Actually, much LESS plausible. If you put two people into a single elimination tournament at random, and they both never lose, the odds are slightly greater than 50% that they will meet in the finals, and decreasingly small in each round before that.
As is pointed out every time there’s a cliche thread, a lot of the “cliches” listed here are just time savers to keep the movie from being boring. Everyone always gets great parking spots not because the people making the movies are idiots, but because showing someone driving around looking for parking, then dealing with the attendant, etc., is boring. Same reason that paying for a cab takes basically no time, etc. Good writing and acting can minimize the glaring nature of these shortcuts, but honestly, would you really want them not to be there?
In this day of birth control, at home ovulation and pregnancy kits, women who have one night stands don’t realize they are pregnant until someone else tells them or they have a routine physical.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned this one:
Hero is captured and tied up by Evil Villian. Evil Villian then spends 5 minutes exposing his darkest secrets and plans to Hero, because Hero is going to die anyway.
Then Evil Villian activates complicated device that is certain to kill Hero in 20 minutes and leaves to resume his nefarious activities.
Of course Hero escapes with 1/100 of a second to spare and defeats Evil Villian.
Outdated cliche. Had a '88 Isuzu Impulse Turbo with a gas gauge that stuck like that when it was low, and I went… either uphill or downhill, significantly. I forget which. The needle would bottom out and stick. I suspect it was more common in earlier cars. (The gauge eventually completely failed)
It also happened frequently on some of my more bootleg gear I used when I was kitbashing robots. Had this ohmmeter that’d stick all the time.
Doesn’t happen so much anymore, I suspect.
That actually happens alot in real life. If a woman has irregular periods it could be awhile before she notices something’s up.
Which leads me to the related cliche I hate: When, in the final fight b/t hero and bad guy, the bad guy kills himself while trying to kill the hero so the hero gets to stay moral. Especially if it’s a railing kill. The whole story was leading up to him being killed by the hero, not by gravity, dammit! Take some responsibility for his demise!
Two lines that are increasingly jarring to me:
Someone call 9-1-1!
Our hero look around the crowd, as he (or sometimes she) bends down to the freshly gunned downed victim. What are you gonna accomplish kneeling there, except a brief moment of piety,mugging for the camera. Get out your own fucking cell phone.
Are you Ok!?
Someone has been beaten within an inch of death, has blood streaming down the face, panting for breath. If I came upon such a person, there are a number of things I would say, but asking if they are Ok is not one of them.
Here’s one of my biggest pet peeves:
Poker games where one player bets some huge amount, and the other one has to cover it by betting his car, wife, whatever. This is a standard cliche, and yet poker is NEVER played like that, or else the richest guy could always just bet everyone else out of the game. Poker is always, always played ‘table stakes’, which means you can only bet what you bought into the game for, and if you don’t have enough to cover a bet, you can go all-in and cover as much as you have and call.
It’s just really annoying. Out of the blue a player will take out the deed to his house or something and throw it on the table, and the other player will stare at his four Aces and have to leave the game and bet money from people, or he’ll bet his kid’s college fund, or whatever. And then he’ll usually lose to a straight flush or something, and his life is ruined. Totally fabricated.
It’s right up with running from the exploding fireball. You see it all the time in the movies, but in the real world it’s not even remotely possible.
You ask them if they’re okay so you can tell if they have a clear airway or if they’re drowning in their own blood. 
(That was a joke. If any paramedics want to correct me, feel free. I am not posting this as a reliable medical procedure.)
It’s a 50/50 coin-toss from the start, actually. In a single-elimination tournament like the one in The Karate Kid, there are two “elimination trees”, one on each side of the final matchup. If person A and person B are placed in the same tree, they have a 100% chance of meeting before the final if they don’t lose to someone else first. If they are not placed in the same tree, there is no chance whatsoever that they will meet before the final, for the same reason that the NFL playoffs can’t have an NFC team play an AFC team before the Super Bowl. I’m just saying that it’s mighty fortunate that Daniel and Johnny got put in different trees.
For that matter, it’s mighty convenient that two competitors from the Cobra Kai dojo never had to fight in the whole tournament, even though Daniel had to fight, what, four of them on the way to the finals? (Yes, I’m counting the semifinal with Bobby’s disqualification as one.)
Incorrect. In a 64-man tournament, you put Daniel somewhere at random. Then you put Johnny somewhere at random. Now there are 32 spots left for him on the other tree, but only 31 in Daniel’s tree. Thus, 32 chances out of 63 that he and Daniel will meet in the finals, or slightly greater than 50%, as I said.
A more subtle flaw with movie-and-TV-poker, is that you always see how good the good player is because of how many times he has a full house or whatever. That’s not a sign of a good player. Good players and bad players will get full houses equally often. The difference is how much money they’ll win with them and how much money they’ll avoid losing when their opponent has them. Instead of a montage of Our Hero always having an amazing hand, there should be a montage of Our Hero bluffing with nothing successfuly, then calling the opponent’s bluff, then folding to the opponent’s monster, then suckering the opponent into putting in his stack when Our Hero has the monster.
Right. You aren’t a good poker player because you win every pot, you’re a good poker player because you fold your crap hands and avoid losing.
I hate the hero or heroine suddenly being able to do incredibly difficult tasks they have never attempted before and succeeding. They leap from a ledge and are able to grab a railing or a rope without slipping or missing. They pick up a gun and know immediately not only how to check the ammo, but are great shots.
The worst is when some plain Jane suburban housewife whose only previous brush with physical assault was spanking her 4 year old is suddenly able to lay some serious whoop ass on the bad guy’s girl. Susie Homemaker can do a perfect right hook and sometimes even let off a good roundhouse and she doesn’t break a nail. Just once I’d like to see her punch the bad guy and you hear a loud CRACK as she breaks her fingers on the bad guy’s chin.
Another thing I can’t stand is the “prophecy”. At some point in the sci-fi/fantasy movies you are almost guaranteed to hear, “It was foretold that someday a hero would come to…(free the oppressed, destroy the enemy, rebuild the planet, pick up the dry-cleaning, whatever.)” How many fucking prophets are there? Isn’t it like Earth where you have predictions from every religion, both major and minor, as well as the conspiracy theorist on the Internet? And why, in a computer controlled world like The Matrix would you have a prophet?
All of the horror film clichés mentioned in Scream piss me off, too. Add in that list the cat that jumps out just to scare the crap out of you and make you let down your guard. Or the Friday the 13th moment where you are sure the killer is dead but they jump up at the last second.
Don’t forget the war movies where the guy shows a picture of his girlfriend. You can guarantee he’ll be the first to go. Along with the new guy who is a total loser but he saves the platoon by throwing himself on the grenade.
Why don’t they make the anti-cliché movie? Some movies, usually comedies, do bits of it but it would be great to do it all. A war film where the hunky hero type is the first to get shot and, not only doesn’t he shrug it off but he starts screaming and crying like a baby. Or the one they are sure is the chosen one gets killed in a spectacular and gruesome manner because someone looked at the wrong prophecy. Of course, the movie would be really short and pretty much a downer because you will probably lose the hero real fast.
Any movie where the smart-ass, streetwise, loudmouth, former criminal, do it “my way” type of guy is in the FBI, CIA, or Secret Service.
You need a college education, experieince, background checks, phsyc exam to get into these jobs. They dont just let you in because you can shoot a gun!
Except, of course, for Catch Me If You Can, right?
knock knock…
One of the most annoying cliches for me is the old as dirt trick of someone pretending to be sick so they can break out of confinement.
It’s like no one in the movies has ever heard of his cliche, so they fall for it every time. And it’s so fracking obvious.
For once, I’d like to hear a guard say " So what if you’re sick? Why the hell do I care?"
That’s not even the start of it. Due to the poker boom, every damn TV show has tried to incorporate a poker scene, and they’re usually painful to watch. I could rant at length, but I’m not going to, because most of it will be fairly obscure. It makes me wince whenever popular tries to integrate “I’m all in” into everything - gah. Due to TV coverage being almost exclusively crapshooty tournament coverage with bad editing choices, even the poker coverage gives a very false sense of what poker actually is.
The old “if a superhero crosses the line into using lethal force, they’re inevitably going to become an out of control tyrant who executes jaywalkers. Or, if they’re ‘good’ enough, they’ll just have a complete psychological and spiritual breakdown.” Gads, it’s as bad as Reefer Madness, or any of those anti-drug VSEs.
Tomorrow, after I’ve had some sleep, I’ll start in on manichean socioeconomic themes in post 1929 and '68 Hollywood… in the meantime—at the risk of sounding like a broken record, again, I hate it when guys who Tamper in God’s Domain get their Frankenstein-style comeuppance. Hmph. If you’re afraid of technology so much, run whimpering back to the caves and leave the future to the humans who aren’t afraid to pick up the lightning-blasted torches stolen from Olympus itsel—
sorry. monologing. me go sleep now.