I’ve been watching the John Wick movies and have noticed that he never misses with his gun regardless of distance, time to aim, etc. The only determinant seems to be if the bad guy is a main character. Is there a name for this trope?
I thought it was called “movies.” Or maybe “television.”
Wouldn’t that be true of any trope?
Since you were already given a good answer, I made a joke. Some of them work, some don’t. There’s probably a name for this, too.
This part would be Plot Armor:
I don’t think there’s a specific trope name for the intersection of those two tropes, although it’s a sort of meta-example of the Yin-Yang Clash:
As a Game Room sidenote, in both the Hong Kong Action Theater and Feng Shui tabletop RPGs, how difficult it is to hit an enemy is determined by how important they are to the plot, not petty concerns like distance, time to aim, etc.
Ok. I get it now.
I’m not sure that the linked quote trope quite fits. My scenario is definitely a variation of it but probably isn’t popular enough to have its own trope.
It’s one of the cliches I most hate. I think it started back in the olden days of westerns, when the cowboys shot dozens of Indians at far range, off the back of a charging horse, or hanging onto a stirrup, or behind their back. Today it’s a cheap thrill, overused and overblown, as directors compete to see who can be most ridiculous in its application.
I get the fact that movies can’t portray realistic gunfire. Either the hero would be dead in the first five minutes or no bad guys ever would be eliminated. (I’m sure we’ve all seen accounts of police pumping hundreds of bullets at a target and hitting nothing or the reverse of someone getting shot multiple times and keeping going.) But I hope never to see someone shooting two guns held cross-handed while jumping and hitting both targets ever again.
Without reloading.
And of course there’s a trope for this as well:
By the way, does anyone happen to know what the record is for the most movie shots fired out of a 6-shooter without reloading?
It’s certainly a subset of my biggest pet peeve. I call it Plot-Based Events.
There are so many instances of something happening on screen just because the plot needs it to happen. Protagonist gets shot at… well, if the plot needs the baddie to escape, it’s a hit that knocks her down (but heals up in an hour or so). If the plot needs her to catch the baddie, then it’s a miss.
No logical reason for something happening, no consideration for what would happen in real life, just whatever advances the plot.
My biggest pet peeve about shooting in fiction is when you got 10 guys firing fully automatic at a single location and when it cuts to the target person he dodges and there’s like 3 or 4 squibs going off on the walls or ricochet sounds.
I rarely ever see the sheer damage a concentrated gun fire barrage would actually do in a movie, unless it’s that one scene in Predator.
This is why the most sensible arrangement is that of Discworld, where narrativium is an actual thing.
Instead of disingenuously pretending that stories operate in a real world but things “just happen” to occur because the plot requires it, in the Discworld universe it is openly acknowledged that this is in fact how that fictional universe works.
So much more honest and forthright.
How about three shots from a one-shooter? On the series The Great, they have spent much time showing people tediously reloading their flintlock pistols after a shot, or carring multiple guns for multiple shots. But in one episode in the season two, someone is chasing someone around and shoots at them three times with the same flintlock without reloading. I guess the hoped people wouldn’t notice that one time?
A bad guy complained of at least 20 in I’m Gonna Get You, Sucka.
It’s called HOLLYWOOD. It was parodied in Blazing Saddles, where Gene Wilder could instantly shoot guns out of 6 bad guys’ hands without moving his. Probably a record.
There’s the house scene in The Gauntlet, with Clint Eastwood. Maybe a bit over-the-top, but it sounds like you’d like it:
The TV-trope I hate most is impossible explosions. First is that most real explosions have no flames. Secondly cars going out of the road and tumbling don’t explode. Thirdlly gas-explosions in real life are hard to rig and are almost all not very effective even if you are close.
Watch MythBusters trying to get cooking gas explosions to happen and you know what I’m talking about.
I have seen the aftermath of cooking gas explosion in an apartment building in Helsinki. The one who tried suicide by inhaling the gas but instead got it to explode did got burn wounds. No-one else were injured. The top of her sinks sewerline broke down and the cast iron parts plunged down the sewer line into the turning in the cellar and that line was a bitch to get working ever since. Hope they fixed it when they had pipe renovation in the building in 2015 when I moved out there.