Lucywas the stupidest movie about intelligence ever filmed. Maybe ever will be filmed.
Every person in the movie is an idiot. Some of them are idiots because none of the plot would work otherwise. Others are idiots because it came naturally to them. Morgan Freeman, notably, is an idiot not because he did it solely for the money; he’s an idiot because he let that contempt show with every word he spoke.
Does Green Room count? On the one hand, it’s not entirely serious, exactly. But on the other hand, it is realistic. It’s horror movie cliches meets gruesome reality, in a rather peculiar and unsettling way. BTW, I’ll try not to spoil it too much, although “spoiler alert” is probably redundant for this kind of thread.
The characters are certainly incompetent or just flat-out idiots. There’s one particular scene where they behave so stupidly that you want to smack your face against the nearest flat surface. But they’re just people, under pressure. They’re trapped, and scared. They have very little time to think. And the real horror comes from realizing that in that situation, you, the viewer, would probably behave just as stupidly and incompetently.
That one scene (I won’t say which one I have in mind), in particular, haunts me in strange ways. Sometimes, out of nowhere, it will pop into my mind, and I’ll shout: “YOU IDIOTS! DON’T…”
…in a cold sweat. And I’ll leave it at that.
The cops in Die Hard (excepting Powell) weren’t very smart, but they weren’t egregiously stupid, either. They tried to assault the building, they turned off the power, they attacked the roof with a helicopter; they were much too gung-ho and by-the-book, but none of those are automatically bad moves. They didn’t know that turning off the power was exactly what the criminals wanted. For the most part it didn’t matter what they did. They were locked out of the building; even when they acted stupidly it didn’t really amount to much.
Die Hard 2 was the bigger offender in this area. The cops in that movie do things like letting one of the bad guys get away from the baggage room, not searching it, ignoring McClane’s warnings about what’s going to happen, walking into an ambush, not noticing the staged firefight, etc. But it had to be that way. The first movie had John McClane as a lone wolf hero because he was trapped in the building with the crooks. Hollywood loves to take an idea that words and try to make it work again, but it would have been too much to have McClane trapped in a building again. The only way to make him the lone wolf in the second movie was to have all the other good guys be idiots.
There was this movie called The Temp, about a woman brought in to fill in as a secretary, but then she starts working her way up the company ladder whilst bad shit keeps happening to people who might get in her way. The guy she started out working for seems to be clueless and unable to not do the wrong thing every fucking time. It stops being at all interesting less than halfway through.
This scene is only part incompetence and part accident but it’s brutally funny in a twisted, unexpected kind of way.
And this is just basic stupidity (but funny, too).
The Liam Neeson vehicle The Grey has garnered a certain amount of internet cult following. So I know this will offend some of you, but anyway, there it goes (SPOILERS AHEAD!!!):
[SPOILER]Liam Neson and his crew are absolute imbeciles. They were in a plane. Rescue was, presumably, coming. They could brave the elements sheltered in said plane, and easily barricade themselves against the wolves. In the most likely place for a rescue.
Instead, they go for an aimless walk, to end up with almost all of them dead, and probably not that far away from when they started, since the final scene is in the wolves’ den.[/SPOILER]
Tech tip: If you want the playback to start at a specific time, you can right-click in the video frame and on the menu that pops up, One of the choices that pops up is Copy URL at Current Time. Pull the trigger at the time desired. My result (seven seconds ahead): https://youtu.be/2kK5din-fHE?t=1373
This sounds like a thread dedicated to movies that angry up.the blood, and to that end I nominate both Star Trek: Insurrection and Star Trek Into Darkness as movies that may have actually caused me partial brain death.
Cool, thanks.
Making this one of the stupidest scenes in film history. I realise Tarantino was going for cartoon reality, there, but still…embarrassingly dumb.
And then make them form up in a big, wide line and march down the middle of the street into the face of automatic gunfire.
The fact that the writers gave them plot armour doesn’t mean that it wasn’t one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen, the casualties from that march should have been catastrophic.
Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes faced a blackmailer who – well, yes, it was clever of our hero to slip past that guy’s security, but the cleverness was undercut by a blackmailee having figuratively beaten Holmes there and literally beaten said blackmailer, maybe in hopes of killing him. Occupational hazard, really; why wouldn’t you beat him up and maybe kill him if he’s blackmailing you?
So he starts blackmailing Holmes, who brings the guy stolen stuff – figuring the authorities will (a) swoop in and search the premises and (b) find other documents the blackmailer shouldn’t have, to get said blackmailer arrested. The blackmailer, knowing this, keeps no contraband there; his plan is, the authorities will arrive and find only Holmes with stolen property and lock him up.
Does the blackmailer simply let that happen? Well, no; that’d make too much sense; he reveals his plan before the authorities arrive. Given that, he could add that the documents are safe with a trusted lieutenant – he could lie about that, or he could tell the truth, it’d make no difference – or he could just keep his mouth shut.
He instead patiently explains that the documents don’t exist.
This time, he doesn’t survive.
Well, for this part, it was clearly symbolic…
“Symbolic” in the sense that Nolan was clearly uninterested depicting real people, only symbolic representations of notional forces and concepts in an abstract setting. With some Batman added.
Yes. This. +1.
I hated this movie. It was offensive on every level. Every character - scientists all - pushed the stupid button and held it down hoping to get every single erg of stupid out of it.
I began ranting on Facebook about it. I compared Life unfavorably to Prometheus, Green Lantern and even Highlander 2. The next day I went back to the theater so my oldest kid could take a picture of me flipping off the poster.
Christ, everyone involved should be forced to forfeit 10% of their net worth for being in it. Argh.
Any by Álex de la Iglesia. He’s like the Coen brothers (comedy section), but by himself and in Spanish.
Does this include stupid plans? Because the bad guys complex scheme in “Flight Plan” would have failed if any passenger had turned their head slightly to the right. Or if the main character didn’t fall asleep at the predicted time. Or if the daughter had done anything that real children do- crying, playing, running around, talking- Really, it’s an incredibly stupid plan.
In the Kevin Bacon TV show The Following, the FBI often did some staggeringly stupid things. One in particular stood out:
Agent A was assigned to protect The Innocent Victim in a safe house. Agent Kevin Bacon was at that time out running down some leads.
The FBI Agent in Charge discovers that Innocent Victim was actually an Evil Cult Member! So she quickly phones…Agent Kevin Bacon to tell him this. Of course, Agent A ends up getting killed, because why the hell would anyone bother to phone him to tell him the Innocent Victim is a fake?
Sure they were, look how long it took for anyone other than Powell to acknowledge that they had someone inside helping them. Powell even lampshades how idiotic the others were being.
The principle characters in Splice seemed to take the worst possible path every time the opportunity presented itself. By the time it got to the male scientist saying “Yeah, I’mma just gonna fuck this half-feral carnivorous, people attacking, cat eating, stinger-tailed harpy creature we keep locked in a barn” I pretty much checked out through the rest of the movie and its predictable conclusion.
That’s not counting the multiple asinine decisions they made along the way to that point.
This happens in books, too. I recently read a book in which one of the very small number of good guys turns out to have been a bad guy all along. Yet the book kept on chugging along, dragging things out, providing suspense and close calls, even though the bad guys knew everything the good guys would do every step of the way. Ugh.
Dumb movie yes, but wasn’t he being pheromone’d into monster lovin’?