After starting this thread, I was thinking about stupid plot devices spotted in movies. I’m not talking about film flubs, such as the old blind man in The Ten Commandments who wears a wristwatch. I’m talking about a purposeful violation of good sense or physics in order to advance the plot.
To wit:
In a stupid kid’s movie I’m ashamed to admit I love: Max Keeble’s Big Move.
Yeah, it’s a kid’s movie, and Disney to boot. Anyway, our hero, 7th grader Max, is out to expose the evil principal’s (the brilliant Larry Miller) plot to screw over all the students except the football players. In order to foil Max, the Principal locks him in the cage-like PE equipment room. He turns the lock from the outside. Max is trapped!
But, uh… Aren’t those rooms designed to keep thieves out rather than naughty kids in?
I rememember in “Lethal Weapon 2”, Early in the movie,Mel Gibson has a scene where he demonstates how he’s double jointed.Sure enough,later in the movie,instead of just shooting him,the bad guys tie him up and throw him in the water.
There used to be a commercial where a woman on an airplane when into the restroom to wash her hair. While washing it, she started making orgasmic sounds. During this, she accidently hit the intercom button so that all of the passengers could hear her. Boy, was she embarassed!
Why was there an intercom in the restroom? Was the pilot going to announce the landing from there?
Totally justified. The bad guy in charge of killing Gibson’s character (Riggs is it?) is not just a thug. He’s an assassin who actually was hired to kill him YEARS ago but ended up only killing his wife. Until that revelation it was believed that his wife died in a car accident. It appears as though this guy has a bit of a sadistic boner for Riggs. So the reason why Riggs is straightjacketed, weighted and tossed in the water is so he can get a little extra anguish by seeing his latest lover drowned in the water as well- right before he dies.
And come on the bad guys are supposed to somehow suspect that he can dislocate his shoulder and hold his breath as long as Houdini?
Look closely the next time you see that scene. When he gets back up to the surface and prepares to “re-locate” the shoulder he dislocated underwater, he dislocates the other shoulder, giving him two dislocated shoulders.
I believe it has something to do with the “Honor among thieves” concept running through the movie, and probably has to do with the Japanese crime films that Tarentino borrowed from.
Considering Mr. White had just gotten himself shot defending him, Mr. Orange no doubt felt a bit guilty, and maybe felt he was going to die no matter what.
Yeah, that commercial bugged the bejezzus out of me. Aside from blatantly ripping off “When Harry Met Sally” - the seated lady asks the flight attendant to bring her some of the same shampoo - why the hell was the woman shampooing her hair in an airplane restroom? And how would the seated woman know that’s what she was doing in the bathroom that made her scream ecstatically?
I mentioned this a week back, but still worth it. The infamous, but unfailing “jailbreak trick”.
If you ever get captured, just pretend to be sick, and the one inept guard will always come close enough for you to kill him and escape. Works 99 times out of 100 in the movies, but strangely you almost never hear of this happening in real life.
And my other favorite, cars will almost always burst into flames upon hitting anything, or just rolling down a hill, or being shot, or being yelled at. I must get that option on my next purchase. C4 wired into the car alarm.
Every movie computer returns a sound for every keystroke. This sentence in the movies would go “beep boop blip beep boop blip!” - nevermind that in the real world this would drive you mad.
Unless, of course, the audience needs to know what’s being typed. In those instances the keyboard noise is turned off…so that the character doing the typing can speak aloud what it is they’re typing.
In both cases, the computer user appears to be capable of typing about 300 words per minute with no errors.
Heh, I’ve seen a couple of movies where the guard responded with “What, you expect me to fall for THAT one?!”
In real life, the guard is probably under orders to get someone else to back him up before entering the cell, and then most likely does so without a gun. IE: You can knock the guard out and get his keys, but you still got the other one pointing a gun at you and thinking that somehow it’s your fault that his buddy is laid out on the floor.
When I was watching the Horatio Hornblower films, I wondered at the odds of Hornblower constantly running into the same British frigate (HMS Indefatiguable) no matter what hardship he would find himself in (drifting in a lifeboat in the English Channel, in a Spanish prison, sailing a supply ship to Gibraltar, etc.
And on Dr. No’s island they periodically run water through them. I know I like to do that with the ventilator ducts in my house every so often.
(Yes, I know why it happened in the book. In the movie, though, it’s completely pointless. And who the hell puts a ventilation duct that big in a prison cell?)
I am quite pretty sick of snazzly one-liners made by the bad guys or the villian in the beginning of the show, and only to have the heroes repeat it later as the said bad guys meet their demise. It’s all right when used in moderation, but it was quite bad in Batman Begins.