Top Five Brutally Bad Plotholes in Quality Movies: Let's Compile a List

Cafe Society
181

Here’s mine:

The first Batman movie, directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, and Jack Nicholson.

Ok, the Joker developed a chemical called Smilex, which would give people those ghastly grins and kill them. I’ll buy that. Apparently Smilex is available in solid, liquid and gas forms (based on some of the contaminated products later named, and the ballons filled with gas near the end). Not a chemistry expert, but I guess I’ll buy that too.
Then we have shots of the Joker in some sort of Chemical factory, asking the scientist type there “have you shipped a million of those things yet?”, while containers of Smilex roll down a conveyor. Smilex starts killing people left and right. Then the Joker appears on television, saying “chances are, you bought it already!”. Footage of news anchors, saying the stuff is mixed in with common beauty products, and certain combinations of those products will trigger it. Later, Batman cracks the code and delivers it to the press. Cue another news anchor sans makeup telling what the combinations are.
Ok, I guess I can buy that Smilex is composed of different chemicals, and when people use the right (or wrong, as the case may be) combination, it triggers the deadly reaction.

BUT, how the hell did the Joker get the chemicals into the products in the first place and then place said products in Gotham’s stores? He’d have to intercept vast shipments of deodorant, soap, cosmetics, etc. Each store probably got shipments from hundreds of different manufacturers. Then he’d have to contaminate each of those products with the right chemical(s), all without altering the product enough for Gotham’s consumers to notice they’d been tampered with. Then he’d have to ship all of the products to the stores they were originally intended for. Again, without raising any type of suspicion whatsoever. No way Bob the henchman, or even the Joker himself, was coordinating all that. And it would take a lot more henchmen than the Joker appeared to have, an army of at least thousands. Each shipment would have to be contaminated, then replaced very quickly. One or two shipments being late could be overlooked, but dozens would raise suspicions for sure. Especially when people started dying. I guess they could have purchased smaller quantities outside of Gotham, built up a supply of the stuff, contaminated it at their leisure, then shipped them out, but that’s pretty convoluted also, and doesn’t address the fact that the products would have to have absolutely no signs of tampering. Also, why didn’t people just go to the NEXT FRIGGIN’ TOWN and buy stuff there? “Safe products are being flown in” my ass. What, is Gotham City on an island? How long does it take to fill a truck up with deodorant and drive it a few miles?

Pretty much killed the movie for me. Being asked to believe that Michael Keaton A) is a billionaire and B) has muscles didn’t help much either. Kinda sucks, as Jack Nicholson played a great Joker and the movie was otherwise decent.

182

Another plot hole in Die Hard 2: At one point reporters are looking up into the air, and reporting on seeing the airplanes circling the airport.

uh, the reason the airplanes can’t just land anywhere is because it’s supposed to be the storm of the decade or something, and the airplanes require ground-based instruments to land because they can’t see the ground.

But if the reporters can see them, they can see the ground.

That’s a true plot hole. Another, which is half bad writing and half plot hole, is that the whole terrorist scheme depends on their being a huge snow storm that day, yet it was clearly planned weeks or months in advance. They would have felt awfully stupid if they went to the trouble to take over the instrument landing system only to find that the night was clear and cloudless.

Yet another problem from the same movie, which is really bad writing and not a true plot hole - in one scene McClane ejects from a C-130 Hercules after the bad guys throw some grenades in the cockpit with him. C-130 Hercules don’t have ejection seats. In fact, no transport class aircraft, military or otherwise, have ejection seats.

I hated that movie more than any other in years because these plot holes didn’t have to be there - I’m sure several of them were pointed out to the producers or director because they had an ‘aviation consultant’ on staff. They just didn’t care. They assumed the audience was too stupid to notice, so rather than spend a little extra time and care, they just did whatever the hell they felt like. Obnoxious.

183

I’d assumed the leader of the Zompires did.*
*I wish I’d thought of this name.

184

Maybe, but the whole rest of the movies is about how they zompires have no human mental powers left. They seem to run around life packs of wolves.

185

“The Joker’s tainted hundreds of basic chemicals at the source.”

I have always interpreted that to mean the Joker contaminated the feedstock used by the cosmetics companies, rather than the shipments. That provides a much narrower range of targets that he has to hit–maybe even just one chemical plant, if it supplies basic ingredients to enough cosmetics companies. It might even have been the plant he was using to make the Smilex in the first place–it was certainly an active plant, so it must have been selling stuff. All he has to do is gain access to that one plant and mix a small amount of the Smilex compounds in with stuff that’s going out the right places. If the lethal concentration is low enough, it probably wouldn’t cause any obvious changes in most of the end products. It would also likely mean that the problem would extend well beyond Gotham itself, although the movie doesn’t really bring that up.

186

Well, technically… :smiley:

187

Hmmm, never thought of it that way. I must’ve missed the “at the source” bit. Still pretty convoluted, but makes more sense that way.

@iwakura43: Gotham is Manhattan? Really? I’m not a big Batman fan, so I’m ignorant of the legend behind it. I always thought that Gotham was a fictional city, like Metropolis from Superman.

188

Yes, Gotham City is fictional. (Though I’ve always had the impression that it’s more or less explicitly modeled after New York.)

I’m not quite sure what iwakura43 was getting at.

-FrL-

189

“Gotham” is a near 200-year old nickname for New York City, first called that by Washington Irving. Calling a fictional metropolis “Gotham” essentially states that this city is a fictional NYC.

190

why? was it once famous for spam?

191

I never got the hate for X-Men 3. My hate is reserved for X-Men 2. Major, major plot point - Nightcrawler has to be able to visualize where’s he’s going. The climax of the entire movie is him finally overcoming this block to port into Cerebro to stop Xavier. Ok, fine. Of course, earlier on in the movie, when someone gets sucked out of the X-Jet (was it Rogue? I can’t remember off the top of my head), Nightcrawler teleports out into the unknown to rescue her. It’s hard to take the huge limitation seriously when it’s already been done.

192

there’s no danger in porting into open air.

193

Yeah, but the “unknown” is open air, which presumably is safer than hopping into a room he’s never seen before.
A deconstruction of the holes in the various Mission Impossible movies would run several pages.

194

OK, Manhattan is an island, although the island of Manhattan is not identical to the borough of Manhattan, which is only a portion of the city of New York, which is the real world model for Gotham City, although New York (as well as Metropolis) also exist as distinct locations in the DC universe.

“Gotham” was regarded as a city of fools in English folk humor before American writer Washington Irving used it as an insulting nickname for New York in the early 19th century.

195

I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark today. there is a huge plot hole in that movie. Indy escapes onto the cargo ship with the Ark.
A German U-boat stops the cargo ship, grabs the Ark, and the girl, while Indy hides.
The U-boat goes to leave, preparing to dive. Indy is seen climbing up on the deck of the sub.
The next scene the sub is arriving at the sub pen on the island.
Where has Indy been hiding all this time? How long can he hold his breath?
:confused:

196

I don’t remember the U-boat preparing to dive. Subs from that era ran better on the surface and had limited endurance underwater, so they’d only dive to attack or to hide. I wouldn’t call it a plot hole that they’d make that trip without submerging. Now, whether you could stow away on a U-boat for a couple hundred miles without being noticed seems a bit unlikely. And if there’s dialog that the captain ordered a dive for no reason, that’s a goof.

197

Not really – eventually it becomes clear that at least some of the zombies have created a working society.

198

The story of Gotham, England is that the people seeing the tax collector coming starting walking around in circles so he would think they were all crazy and not likely to have money. Its application to New York City came from the idea that the denizens might not be as crazy as they appear. It might have started with Washington Irving for all I know.

Speaking of Superman flying speed inconsistencies, you should check out How Superman Should Have Ended. Also if you like dry humor, I recommend the Logically Critical podcast on superheroes.

199

Which he did repeatedly in the White House earlier in the movie without any apparent difficulty.

When he said this at the critical moment, Storm should have bitchslapped him and told him to get his ass into the room.

200

Sure, it’s fair that Nightcrawler’s limitation stems from being a chicken, and can be overridden if he’s under the effect of a bitchslap (as you suggest) or chemical mind control (as was the case when he attacked the President).

Which reminds me of the “kill all the humans” moment when people all over Earth (including El Prez) are writhing in pain. This should’ve caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries from crashing cars and planes.