Jones has rigged an abandoned ship with a Rube Goldberg device in which bottles topple over, and balls roll down chutes, and switches and levers are triggered, and eventually a bomb will be set off. The mad bomber ( Tommy Lee Jones) holds a remote control device which will blow up Jeff Bridges' girlfriend while she plays violin for the Boston Pops. A retired cop ( Lloyd Bridges) is chained to a piece of playground equipment and wired to a bomb. " No points for figuring out that at the speed of electricity, if one of them is the smallest fraction of a second behind the other one.
The tension mounts as they do the countdown: "Three. The only recourse is for the threatened cop (Forrest Whitaker) and his partner ( Jeff Bridges) to separately and simultaneously cut two wires. A member of the bomb squad is listening to a Walkman which, alas, has been rigged with a bomb, so that if he removes the earphones his head will be blown off. A mad bomber is loose in Boston, and there are more diabolical schemes afoot. No points for guessing which will come first, since at typing speed she would have to pound the keyboard for many long months to exhaust the memory of most hard disks.īut wait. At one point, early in "Blown Away," a tearful student at MIT is about to be blown up because her computer has been rigged with a bomb that will explode, the dialogue explains, "when the hard drive runs out of available bytes" or when she stops typing.