The most absurdly stupid moments in film

Yes. The guy who set him up with his whole fake identity also set them up with all the means with which to carry the hoax off, including the incinerator.

I’m going to save a link to this post to use whenever the idea of adding avatars in the SDMB comes up. This should kill the idea toot sweet. :smiley:

Didn’t *Commando * also have a scene where an SUV or pickup truck was pushed (driverless and not running) down a hill, where it hits a bump and sails into the air - with a trial of exhaust following?

Sorry if it’s been mentioned (I think I’ve read the thread - but I’ve read others too and they run together in my mind eventually) - my pet peeve in movies and TV is having foriegn characters speak to each other in accented English, instead of in their native language. I’ve been willing to forgive a lot of nonsense in Heroes because they’ve been great about letting characters talk to each other naturally. Heck, in one episode last season I think we got English, Spanish, Japanese, and French. Not bad. :smiley:

24 is notorious in this aspect.

One of my favorite dumb movies would be Transporter 2.

At some point early in the movie, the bad guys attach a bomb on the underside of a car and they tell the Statham to drive off with it. Statham sees the bomb in a puddle and drives off. He accelerates and hits some obstacle on purpose which causes the car to take off and start rotating in the air. He manages to time this so perfectly that when the car is completely up-side down, a hook hanging from a crane fortuitously rips the bomb from the underside of the car just microseconds before it explodes. Of course the car completes its rotation in time to land upright on the road.

In the same movie, Statham is standing in the middle of the road. He is about to because mashed Statham with ketchup by two cars about to have a head on collision with him in the middle. Not someone to panic easily (remember, he detached a bomb from a flying car with a hook from a crane) he simply jumps vertically about 10 meters in the air just when the cars are bout to collide and then lands on their smashed hoods.

Easy stuff.

Ah yes, good point. Hadn’t thought of that.

I’d argue that that’s just a filmmaking convention. It’s not like the filmmakers actually think that’s what happens, or want to convince us that that’s what’s happening. It’s just that they believe (truthfully or not) that people don’t like subtitles.

24 is notorious for doing a lot of absolutely ridiculous things, mostly in the form of plot twists, but also geography, cell phones, computers and travel time. Compared to that, making the bad guys speak the language the audience understands is pretty minor. :smiley:

I thought there was a fanwank that said that the sound effects are EM noise from the ships’ engines and weapons being played out a speaker. The aural feedback being part of how fighter jockies keep track of what’s going on around them. I’d buy that as an explanation if they ever explicitly showed someone turning on their speakers.

Whoops, you’re right. I regret the error. Still, every time I’ve been on a plane and elbowed some guy unconscious, then broken his neck, some busybody has noticed. It’s really annoying.

The stupidest part of Goldeneye is the pre-title sequence, where Bond, in free fall, catches up to a plummeting airplane (with its props spinning, so if anything it should be moving faster than a free-falling body).

The second time I watched Goldeneye, that was more plausible - the plane was virtually idling when it dropped off the end of the runway and Bond accelerated over the edge on the motorbike - but yeah, not plausible enough.

Lost is good about this. Sun and Jin speak Korean to each other, with the conversations subtitled in English. Their flashbacks are also subtitled.

Does he accelerate down on the bike? It’s not that bad though, you can catch up to falling objects if they have more drag than you. I’d bet a plane would have more than a person that’s trying to streamline himself.

I`ve seen footage of a skydiver doing just that, something well out on the borders of amazingly cool and incredibly stupid. Probably the engine was idling, and maybe the pilot had dropped the flaps to slow down (as it would be the case with a plane ready to take off)

So it`s not so stupid.

Searching a little I found this video, but I can´t open it myself. However the preview shows the guy approaching the plane on a spread eagle position, if it can keep up with it like that I`m sure it can catch up with it fairly quickly going down headlong.

Here, nice footage at the beggining, and the same kind of plane as on the movie, a Pilatus Turbo Porter.

A sacrifice I’m willing to accept for the sake of the co-ed showers.

That seems like it should be even less plausible. If the top of the dam is a flat surface, then the accelerating motorbike will only push him outward, while downward acceleration will be exactly the same as if he just stepped off the ledge. If anything, it will make the plane harder to catch since he’s now moving steadily away from the wall as he free-falls, while the plane falls straight down next to the wall.

I suppose now we could come up with some explanation of how wind resistance would cause the plane to pull up slightly and move away from the wall, while trading enough downward speed for forward speed that Bond’s path intersects with it at just the right moment.

Not to mention that not only does Bond catch up to the plane, he catches up to it at virtually no speed differential, allowing him to casually open the door and step in. I wonder if Bond has ever played the lottery…

Where do you think M5 gets their money to supply them with all those hi-tech toys? :smiley: