Die Hard screenwriter answers this decades-old plot hole question

Die Hard is the most perfect movie ever made and anyone who says otherwise is incorrect.

If you need any further evidence of this, just look at pretty much any episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Clip via Tripping Hawk Anyways, while the movie is perfect (don't @ us), there has always been a little niggling question about one of John McClane's actions. When he finds Hans Gruber snooping around near the explosives, he gives him a gun to help him as back-up, but when Gruber tries to use it on McClane, the clip is empty. How did McClane know that Gruber was a bad guy? It turns out that answer comes down to the old cutting room floor. Talking to Esquire, the movie's screenwriter Steven E. do Souza talks about a scene which never happens, where Gruber and the rest of his German baddies synchronize their watches at the beginning of the tower heist, which would then be used later on when they all planned to escape by an ambulance. McClane would then notice that all the terrorists ("Who said we were terrorists?") were wearing the same watch, and he would notice that same watch on Gruber before giving him the bullet-less gun. But when the ambulance escape was replaced by the big rooftop explosion instead, out went the watch stuff, and out went McClane getting clued in to Gruber's true intentions, despite his dodgy American accent. So there you have it!