Every single time Nova goes out into the field to build or find something, building or finding the macguffin is only accomplished as evening draws near on the last day they have scheduled to film. They’ve been doing it for decades and, too often, the accomplishment sorta fizzles. With just a bit of planning they’d do it first in the studio and, when all the kinks are out, they’d do it for the camera, but no, they prefer a crap ending with manufactured drama to doing it right.
In the Japanese detective series Galileo, there’s a scene where the detective is trying to disarm a bomb to which, naturally, the heroine has been attached. He comes down to the classic red-or-blue wire scenario. Running out of time, and unable to deduce which wire to cut, he desperately asks the heroine, “What’s your favorite color?” She screams out, “Pink!”
He reaches in, cuts a wire…and the bomb doesn’t go off. Then, as he frees the heroine, he says, “I give in. Your intuition beats my deduction.” There was a third, pink wire hidden behind the blue and red ones…
Sure, but if you go back and read my OP, my problem with the scene in The Matrix is not that the good guys got away, nor that the good guys got away and it was close, it’s that the good guys got away and it was BEYOND close… to a comical degree that actually made it less enjoyable for me because instead of thinking “oh, man, I hope they get away” I was thinking “oh, come ON that’s just ridiculous”.
How about those giant eagles in the LOTR movies? They sure do come in handy. Alot.
Or the T-Rex in Jurassic Park?
Or the fighter planes in Saving Private Ryan?
And of course: “Yahoo! You’re all clear kid, so let’s blow this thing and go home!”
Indiana Jones slithering under the the big stone wall and snatching his whip just as it is about to seal his fate. Best opening ‘nick of time’ scenes evah.
They do this on Psych a lot. Lassiter and Juliet always seem to show up guns blazing just as Shawn and Gus are about to get killed. Then the cavalry arrives. No mention is made of how Lasssie and Jules even know what was going on most of the time. You can almost time your watch by it.
That’s one of the clearest and best descriptions of this I’ve ever read (your post, that is). Thanks! I never have a problem with this stuff, because I go to the movies to suspend my disbelief for a few hours. It’s part of the escape.
He didn’t get out of the COCKADOODIE CAR!
Because that’s … life.
“Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb!”
– and, of course –
“M, as in Mancy!”
Yeah, I’m with the OP on this one.
If it were just a matter of “nick of time” escapes being statistically unlikely, Shawn1767 would have a good point.
But it’s annoying when someone—either the good guys or the bad guys—does something more slowly or stupidly or ineptly than there’s any good in-story reason for them to, just to make the timing come out right: because if they were really giving it their best shot, the scene or situation or movie would be over sooner. Hence, instead of formidable, competent heroes or villains, we get what the OP appropriately describes as “silly non-threats.”
The other reason it’s annoying is that it’s so cliched. Supposedly, if you’re writing a suspenseful story, the way to heighten the tension in the story is to set a time limit. But from the experienced viewer/reader’s point of view, if you’ve seen enough movies that you’re hip to the formula, you know that, when there’s a time limit, nothing decisive is going to happen until right before the countdown reaches zero, but it will happen then.
I just figured it out! I know where our hero is, and the baddie is gonna get the drop on him. Let’s hurry (including leave here, get in our cars, drive across town, go into building, figure out what room person is in, enter without making a sound, etc.)
Cut to scene of baddie has hero dead-to-rights, at gunpoint.
Close up on baddie’s face… Oh no he’s about to shoot hero… but wait! he wordlessly looks quite surprised. He’s surprised because someone’s shot him dead (from behind, through the chest, once. Good guy last minute rescuers never shoot the person in the brain)
Lately it seems like the secondary “to the rescuer” must be white and female and reasonably pretty.
Also, even though the baddie has clearly collapsed to the floor dead, she must still be holding the gun up and aiming it with both hands (because she’s processing what she’s done, and certainly not so it’s obvious to viewer who the shooter was because they’re still holding the gun as if they’re firing)
If they give us a reason for her being there that can work fine (maybe she’s his stalker). It makes as much sense as a 25 minute gun battle in a downtown office building where the police don’t show up until just before the bad guy is about to shoot the good guy.
He shouldn’t have monologued for so long . . . :smack:
One variation on this which made us give up on a British police series.
One character has unwittingly walked into the bad guy’s lair, as his partners just figure out who did it. They race across town to rescue him, getting there just in time. What they don’t do is pick up their damn radio and get some coppers a lot closer to do it.
This plot device in general worked a lot better before cellphones.
The whole last half-hour of Argo was a nick-of-time montage. There was the ringing telephone, the hostages boarding the plane just before the doors closed, and the plane taking off with Iranians practically reaching out to grab the wheels. Very ridiculous in a serious movie.
Another The Matrix one, caused by the “stupid delay to make things more urgent” scriptwriting trick (Cracked reminded me of this one recently) - Neo and Trinity save Morpheus, the phone is ringing to let them “connect” back to the real world, escaping the Matrix-world where bad guys are rapidly closing on them with the intent to do Real Harm to their real bodies and minds.
Trinity decides this would be an awfully swell time to bust out with the “I have to tell you something” trope, then fidgets a while, with the phone literally ringing several times and multiple lines of dialogue exchanged, then just answers the phone and doesn’t even finish telling him what she was going to say. :smack: Awesome. “Barely nick of time” move intentionally caused by a protagonist (because fuck, she was going to see him on the other side after answering the phone; they weren’t being separated), plus awkward “I have something to tell you/oh never mind.”
Right. She was knocked out on the floor but magically comes to in time to clock the baddie… fine. I mean, it’s still trite, but at least it’s a little less stupid b/c as you say there’s a reason why she’s already there.
No, I was thinking of some movie where the bad guy gets shot and when they do the “pan to the shooter” the audience gasps because it’s someone who (it ends up) had been stalking the good guy the whole movie, and which actually explained a lot of loose ends. Does that sound familiar to anyone?
Every televised poker game ends with somebody winning it all. How contrived!
I wonder who pitched that one.