Silly "nick of time" scenes

[Jragon]

@Martian Bigfoot

Hey, that’s a pretty unfair description of Lola Rennt. That’s a really good movie!

(Also, it’s the movie that started my infatuation with Moritz Bleibtreu, whom I’ve had a sadly unrequited crush on ever since.)

I’m not saying it’s a bad movie, but I maintain that it’s silly.

c.f. Guy gets hit by an ambulance. Also “die Tasche” ad nauseum.

Edit: In addition, I’ve seen the movie like 12 times. That’s not an exaggeration. My German teacher in high school loved that movie and made us watch it in class way too many times over the three years I took German. Anything becomes ridiculous after about the 6th time.

[Heracles]

@Jragon

My German teacher in high school loved that movie and made us watch it in class way too many times over the three years I took German.

Funny: My nephew had to watch and evaluate this same movie (Cours, Lola, cours) in his French (as-a-first-language) class.

Anything becomes ridiculous after about the 6th time.

Especially a movie about repetition!

[terentii]

@Voyager

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.

Something like this happened on the last season finale of Doc Martin. His wife is about to board an airplane with a potentially fatal brain aneurism, and he’s racing like hell to get to the airport in a police car to stop her. In the meantime, he saves a woman whose heart’s stopped by telling his receptionist over the phone to apply paddles and CPR.

The whole time I’m thinking: “You have a cellphone! F’rchrissakes, ring the airport and keep your wife from getting on the airplane until you arrive! Or better yet, have an ambulance pick her up and rush her to the hospital!”

[terentii]

@Boyo_Jim

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.

Either that or they know the cop they’re talking to is probably dirty and they’ll end up getting the victim killed anyway.

[terentii]

@Der_Trihs

That reminds me of a bomb defusing scene from the CGI Starship Troopers; from memory it went something like this:
Character 1: “What do we do?! I don’t know anything about bombs!”

Character 2: <fiddles with bomb> “Should we cut the red or the blue wire?”

Character 1: “What?! How would I know? Uh, blue!”

Character 2: <snips red wire>

Character 1: “What? Why’d you snip the red wire?”

Character 2: “You said you didn’t know anything about bombs!”

They did basically the same thing on Hogan’s Heroes:

KLINK: Why did you ask me which color wire to cut when you already knew the answer?

HOGAN: I didn’t know which wire was the right one. But I was sure you’d pick the wrong one!

Something similar happened on MASH*** with Henry Blake, but I don’t remember if the punch line was the same.

[terentii]

@AncientHumanoid

Lots of Star Trek eps, old, next, and others. Transporter figures into a lot of them.

“The Doomsday Machine” being the most obvious example. Did anybody really think Kirk was going to die on board the Constellation?!? :dubious: :smack:

“Obsession” is a close second, but the two episodes were filmed almost back-to-back.

[terentii]

@Claverhouse

Anyway, all I can remember was that they ended on a cliffhanger; and this was resolved in a few seconds at the start of the next. The only definite memory is one of the Flash Gordon-type hero standing with two others in a tunnel facing the audience as tons of molten lava/mud filled up behind, with no escape possible.

I remember that episode! I think it was from Flash Gordon vs the Mud Men. Local stations were still showing those serials on late afternoon TV back in the '60s. I watched it while on vacation in West Virginia in the summer of '65.

[Andy_L]

@terentii

They did basically the same thing on Hogan’s Heroes:

KLINK: Why did you ask me which color wire to cut when you already knew the answer?

HOGAN: I didn’t know which wire was the right one. But I was sure you’d pick the wrong one!

Something similar happened on MASH*** with Henry Blake, but I don’t remember if the punch line was the same.

Lt. Col. Henry Blake: [reading a set of instructions] And carefully cut the wires leading to the clockwork fuse at the head.
[Trapper cuts the wires]
Lt. Col. Henry Blake: But first, remove the fuse.

[terentii]

@Voyager

This plot device in general worked a lot better before cellphones.

I’ll never forget the episode of Columbo where the murderer’s alibi was scuttled because the only pay phone the fictitious killer could have used to call the police was in a gas station that had closed early. :smack:

[msmith537]

@MaxTheVool

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”.

Yeah, it’s sort of like how the thing about to kill the hero slows down the closer it gets to killing the hero. And if that doesn’t give enough time it needs to give one last roar in your face or target you with it’s laser designator (at point blank range) or pull back the slide on his weapon (were you chasing me with an un-cocked weapon or did you just eject a chambered round for no reason?) or just rear up in front of you just long enough for your friend to blast it with the nose cannon of the gunship you conveniently left parked over there.

[Lemur866]

It’s funny how predators will always quitely sneak up behind you–and then give a good loud threat display roar which gives you a three mississippi running head start.

[terentii]

@Lemur866

It’s funny how predators will always quitely sneak up behind you–and then give a good loud threat display roar which gives you a three mississippi running head start.

Or how a helicopter can be hovering just over the next rise, but you won’t even hear it until it pops into view. :eek:

[ftg]

While the OP predates it, Gravity is just one horribly over-extended series of examples of this.

[typoink]

@MaxTheVool

A common trope in movies and TV is the scene where the hero arrives (or something good happens) just at the very last possible moment before all hope is lost. Frequently, the nick-of-time-ness of it is played up to such a degree that it becomes ridiculous. For instance, I was just rewatching The Matrix for the first time in a while (an interesting topic in its own right… some parts of it hold up really well, and some parts don’t), and the timing of the end of the movie is just off.

I absolutely agree that that EMP moment is terrible (and could have much improved by simply making the monster robot things less comically inefficient), but The Matrix also includes my (least?) favorite example of a similar infuriatingly inefficient moment, when Trinity taunts the agent with “Dodge this” before shooting. After the agent JUST demonstrated that they were fast enough to dodge that. Which, not only is stupid, but I remain convinced that that scene would work better if Trinity shot first and quipped “dodge that” later.

[Wallaby]

In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there are 2 nearly identical scenes.

One in Moria, when fighting the Balrog, one in Mt Doom after the ring is destroyed.

In each case, our heroes are running away across a collapsing arched bridge - each span of the bridge collapses (sequentially) a split second after our heroes have leapt off it.

[Suburban_Plankton]

As the horrendous Black Beast lunged forward, escape for Arthur and his knights seemed hopeless, when, suddenly … the animator suffered a fatal heart attack.

ANIMATOR: “Aaaaagh!”

The cartoon peril was no more … The Quest for Holy Grail could continue.

[Robot_Arm]

@terentii

Or how a helicopter can be hovering just over the next rise, but you won’t even hear it until it pops into view. :eek:

It’s even better at the end of Goldeneye. James and Natalya have saved the day and James moves in for the clinch, saying that there’s no one around for miles. Then a bunch of Marines pop up from their foxholes and some helicopters descend into view. Yes, that’s right, the helicopters were hiding by being off the edge of the movie screen.