For all we actually see, it’s entirely possible that Syndrome reacted by programming that final model to never swing on itself like its predecessor; as you say, Incredible never gets in position to retry his strike-at-me-and-hit-yourself tactic, so we never see whether there’s now an improvement to stop it from slitting its own throat.
It’s not essential, that’s my point. The Joker does what The Joker does. If he had succeeded in killing Dent, it was caused chaos in the streets. By failing to capture and sending one of the asylum into the police station with a bomb in his gut, he causes chaos. The plan was always to get Lau and any number of explosives would have done the trick. The fact that The Joker was there to play a game with Batman was just icing.
Syndrome has shown that he isn’t above killing super after super (in fact, the sheer number he’s wiped out is rather shocking). So once he finds Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl, what’s stopping him from killing them both on the spot?
Nothing but contrivance.
The hole has nothing to do with Joker’s plan and everything to do with Gordon’s–he fakes his own death, but then personally drives the car carrying Harvey with the assumption that somehow they would grab Joker this way? That’s a plot depending on a countless number of unknowable variables.
Although most of Joker’s schemes (including the opening bank heist) all rely on timing more accurate than the finest Swiss watch. He just claims to be an agent of chaos, but he always has a Plan.
Of course, the other big plot hole is when he invades Bruce’s apartment and party, and after Batman jumps to save Rachel, he leaves Joker with all his goons upstairs. What happened next? Did they just leave quietly?
Still a terrifically entertaining movie, but one that doesn’t hold up to too much scrutiny.
No, it still counts. One of the rules is “Character fail to do something obvious that would achieve his goals.”
If Riggs’s goal is defined as suicide then he should have put the loaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. That would have been the obvious direct way to achieve his goal. Doing all kinds of crazy shit so he somehow died on the job isn’t the obvious direct way to commit suicide.
Monologuing. A common weakness among supervillans. 
MURTAUGH: Okay, clown, no bullshit! You wanna kill yourself?
RIGGS: Aw, for Chrissake …
MURTAUGH: SHUT UP! Yes or no - you wanna die?
RIGGS: I got the job done! What the hell do you want?
MURTAUGH: JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION!
RIGGS: [angry] Well, what do you wanna hear, man? Do you wanna hear that sometimes I think about eatin’ a bullet? Huh? Well, I do! I even got a special bullet for the occasion with a hollow point, look! Make sure it blows the back of my goddamned head out and do the job right! Every single day I wake up and I think of a reason not to do it! Every. single. day. You know why I don’t do it? This is gonna make you laugh! You know why I don’t do it? The job! Doin’ the job! Now that’s the reason!
[Murtaugh looks at him. Nods. A moment, then]
MURTAUGH: You want to die.
RIGGS: I’m not afraid of it.
MURTAUGH: [unholsters his gun] Here, take my gun. Don’t nibble on the barrel, pull the trigger.
[offers the gun to Riggs]
RIGGS: You shouldn’t tempt me, man. [takes gun, puts it to side of head]
MURTAUGH: Put it in your mouth. Bullet goes in your ear, might not kill you.
RIGGS: Under the chin’s just as good.
[They stare at each other. Riggs’ finger begins to tighten on the trigger. At the last second, Murtaugh jams his thumb in front of the hammer, and CLICK the hammer thuds against his thumb]
MURTAUGH: Jesus. You’re not trying to draw psycho pension… You really are crazy.
Why would you assume Gordon drove the truck to catch The Joker? He drove because he’s a badass driver (also shown in Batman Begins when he drove the Batmobile like a champ) and they assumed The Joker would take a shot at Dent.
Yes. He came to the party to terrorize Dent. No Dent, no Dent’s girl, the fun’s over.
It’s not about killing Mr. Incredible, it’s about humiliating him and showing him that Syndrome is better. Syndrome purposely leaves Mr. Incredible alive after his ultimatebot grabs Mr. Incredible, and all the exposition about why Syndrome is doing what he is doing, “when everyone is a super, no one will be”… I don’t see how anyone can miss the “showing up former idol” part of Syndrome’s motivation.
The “he won’t kill you if you’re unarmed” thing is just a working hypothesis at that point. Would you, as a badass special forces soldier being hunted, deliberately give up your weapons based on a hunch you had about the motivations of the creature hunting you?
Besides, he was there to try to hunt soldiers - to hunt the most dangerous prey. Anna was a civilian - if she picked up a gun and shot at it, it would have to kill her out of necessity - but if she didn’t arm herself, he’d let her go.
But the soldiers - that’s who he’s there to kill. If they disarmed themselves, he’d probably just kill them hand to hand (as that would put them on equal terms) - it’s pretty unlikely in the middle of a hunt he’s just going to try to let them go.
Late in the movie, Arnold has no weapons, and the Predator decides to try to kill him hand to hand, not just ignore him and go away.
So… not a plot hole.
I think we’re drifting off the topic. I’m looking for movies that don’t have obvious plot holes not movies where the obvious plot holes can be theoretically explained away. If you have to fanwank something that happened in a movie, it’s a plot hole.
Some people are wrong that things are plot holes. That doesn’t make it a fanwank, it means they didn’t understand the material.
If the objection to Predator is “drop your weapons and you won’t get hurt”, it’s shown to be incorrect, because there was a part in the movie in which Arnold was unarmed, and he certainly got hurt.
Also, plot hole doesn’t mean “someone who made a decision that was not the optimal decision you’d make if you were the world’s greatest strategist with plenty of time to think about the problem”
No, I disagree. If it was just my suggestion that the characters should have all dropped their weapons then it would be me fanwanking. But that’s not what happened.
The characters in the movie came up with that idea. They were the ones who established that the Predator would not attack an unarmed character. And it worked - the unarmed character wasn’t attacked. So this is canon.
And once the characters figure out that unarmed people are safe, it’s a plot hole that they decide to remain armed.
Even if your argument is correct and the Predator did attack unarmed characters then it’s just an additional plot hole. If he attacks unarmed characters, he should have attacked Anna. When you change the rules like that halfway through the movie, you create a plot hole.
They didn’t “establish” anything. One character speculated about the motivations of a completely unknown entity. Why are you assuming that he’s omniscient? You’re saying they established it as if they ran an experiment with all possible cases and collected every possible outcome. No. What if the predator didn’t kill her because she was a woman? Or that she wasn’t big enough to justify her as a trophy kill? Or that she was a hostage of these people and tied up and obviously not a combatant? Or a dozen other reasons.
Let’s turn it around and ask this: If Arnold and all the other soldiers in the movie dropped their weapons, and the predator killed them anyway, does that mean the movie doesn’t make sense? That the movie broke its own logic and was nothing but a bunch of plot holes? No, it means one of the characters had a faulty or incomplete understanding of his situation.
Characters not being omniscient and also aware of their own omniscience doesn’t constitute a plothole.
The movie shows us
- The civilian captive unarmed woman was spared when the Predator had a chance to kill her
- Arnold speculates that it’s hunting for sport, and since she was unarmed and no match for the predator, he didn’t attack her
- Arnold doesn’t disarm himself, which is what he would do if he were omniscient and correct about the predator’s motivations.
But he’s not omniscient, and he’s not even fully correct, or at least, his quick explanation did not fully explain the situation. You assume this to be a plot hole, because you apparently subscribe to the “if your characters aren’t omniscient and formulate the best possible plans that I can come up with, it’s a plot hole” school of story criticism.
But your criticism isn’t a flaw of the movie, it’s a superficial and flawed analysis of the movie. Arnold may well have thought that Anna, as a non-combatant, wouldn’t be attacked unless the predator necessarily attacked her in self defense when she armed herself. But Arnold and the other soldiers were the prey, she wasn’t. Does he believe that the unarmed rule extends to them? Could they be in the middle of combat with the predator, all drop their weapons at the same time at the moment the predator is about to kill them, and then all be protected by this speculated rule like a magic force field?
No, and it’s a pretty ridiculous argument to say that it’s a plot hole if that’s not the case.
The fact that Arnold doesn’t give his weapons up even after he speculates about the motivation as to sparing the civilian captive indeed proves that he isn’t completely sure that being unarmed makes you immune from attack. And he’s proven right, later in the movie, when he was unarmed, the predator attacked him in hand to hand combat. Because he was the prey - the badass soldier - not the civilian hostage.
Wait. So if one character speculates about the motivations of an alien creature that he has had no communication with, and the movie later shows us that this speculation is wrong, it’s a plot hole because a character said it therefore it’s canon, and therefore if anything happens to contradict it, the writers of the movie had no idea what it was they meant to write.
Characters can have their own knowledge, speculation, flaws, and poor decision making. They aren’t omniscient entities that always make the optimal decision. If you go in with the assumption that they are, then every deviation from optimal decision making every point becomes a plot hole to you. But that’s not how real life works, nor is it how fiction should work.
A character not acting rationally is not a plot hole if the character is specifically written to be irrational.
Man, you must have hated A Beautiful Mind. Everything Russel Crowe’s character wanted to achieve could have been done so much more easily if he’d stopped talking to imaginary people! What a plot hole!
The Longest Day, 1962.
Of course, it’s helped by being nonfiction.
To me, the biggest plot hole in Predator is Anna being on the helicopter at the end. If she came bursting out of the jungle alone with a crazy story about the Beast That Makes Trophies of Men, the crew would’ve blown her away on the spot.
I don’t mind a character being irrational, as long as he’s consistently irrational.
“Why did Riggs do all those reckless and unnecessary things?”
“Because he wanted to die.”
“Then why didn’t he just commit suicide?”
“Because he didn’t want to die.”
Sorry, but that’s ridiculous. That’s just the writers trying to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted Riggs to be suicidal so they had an excuse to show him doing all kinds of risky stunts but as soon as the stunt was done they turned his suicidal mindset off until the next stunt.
I don’t think you entirely understand what “irrational” means.
All of these are good points. Point 2 particularly bothered me in The Dark Knight.
The Joker isn’t just rolling with the chaos in The Dark Knight. His plans are extremely complex and multistage.
How does the Joker get the explosives into the hospital or on the boats at end? How did the Joker’s suicidallly loyal minions manage to abduct and replace an entire police honor guard at the funeral with no one noticing? How did he get the poison into the judge’s drink?
Also, how come there doesn’t seem to be any involvement from the state police or FBI in The Dark Knight?