There is a movie meme that bugs the heck out of me and one I wish would be banished from all action / horror pictures. You could call it “never finishing the job.”
For instance: good guy and bad guy are fighting. Or good guy sneak attacks bad guy while bad guy is fighting with another good guy (usually female, in this scenario). Bad guy falls down motionless. Good guy rushes to other good guy or turns his back on bad guy who gets back up and re-attacks.
I am SO tired of this cliche. Just finish the job fer pete’s sake! If you hit bad guy and he falls down, hit him a couple of more times so he stays down! If you shoot him once, shoot him a couple of more times. Finish the friggin’ job!
The worst version of this, made fun of in numerous places, is where the bad guy pauses before finishing off the good guy to expound at length on his or her evil plans - thereby giving the good guy time to pick the handcuffs or whatever and escape.
Yeah. Ammo is cheap, or at least cheap enough to spare a couple of rounds to make absolutely sure. On the other hand, it’s difficult to see with what to replace this trope – it doesn’t create tension if the bad guy goes down and stays down, and used well (as it almost never is), it drives the point home that the threat is a really fucking serious one. But the bad guy going boo one last time just for a cheap scare before finally getting that last bullet? Yeah, definitely loose that.
From the same genre, the Bathroom Mirror Scare – you know the drill, protagonist (usually female) opens the bathroom mirror to retrieve some thing or other, then closes it, and boo! There’s someone/thing behind her, only there isn’t when she turns around horrified. Often also played as a faux scare, when there’s actually her husband standing behind her. Seriously, I get that the bath is a good place for scares because it’s where we feel the most private and thus vulnerable, but still, I feel like the last dozen of horror movies I watched included some variation of this theme. Loose it!
Sean of the Dead had a pretty good take on the bathroom mirror bit. House of Wax addressed the issue mentioned in the OP:Female protagonist takes a baseball bat to the villain and swings for the fences about a dozen times, and that sucker ain’t getting up no more ([LINK REMOVED BY MODERATOR). Of course, there’s still his formerly-conjoined twin to worry about, but that’s another issue.
Good guy and bad guy fight. Good guy falls, apparently dead. While bad guy gloats, good guy miraculously recovers and kills bad guy.
It’s nearly impossible to really kill an important character, good or bad. A minor character can be bumped on the head or kneed in the groin, and he’s out for the remainder of the movie.
Even worse is this trope’s idiot cousin: Good guy and bad guy fight. Bad guy beats the living tar out of good guy. Good guy falls to the ground, defeated… or not really because he then reaches into some inner reserve of strength (often coupled with some sort of Big Epiphany) and gets back up. Then, despite having just been ground into a white-hatted paste, he proceeds to pummel the as-yet unhurt bad guy into oblivion.
This particular trope made for my least favorite moment of “Serenity,” particularly since it’s exactly the kind of cliched climax that Joss Whedon has made a career of subverting.
You mean the swordfight, or the movie bit with the Operative? They’re not quite as bad as you describe, though I’m quite fond of the bit involving Mal getting tortured:
[spoiler]Zoe, Wash and Jayne bust in to find Mal struggling with the torturer.
Zoe: Stay back, this is something the captain has to do for himself.
Mal: [off-camera] No, it’s not!
Zoe: Oh. [she, Wash and Jayne shoot the torturer about thirty times][/spoiler]
The one that always bugs me is the person in a gunfight, obviously not carrying much or any spare ammo, who shoots one opponent (out of many) and leaves the opponent’s gun just lying there. Thirty seconds the fool is somewhere else with another opponent and uses his last bullet, while the opponent is still shooting at him. Hello?
The bathroom mirror horror cliche definitely has to be retired. It’s gotten so it’s more of a shock when someone uses the medicine cabinet, closes the mirror, and there isn’t something there.
Actually, the amount of abuse people take in movie fights is pretty ridiculous if you think about it. How many times do we see some guy falling a couple stories…onto a coiuple of crates, get their head bashed a gainst a metal pipe, knocked around with a shovel, their car rolls over down an embankment, they are shot…in the shoulder, and then get caught in an explosion that rams against the windshiled of a parked car…only to have them get up and keep fighting as if it is just a scratch.
The other cliche that’s gotta be retired is the whole “fall from a great height” crap.
The good guy beats the bad guy. But killing the bad guy would be wrong. So he lets the bad guy live. The second the good guy turns his back, the bad guy attacks again. But the good guy ducks, and the bad guy falls to his death from a great height.
This cliche allows the writers to tell us that killing is wrong–although often the good guy who suddenly discovers that killing is bad, m’kay, has previously slaughtered dozens of minions without even half a qualm. But it prevents the good guy from having to deal with the consequences of letting the bad guy roam free to spread evil. The bad guy dies, but the good guy didn’t kill him, he was killed by his own evil!
Either the bad guy needs killing, in which case someone should step up to the plate and pay the karmic price, or he needs to be not-killed, in which case someone should also have to step up to the plate and pay the karmic price. You shouldn’t get to let the cake live and kill it to.
This is more a documentary trope, but I get annoyed every time someone “finds” something extremely interesting while taking a walk in front of the camera. Are we expected to believe that the 250.000 year old intact human skull has been lying there in the dirt just waiting for a documentary team to walk by and pick it up? It takes me out of the documentary every time.
