Or any army/Vietnam movie. The guy’s going to be shipped out tomorrow, and wham, he gets a bullet.
And the hardened vet they assign to “look after him” will not be paying attention for a split second when it happens. This will trigger a heroic “one man army” killing spree.
I have two.
-
The parent rushing to make an appearance at the kid’s stupid recital/play/soccer game (ususally after having had to choose between the kid’s sucky ballet recital and some Big Important Meeting at his job). Somehow the kid is always able to spot the parent in the crowd and exchange a meaningful look.
-
The hero lies helpless on the floor. The bad guy looms in the foreground holding a gun. The baddie makes some sort of triumphant remark and a shot rings out. The baddie falls over dead and we see, standing behind him, the shaking, trembling figure of the chick, the kid, the sidekick or some other previously non-violent character holding a gun with both hands.
You can always tell a sequence will end this way anytime the baddie incapacitates a “good” character without killing him or her before fighting the hero. Any unconscious or wounded “goodie” will always reappear to save the hero at a critical moment.
“Tell my wife…I… love her…”.
I’m perfectly fine with them climbing out of boxes, but someone has to think of the cakes 
For me it’s mostly action film cliches.
The one I truly hate is the hero being persued into a body of water (wading shallow) and a lone soldier stops at the perfect point where the hero can rise out of the water in back of him and dispatch him. Never in back of him, never to the right of him, never to the left of him…(I can usually hear the director in my head going, “OK, soldier a little more to the left, a little more forward now a little to the right…”
Its brother scene where one of the persuing villian minons goes exactly under the tree where the hero is wating to pounce. (of all the trees in all the forests in the world…)
In action films where a number of bad guys are going to beat up the hero but politely they come at him one at a time.
The hero has dispatched anywhere from five to 25 bad guys with little or no problems then at the climax of the film he faces off with the (usually middle-aged) main villian and have all kinds of trouble with him.
should read “Never in front of him…”
-
The Sinister Gov’ment Agent who must complete his mission, no matter how stupid it may seem (“You have to capture the giant Killer Shrew alive at all costs!”)
-
Rich = Bad. Doesn’t always, but the concept that by being rich and successful you’ve “sacrificed” something, as shown in The Family Man.
I second the “False Danger Child Alarm”.
These can sometimes be the same scene, where the crowd of baddies comes in one at a time and are easily picked off, but the very last baddie takes forever and is a heck of a fight. (I saw a comic strip that referred to this as the “Inverse Law of Ninja Power” - the more opponents, the easier they are, but as you get down to the last ones, they get tough.)
2 things…shooting a car makes it explode and a speeding car doesn’t ram the back of a parked car,it flips over
Incredivles spoofed a lot of the ones I had. The whole monologuing bit. Kill him! Shoot him in the head and then burn his body! Of course then the hero would be dead.
“She knows … .”
The one I hate is when the hero’s buddy or mentor or girlfriend gets killed and he drops to his knees and screams, “Nooooooooooooooo … .”
A similar cliche in action movies is a scene at the end where the main baddy, who has been shooting people without hesitation throughout the movie, finally has the good guy cornered, and decides to put down the piece and duke it out. In the excellent thriller Cellular,they had this cliche, but at least had the bad guy realistically beat the shit out of the hero, who was an ordinary guy and not equipped to beat a tough corrupt cop hand-to-hand.
I can’t remember ever seeing that in a foreign film. “Nyeeeetttt!”
The 10-minute long death scene. I didn’t mind Alan Rickman’s in Robin Hood, because his character was so over the top that you expected his death scene to be also, but come on already! Trinity could have written a book with all the things she found time to say before she kicked the can!
A man and woman are stuck on an island. Later in the day the man discovers the woman bathing naked under a waterfall. Just at that moment another naked large-breasted woman arrives and the two ladies go at it in a big vat of lime Jello.
I mean COME ON! How real is that? Everytime I’ve ever been stuck on an island it’s always orange Jello.
I also hate the end scene where the good cop/hero/super dude kills the bad guy at the end. I’d much rather see the bad dude end up alive, in jail, serving his time as Big Bubba Joe’s bitch.
Oh yeah. Another is when the good cop spends the entire movie hunting down the drug lord kingpin/murderer/mater theif only to learn it is really the police chief/partner/DA/co-worker.
I feel the same way. I always find it inherently unsatisfying for the bad guy to just die without having to suffer any real or extended consequences. I’d much rather see the guy have to through a trial and incarceration, with all the attending humiliation and degradation, than just see him get painlessly blown up or shot.
Err… Master Thief :smack:
I’ve noticed this too, though usually with monsters, and occasionally stormtroopers. (Witness the Aliens movies, and at least one scene in Return of the Jedi)