Very familiar. Well there’s From Russia With Love, where Grant was saving Bond’s bacon several times throughout the movie, but I know there’s better examples I can’t think of…
Most recent one I saw was in The Host when Melanie’s uncle finds her before she dies of dehydration/heat stroke.
There are more but that would reveal spoilers.
Ugh… resurrecting this because I watched Dredd last night (yeah, I know… my own fault)… and they did this exact trope almost verbatim.
That’s also pretty much every episode of CSI: Miami. The only person in the entire freaking city allowed to save the day is Horatio.
More annoying to me than the general nick of time cliché is the badly done version of them in which the last smidgeons of time are repeatedly played with no appreciable progress while the heroes or protagonists are racing around trying to beat the deadlines.
You know… **giant spider looms over the victim, mandibles open up and go to either side of the victim’s head and begin to close…
the hero runs up the steep slope, dodges hexes from three witches and spends 4 agonizing minutes in a swordfight with the 2nd-worst evil knight before running him through the heart, yanking sword out and wiping blood off on evil knight’s hair…
giant spider looms over the victim and again opens mandibles, having apparently stopped in mid-bite and gone off to take a potty break before coming back but it’s chomping time now for sure…
hero runs over the crest of the hill, yells “Buddy!”, seeing the spider, and dashes down the hill only to be confronted by 3rd-worst evil knight weilding a mace…
close-up of very frightened victim, pull back to see spider do a couple of experimental test-chomps in mid-air, just to make sure they’re in working order, before again approaching victim, having backed off several yards for the test-chomps, and opening them wide and moving in for the kill, which is really really imminent and could happen like really soon or something…**
Starting with the fact that we just bombed Ireland.
My God, yes. It must be Zeno’s deathblow.
Actually, that’s Wales.
My father said he’d go to the movies every week and the fake resolution of the cliffhanger used to annoy him a lot.
Workaholics has an AWESOMELY silly “nick of time” scene where they try to beat Angela back to her house with her kid brother. He gives them directions for a shortcut he knows. When it looks like they’re just about to get him home in the “nick of time”, it’s revealed that he took them to IHOP. He didn’t want to go home, he wanted breakfast.
There is a good reason for this. They know that if they call the near by cop, no matter what they say, no matter what warnings they give, the non-hero cop will walk in, gun still holstered, and get shot down from behind because he never looked to the sides when he walked through the door.
They know this because that’s what happens to every single non-main-character cop who is the first to arrive at every single main- bad-guy crime scene.
In The Day After Tomorrow, a GIGANTIC tidal wave is crashing through the streets of New York. Like, 10 stories tall. Our heroes make a mad dash up the library steps to the door, because if they can just get inside the library they’ll be fine. And they do. And they’re fine.
“Whoever wrote this episode should DIE.”
Sorry, just had to add that.
Indiana Jones. My favorite n-o-t shot.
I nominated End of Days. The devil has until midnight to impregnate his chosen bride and bring about the birth of the antichrist. At the end, the counter has dropped below one minute and neither of them even has their pants off. We’re meant to be on the edge of our seats about whether or not he’ll be stopped in time.:rolleyes:
God vs Satan. Winner: Physics.
In the Star Trek: The Lost Era novel Serpents Among the Ruins, a couple of engineers have to go into a heavy-radiation-filled Jeffries tube on the *Enterprise-*B, to fix some kinda mechanical problem or whatever. They have timers on their heads-up displays telling them how long they have to fix the problem before they’re up a creek without a paddle.
So they get in, fix the problem, and as they’re exiting the tube, there’s like two minutes left.
“Two minutes left. That wasn’t even dramatic.”
“Yeah, sorry. Next time.”
The best “red wire/blue wire” is from The Abyss. Ed Harris is in the special deep diver suit, damn near the bottom of the ocean, trying to defuse a NUKE. They tell him which one to cut but his only light source is a yellow glow stick. Making the info useless.
The German movie Lola Rennt was basically one big silly sequence of just-too-late scenes mixed with time travel (-ish nonsense) which turned them all into silly just-in-time scenes.
