Blown Away is a 1994 American action thriller film directed by Stephen Hopkins and starring Jeff Bridges, Tommy Lee Jones, Forest Whitaker, Suzy Amis, and Lloyd Bridges, and follows a Boston bomb squad member pursuing an Irish bomber, who recently escaped from prison and is targeting the other bomb squad members.

The head of the studio was former Paramount executive Frank Mancuso Sr.[3] It was the first action film starring Jeff Bridges, who was by then a 45-year old leading man.

"I was very lucky that MGM backed me up, because he doesn't seem to be the obvious choice for this kind of genre film.

"[6] Irish Republican Army fighter Ryan Gaerity escapes from his cell in a castle prison in Northern Ireland after turning a toilet into a bomb, killing a guard and his cellmate in the process.

In Boston, Lieutenant James "Jimmy" Dove is a veteran member of the police force's bomb squad, on the verge of retirement and helping to train newer recruits.

Devastated, McGivney moved to Boston and took on a new identity, hoping to find atonement in saving others by defusing bombs.

Gaerity sees Dove on TV and makes his way to Boston, taking residence in an abandoned casino boat.

He takes a job as a janitor at the police station to learn more about Dove's present life and his co-workers.

He explains his true past to Kate, and convinces her and Elizabeth to go into hiding at Max's seaside cottage.

Max decides to try to stop Gaerity himself, trying to get close to him at an Irish bar, but instead ends up captured by him, and latched into a makeshift bomb.

The two race back to the city, where Kate is playing the violin in an orchestra's outdoor 4 July celebration, hoping to stop her before she starts the car.

Stephen Hopkins, who agreed to do the film after completing Judgment Night, told his agent, "'I don't want to make a movie about a bomb squad!'

"If you bring it down to as realistic terms as possible under the circumstances, then for me it becomes more interesting than to be out there with larger-than-life superhuman types in glossy, glamorous situations.

[15][16] Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four who had been wrongly imprisoned in the UK, helped the filmmakers with background information.

[21][2] The film suffered in comparison to another "terrorist with a bomb" movie, Speed, which was rushed into cinemas to beat Blown Away.