A covert government agency has to kill/capture someone in public and their best solution is to throw 30 heavily armed agents at them and cause a giant firefight in public with hundreds of witnesses and somehow get away with it.
In real life if a police official says “You need to leave this to the police” then the amateur person probably does leave it to the police. However, in the history of movies and television, no one ever told by the police to “leave it to the police” actually leaves it to the police.
Yep, I can think of a couple examples of this right off the top of my head.
One of those ‘pulled from the headlines’ style police procedural shows I watched a few years ago showed a group of teens having a ‘pill party’ where they all stole pills from their parent’s medicine cabinets, mixed them up in a big bowl of rainbow-colored tablets and took turns popping them indiscriminately. The supposed real-life aspect was more urban legend ‘parent panic’ fiction than reality. And what a stupid concept, even for teens, who do a lot of famously stupid things. Most of those pills are going to be boring old-people pills like blood pressure meds that don’t give any kind of buzz, but can seriously screw someone up who isn’t supposed to take them. Not to mention drug interactions that can easily kill or fry your liver or something.
The other one was very recent (minor spoilers for the ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ reboot): Hal went to a ‘hallucinogen dispensary’ as a treatment for his anxiety. He was presented with a big bowl of gel-cap pills of some non-identified hallucinogen, of which he was only supposed to take one. Of course he swallowed the whole bowl, which just logistically is dumb. Even trying to wash all those pills down at once with a gallon of water would have choked a horse, and he dry-swallowed the whole bowl.
Today they don’t leave it to the police but do it for YouTube views.
I didn’t notice at first what you were replying to. I thought you were talking about manual transmission race or chase scenes. It fits the thread - there’s usually WAY too much shifting, especially older movies.
I think of Mickey Rourke as Marv in Sin City simply pouring the pills into his mouth, and most of them missing and dropping onto the floor of his car.
Of course, if that’s the thing that bothers me about Sin City, then I’ve got issues.
And generally, that makes them a suspect, or at least a Person of Interest.
After laundry pods, there’s nothing I wouldn’t put past teens responding to peer pressure.
Doubtless this has been mentioned before in this thread’s 5k posts, but I’ve noticed in sitcoms that a couple will, while away from home (say, at a school function), encounter a situation that starts a fight (Dopey Husband acts the fool, or Flirtatious Wife flirts a bit too hard, or what have you). Then they resume the fight back at home. As if the car ride home was perfectly normal and they didn’t talk about the thing that they’re going to fight about when they get home.
Or the corollary to that, where one person is going on and on about a certain subject, and the scene goes from the person talking in a, say, restaurant, then the person is still going on about it in the car driving home, then the scene cuts to back home where the person is still talking about the same thing. And at the start of each new scene the conversation picks up exactly where it left off.
I saw a spoof of that somewhere, in which the scene cuts from the restaurant to driving home, and the listening person says “why did you completely stop talking when we left the restaurant for a full 5 minutes while we walked to the car, and picked up again exactly where you left off once I started driving?
Also spoofed in a Simpsons episode where a man named Alberto tries to win Marge’s heart:
ALBERTO: Why ride when we can [scene cuts to them on a hang glider] glide!
MARGE: I’m just glad you’re talking. You didn’t say anything for 40 minutes!
Heh, that might be the very spoof example I was thinking of. I thought it went from inside someplace to a car, but I couldn’t remember details, only the thing getting spoofed, and I remember that scene now that you mention it.
If you heard my daughter talking about Pokemon that wouldn’t seem too strange.
Fully automatic weapons used in police shootouts. I am binge watching The Rookie, seasons 1-6, and I actually lost track of how many times the bad guys used fully automatic weapons. Number of times it happened in real life? Twice in recent memory-2024, and 1997. ( Of course, back in the roaring twenties it could have been more common, what with 'chicago typewriters")
Getting thrown through a plate glass window and walking away without a scratch.
Chris & Jack did it well. Actually their channel has quite a lot of send ups of TV tropes.
Yeah, when people say they’re doing a dietary cleanse, that’s probably not what most people had in mind.
or Shaft old one or newer “jumping” through windows
Whenever there is a scene involving a firearm, sometimes without it even being drawn, but still in its’ holster, the person looking at it is frequently able to identify it as to manufacturer, model and maybe even variant, with only a glance at it. I see this frequently in the Spenser novels of Robert B. Parker. Frequently it is Spenser who does this, but sometimes other characters do so as well.
I have very little knowledge of firearms, so I wonder - is this realistic? Is, for example, a Smith and Wesson revolver so noticeably different from a Colt or a Ruger?
It is surprisingly easy to identify many handguns even when they are holstered. Grip shape and angle, type of grip pattern or grip panels, hammer style (or lack of external hammer), type of magazine catch, type of rear sight, slide profile, and other factors are pretty quickly distinguishable. It’s often more difficult to ascertain the caliber, barrel length, and some other aspects.
Manufacturers and designers want to make their products identifiable. Just think how easy it is to identify many cars from behind, without referencing the name badge.