“This… was POORLY-WRITTEN!!!”
Characters with seemingly infallible memories. Especially those who can recall a number or address they’ve only seen in a fleeting glimpse.
Scenes where the good guy and the bad guy face off at close range pointing guns at each other, but wait for the other guy to make a move before they react.
Alcatraz was unused from 1963 through 1969, when it was taken over by a group of Native Americans. After that it was turned into a national park. So I suppose you could say that it wasn’t completely abandoned, but it has been unused as a prison for decades. There is certainly no furnace there from the original prison that has been kept in operation.
But yeah, I guess since the furnace was built in the twenties or thirties explains why it has trap doors and belching flames. I mean, anything that old must be really bizarre, right?
Others have already mentioned some of these so I’ll just reiterate:
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Movies where bad things happen to animals–and particularly beloved pets or cats of any type (including wild cats). I don’t have that much of an issue with non-beloved “extra-type” animals getting hurt (like horses in old-time war movies–not that I like it or anything, but it’s not a dealbreaker for me) but as soon as somebody loves it or they give it a personality, I don’t care if it’s a cute kitten or a manatee, I’m gonna be sad if it gets killed.
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Romance in non-romantic movies, particularly if it results in the woman being less effective because she’s fallen in love. That was one thing I liked about “The Expendables 2”-- there was a woman in the otherwise all-male cast, but aside from a bit of flirting, there wasn’t any romance, and she was as effective as the guys all the way through.
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This doesn’t happen anymore, but it used to happen in old movies/TV (watch for it on Star Trek: TOS for an example): the blurring of female closeups to make them look “dewy” or whatever the hell they’re doing. It’s annoying and I get stabby every time I see it.
It’s laughable when a character learns a language after the briefest of exposures to it (immersion or otherwise) and is instantly able to pass for a native speaker. (“NCIS: LA” takes this to extremes.) Or, like Gregory Peck in The Guns of Navarone, is a native English-speaker who also speaks “Greek like a Greek and German like a German.” Believe me, native speakers of a foreign language can always spot a non-native, even if their true nationality isn’t immediately obvious. (This was actually the most realistic aspect of Inglorious Basterds.)
Vaseline on the lens.
No, really.
Disney death scenes where the protagonist’s companion dies to tug at the heart strings, but then turns out not to be dead after all.
Women who are hailed leave/cheat-on their boring but decent husbands/boy friends/fiances for the far more interesting hero, without any regard for the person left behind. (e.g. sleepless in Seattle). Also the same with the genders reversed but that seems less common.
Characters who keep important information secret from their friends for no good reason. (Harry Potter keeping secrets from Dumbledore, John Lock not telling everyone about the Hatch in Lost, etc.)
As others have mentioned: Bad science, unfaithful adaptations.
Romance movies where the two leads are smoking hot, they live in the big city, have professional jobs, yet have no current partners, or even friends or someone who is trying to get with them. Yeah, right, they are single and totally available. How about like in real life where people like this are already with someone?
The textbook diabolical evil genius with some sort of lair, usually a cabin or warehouse, where they have all sorts of generic weird stuff to do awful to their victims. We hear about folks like that in real life all the time, at least one every week, right?
Mayhem, buildings explode, hundreds of cars are wrecked, etc., and we basically just walk away. Or gun fights with hundreds of bad guys firing thousands of rounds from automatic weapons and there is never a cop arresting anyone.
The one-punch-knockout; the most common victims are nameless evil henchmen, because apparently all supervillains hire their thugs from the “Glass Jaw Temp Agency,” but this occurs in almost any genre. A single one-punch-KO I’ll buy; the hero doing it literally left and right to 20 guys in a row, not so much.
For me it’s unrealistic exaggerated physics. This has become particularly prevalent where they no longer do real stunts and use CGI for characters or vehicles. The A-Team film has a couple of good examples I can think of off the top of my head. The loop the loop in the helicopter and the falling tank scene.
For me it makes it feel like I am watching a cartoon. It actually undermines good CGI because I can tell it’s CGI because of the silly physics. It really cuts down on the adrenaline buzz you are meant to get from such scenes when it’s so obvious they are not real.
And they don’t scream or get hysterical in the way a normal person screams or gets hysterical, apparently the directors have never seen someone do either. Their hysterical screams are banshee ones and they barely move, busy giving us that “from the diaphragm!” yowl. When someone gives a scream anywhere near that irl, they are more dangerous than whatever scared them: they windmill, they jump, they assault the person nearest to them yelling “make it stop, make it stop!” “I would if you got off my neck!”
Not always, at least not within a reasonable length of time. Spanish is my Ducth coworker’s fifth language, but it took weeks before she made a mistake that a native Spaniard wouldn’t have made. I doubt it would happen any more (more due to the two years in Scotland than to the long time I’ve been out of the US) but I used to be mistaken for American all the time; “not quite from around here” American, but American. It’s exceptional but possible.
Clichèd music. “Born To Be Wild” and “I Feel Good” to pick a few. Find some new goddamn songs.
Agreed on the cliche trailer music.
How about the romantic comedy trailers that always have the black bars at the top and bottom with the name of the movie and when it opens. You can always spot a romcom even with the sound muted.
I’m not sure I understand this objection. For one thing, good guys use guns in half the movies out there.
And in the specific case of “Clear and Present Danger,”
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Jack Ryan isn’t a CIA agent, he’s an analyst. Ineed, in that movie the distinction is one of the central plot points of the movie, which Ford being distinctly opposed to the actions of CIA Operations (as led by Henry Czerny, who isn’t in enough movies.) He has some history of using guns but he’s not actually a soldier, and
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There is never any reason in the movie for him to use a gun. He’s surrounded by people who know how to use them better than he does.
Indeed, I am reminded of the scene in “The Hunt for Red October” - which is generally a pretty fun movie - where Ryan, at the end, gets a gun. While this enables the hilarious moment where Alec Baldwin makes fun of Sean Connery’s accent, it’s stupid and pointless. Up to that point Ryan was the hero of the story by using his brain, and then in the end he executes a guy. It cheapens the final scene, in my opinion.
I’m a teacher, so pretty much any scene depicting a teacher in a classroom grates on me.
Typical scene:
Teacher enters classroom. Students are milling about, talking, horsing around, etc. Bell rings and students settle into their seats. Teacher begins the lesson with a question. Class clown makes “witty” comment and high fives his buddy. Overachiever raises hand and gives a technically correct but uninspired answer. Finally, teacher calls on a student who gives a remarkably insightful response. Teacher follows up with an equally meaningful observation, and every student is enrapt. Bell rings, class is over.
WTF? So in movieland, each class lasts only three minutes? Yeah, I know, it’s shorthand, but it’s stupid. Fade out as the class continues or something. Plus it’s become such a cliche scene.
I hate that too. 
Almost everything that’s been mentioned can bug me, but I can set aside trope-flaws if the rest of the movie holds up. The one thing that claws at my eyes and irritates me, and is more common in TV productions than cinema, is… bad editing. I don’t necessarily mean bad artistic choices, but fumbling the basic technique.
The third or fourth time I catch action that goes across a cut and the action doesn’t match - e.g., a character starts to raise a glass and in the cut to another angle, the motion doesn’t match up - I start to fume. The art of editing is like any other; it comes down to one person’s judgment about how to seam things together. But the skill of editing should be a bar to anyone getting near an NLE.
I’ve got a number of pet peeves, but probably my main one is aviation related. It seems like all directors, when faced with a scene featuring a WWI type biplane, think it will be perfectly realistic to trick up a de Havilland Tiger Moth with a fake cowl to masquerade as a Fokker or an SE-5 or whatever. The Tiger Moth has one of the most distinctive wings of any biplane, and is impossible to mistake for anything else, no matter what the disguise.
At least this was one of the things that they did right with in Flyboys. The CGI let them portray those old biplanes with excellent accuracy, right up to the point where they put radial engines in them, instead of rotaries. It appears when aviation is concerned, most Hollywood types are very deficient in expertize.
“White Rabbit”