Peeve: people taking savage beatings and then somehow pulling up hidden reservoirs of strength to come back and win the fight. That’s why I loved it in A Fistful of Dollars when the Stranger is beaten nearly to death, he needs days or weeks of convalescence before he’s fit to take on the bad guys again.
Thanks for the Firefly corrections. I almost put a DVD in to check the dialog before the edit window was done, then I thought "Ok, I’ll just add “paraphrased from five years ago.”
But then I got called away.
Two opponents both impervious to blunt force trauma fighting each other with blunt force trauma. What are they supposedly thinking? “Maybe if I hit him reaaaally hard this time something different might happen.”
It’s a lot like watching a pillow fight.
This is why I never read superhero comics. They always just ended up with two costumed people punching each other in the sky.
Destroy!! scottmccloud.com - Destroy!!
Load-bearing villains. It worked for grandpa Tolkien, I don’t see no good reason it shouldn’t work 100 years down the line !
I can tolerate heroes taking shots to the face and only getting angry rather than concussed. They’re action heroes, the brain is not a vital organ for them.
It’s the high speed tumblecrashes into stuff that take me right out. Like “hero is tossed out of a vehicle/punched into a wall so goddamn hard they bounce a *couple *of times, then dust themselves and soldier on with perhaps a minor cosmetic scrape”. Like, no, dude. Your skeleton is more jell-o than calcium at this point. You’ve got shards of pelvis embedded in your upper lungs. Your internal organs are oozing out your ears, eyes and asshole. Your arms ripped out of their sockets when you grabbed than ledge mid-fall. That guy punched through solid concrete three cuts ago, the force of the gutpunch that sent you flying back means you’re *definitely *in seven kinds of septic shocks right now from all the liquid shit oozing out of your destroyed lower intestine. And so on.
The first X-man movie was :dubious: about this, and then Origins : Wolverine compounded the idiocy. I mean in X-man you could handwave it by assuming Wolverine and Sabertooth didn’t know each other’s powers when they tussled. But Origins nixes that from the intro : the hero & villain both regenerate to the point of being essentially immortal. They both know this. They have both been taking advantage of this fact to survive the endless wars they participated in together through history (presumably out of boredom ?).
They still claw at each other again, and again, and again throughout the flick. I guess it still must hurt some, and it’s probably still cathartic to punch a guy you hate right in the dick, but still…
I think both characters are ALL about the cathartic dick-punching
And when you’re out of bullets, throw the gun!
Personally, I’d like to see more asymmetric fights. OK, so you’ve got characters with similar abilities on both teams, but that doesn’t mean that your big musclebound bruiser has to go up against their big musclebound bruiser, and your flying long-range energy blaster has to go up against their flying long-range energy blaster, and your telepath up against their telepath, and your army of mooks against their army of mooks, and so on. Figure out which of your guys are more effective against which of their guys, and try to maneuver into those fights.
The fight at the end of Ford Fairlane went the way it should have. Ford challenges Smiley to a “mano-a-mano” fight, with no knives or guns or anything. Smiley agrees, puts down his knife and squares up, laughing, getting ready for fists. Ford then shoots him with his concealed forearm gun. And then mocks him for being stupid.
Great movie!
What about**Butch Cassidy?**
I guess that too 
I’ve never actually seen BC & TSDK
Somewhat similar: there’s a scene in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang where Robert Downey Jr’s perennial loser of a character has just seen one of the baddies murder a woman, and has managed to get a hold of the guy’s gun when he’s not looking. The guy sees Downey, and starts in with the standard, “You’re not gonna shoot me. You’re not the kind of guy who just shoots people,” movie cliche.
He gets about a sentence into it before Downey empties the gun into his chest.
I love scenes like that. Makes the movie more “real” or something.
There’s a similar scene in the Franco-Belgian comic XIII. At one point the hero, battle rifle in hand, kicks open a door only to find himself staring into the barrel of the Big Bad’s handgun. A Mexican stand-off ensues, at which point the hero offers to macho it out instead. The Big Bad agrees and they both drop their guns, then Big Bad smirks and calls XIII a naive idiot as he goes for the second gun he’s got tucked in his back… only to catch a thrown knife in the heart. IOW a rare case of *both *parties trying to Indiana Jones the other at the same time
Yes, and again yes.