has a couple of scars to spoil his otherwise-perfect good looks. Despite the terrible beating he endured, he is fit as a fiddle and just as skilled at martial arts as ever. He will wince slightly once the fight is over, though.
When the bad guys ride into the Western town, any child’s plaything left on the street will be…
…crushed by the hoof of a snarling horse.
When our hero is being chased, he jumps into his car, turns the key, and…
…the engine sputters pityfully. The hero turns the key again and…the engine sputters pityfully, but for a little longer. Once more the hero turns the key, and as the soundtrack cranks up to frightening proportions, the engine fires and…
, with a cloud of foul smoke, roars to life just in time for the hero to zoom away from the badguys. If they lean out the windows to shoot at him, oddly enough…
…they miss the large target of his swerving car, yet our plucky hero is able to aim (backwards over his shoulder and out the car window while driving) and hit one of them as the he drives away.
If there is a counter or bar in the shot, someone is going to be ______________ the bar.
polishing
In horror movies, black cats are never…
Silent or still. They must flee out of the shot, shrieking like banshees despite the lack of any discernible provocation.
The only circumstance under which female character’s makeup is not perfectly in place is…
… if she is the long-lost mother of the hero, now a down on her luck prostitute.
In an all-action, no romance thriller, the hero will always seek information from a seedy or sinister character in…
…a cheap and seedy dive, usually on the waterfront.
In a hostage situation, the lead negotiator for the police will always be…
a hard-drinking, world-weary type with a bad attitude towards his superiors but a semi-mystical ability to bond with the bad guys on the other end of the phoneline.
In historical epics, the hair of every major character is…
…clean, despite the lack of hygiene right up until recently.
Time travel is never ever…
a straightforward, uncomplicated, consequence-free undertaking.
Almost every time traveler will be revealed to a friendly person not from his or her own time by…
a spectacular cultural gaffe (misunderstanding a word, wrong clothing, etc.)
Whenever our heroes need to access a computer that contains the information desperately needed to expose an eeeevil plan…
…pulls out a small device plugs it into a USB port and immediately gets the password.
Just as the car is approaching adimly lit and off the beaten track dust road…
the driver slows, peers out the window and sees a weatherbeaten and/or nearly overgrown old sign that gives him just the information he needs to know that he’s on the right track.
In any group of unlikely, thrown-together antihero thieves, there must be one each of the following…
…a hacker, an explosives expert, and a charming lady-killer. Or is it a safe-cracker, a contortionist/acrobat, and a pickpocket?
The laser sensors placed as security measures to protect valuables by triggering an alarm are always…
revealed by their iridescent red beams, evaded with great dexterity by the hero until one, at last, is inadvertently interrupted, at which point all hell breaks loose.
The mythic sword of any great warrior has not only a cool name, but also…
A more interesting origin and backstory than any of the human characters.
In both westerns and historical adventures, the hero’s horse…
…is invariably white
The geeky kid at school is revealed to be…
either a genius whose knowledge will come in very useful at a crucial point in the plot, OR deeply attracted to the cutest girl in the gang, whose love she will eventually reciprocate, OR destined to become the next Bill Gates.
The fussy school official with the clipboard and stopwatch is invariably…