClane felt."
- Invoked:
- Bob realizes that Evulz is coming and hides himself ahead of time, with several things he thinks will be useful, so that he will be ready to fight back efficiently as soon as he needs to.
- Jim decides that sabotaging Evulz' scheme from within will be easier if there is an alleged man, let's call him "Bob", performing said sabotage unrelentingly and making Evulz look like a fool.
- Exploited: Realizing the circumstances of his predicament, Bob intentionally chooses guerrilla as his strategy because that's how the bad guys always get defeated in situations like this.
- Defied:
- Emperor Evulz instructs his mooks to thoroughly search the location for stowaways so as to make sure that no one has slipped under his radar.
- Evulz orders the complete destruction of every part of the building that is not under his control.
- Evulz starts killing hostages right away and makes a demand for anybody that has not been captured to make themselves known or people will suffer.
- Discussed: Alice and Charlie notice that Bob isn't among the hostages, and wonder if he might be planning a counterattack from somewhere inside the facility.
- Conversed: "The Right Man in the Wrong Place has some good odds in a hostage scenario, if he has the element of surprise..."
- Implied: The P.O.V. character is someone outside the facility who only gets glimpses of what's happening inside, such as windows blowing out, mooks getting thrown through them, and spurts of copious gunfire. When Evulz is finally vanquished, Bob is clearly the dirtiest and most beat up of everyone who comes out.
- Deconstructed: Bob's guerilla warfare defeats Evulz, but it also winds up completely trashing both his workplace and his own body. He is hospitalized for an extended period in order to recover, while all his co-workers are furloughed until their place of work is repaired and cleaned up.
- Reconstructed: Bob's story of fighting against absurd odds and succeeding becomes legend within his workplace (with all the perks that it carries), and his fellow co-workers figure out that they need to learn how to prevent something like this from happening again (or how to win if something like this does happen again).
- Played For Laughs:
- Bob is a completely incompetent nincompoop that...
- Manages to stumble his way into being Mistaken for Badass.
- Is up against hostage-takers that are such morons that an idiot like him is capable of pulling off their defeat.
- Believes he has what it takes to be the hero in his predicament, but said incompetence showcases that he is, at best, a Decoy Protagonist.
- Bob has been caught up in so many instances of this trope in his past that it's now an Unusually Uninteresting Sight to him.
- Bob is such an immense badass that the whole situation is glossed over in a Gilligan Cut — actually seeing the ensuing Curb-Stomp Battle implies that the terrorists had anything resembling a fighting chance or that Bob actually gave a shit about the situation.
- The plot is such a deliberate Whole-Plot Reference to Die Hard that people In-Universe note the resemblance… of course, Bob will be the one person on the cast who has never seen either the original or any of the billion copycats.
- Bob is a completely incompetent nincompoop that...
- Played For Drama:
- Even though he escapes the initial siege, Bob is caught well off-guard by Evulz' attack, and while fighting back, he struggles with the dog-shooting he has to undertake while also keeping himself from being driven into a Heroic BSoD by the stress of his life being in such great peril.
- Bob has been caught up in so many instances of this trope in the past that figuring out the best way to exploit a building's weaknesses (and leaving people behind in a hostage scenario so he can improve his fighting chances) has become second nature to him.
- The situation is a Mook Horror Show, emphasis on "horror". Bob has snapped and rather than acting like, well, John McClane, he acts like a Slasher Movie villain (with all of the danger to friend, foe and innocent bystander that this implies) and the villains are all given a focus (like talking about their families) that makes it even more horrifying when they are stuck on the wrong side of a brutally cruel kill by Bob and left behind for everybody else to find, and by the end of the story the people stuck in the middle are just as concerned of what Bob will do if he gets his hands on them as they are of the terrorists.
- Played For Horror:
- It's "Die Hard on an X"... and it's a Torture Porn. The terrorists don't just blow away their hostages — they cleave them apart with rusty fire axes on live television and bathe in their blood.
- The story is "Die Hard in an Eldritch Location", and at its safest counts as Lovecraft Lite. The "terrorists" are a swarm of invading extradimensional entities that devour entire worlds and are implied to be running from something even worse, the "clueless police" are The Men in Black who can barely even comprehend what they're up against and are woefully outgunned by the threat, and "Bob" is a friendly nickname for a Benevolent Abomination inhabiting the Eldritch Location in question, who is The Only One able to save the day.
Crawl back to "Die Hard" on an X undetected via this link.
