I have very little problem suspending disbelief in any fantasy or superhero story. In things like cop or military stories anything that makes it clear that they didn’t spend a second of time researching. If you make even a minor mistake that any former JROTC cadet would catch then I’m out. Or when a general is the direct combat commander of a squad and captains are doing the jobs of privates. Or command level cops doing street cop work. Things like that. I am able to suspend my disbelief with Law and Order when they have improbable situations because they tend to get the little details right.
Movies where characters act completely unlike how normal humans act like only so the plot can progress.
How many movies feature an armed bad guy that has two cops show up behind him, the cops yell DROP YOUR GUN only for the bad guy to rather easily turn around easily kill both cops? As we seen in real life 99/100 times the bad guy gets 30 bullets in him.
Or the infamous “Bad guy holds important person hostage with a knife/gun to their head and tells the heroes Drop Your Gun”. Why would you give up your only advantage? The only time it makes sense is when the bad guys henchmen are around which means just killing the bad guy won’t work.
He took it out of the frame first.
But still, folding an old painting is probably going to crack it, if not crease it. So the complaint still stands.
This reminds me of one of Dan Brown’s worse novels, Deception Point. In his novel, a rogue U.S. government agency director goes to immense lengths to fake evidence of extraterrestrial life and thus influence a U.S. election outcome - all for…what? Because he wants NASA to have a bigger budget, that’s all.
No, he doesn’t. That scene has always bothered me because the rest of the heist is so clever and carefully thought out and orchestrated and yet that crucial part make no sense and cannot be explained by anything but magic.
I just rewatched it to make sure. He takes off the ornate display frame but the canvas is still stretched on its wooden frame. He lays it flat in the briefcase, then closes the briefcase like a book, which should be impossible because there is wooden frame there. Then he opens it at home and pulls out the painting, shown from behind with its wooden frame perfectly intact. It’s like real world physics suddenly disappeared and the briefcase became Mary Poppins’ bag which can hold items much larger.
Ha, I just started to write “How does Thomas Cr” in Google and it auto filled “How does Thomas Crown fold the painting?” Apparently the director was going to film a sequence where he breaks the wooden stretchers but instead just thought no one would notice.
Needlessly complicated government conspiracy plots are my favorite.
Man of the Year starring Robin Williams has Robin Williams as a Daily Show style TV host run for President despite trailing a distant 3rd in all polls. Then somehow due to a voting machine glitch Williams somehow wins the Presidency and absolutely nobody questions it. Then a whistleblower inside the voting company tries to tell Williams about the glitch and the voting company sends hitman to try to kill her, along with members of Williams staff who try to cover it up because they want to remain in power.
Did the movie writers assume that literally nobody would question a random asshole winning the Presidency out of nowhere, you would actually need a whistleblower to break that story?
I’ll accept just about anything as long as the characters are believable. I’m not one of those people who notices plot holes or gets hung up on little things. I am, for the most part, blindly entertained, as long as people’s behavior and the world are internally consistent. My own writing is full of handwavium - I just want a good story.
The one I struggled with recently was The Tomorrow War. First I have to accept that the world would lift a finger to save folks 30 years in the future. Have the writers ever met humanity? Not bloody likely. But the thing that I really couldn’t let go of was the notion that they’d just draft a bunch of middle aged people and send them into combat without any training whatsoever. Did it ever occur to them maybe their casualty rate was so high because they didn’t so much as tell new cadets where to aim?
Stupid.
Many good points and examples already made.
One other factor: how interesting the characters and plot others are matters. Boring characters and plot can have a minor thing take me out, but great on both those counts and I willingly look past a lot of stupid.
That reminds me of a plot point in Ever After.
Who notices what is wrong there?
Where does your ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ stop?
When I don’t like the film/show/book/comic/etc.
something that will take me out of a movie tv show ect is when someone in production has no clue how a video console works …like when you see someone using an sega genesis controller with a playstation system and the sounds coming out are from the infamous atari 2600 pac man
Also the same with computers that repainted trs–80 using a programming prompt from a c-64 your trying to pass off as the supercomputer of your spaceship is just going to get a WTF laugh from me … .
There are few old scifi tropes I hate:
Odd shaped doors. What’s wrong with retangular doors? We live in far future compared to 1950 and still our doors are rectangular as that is the simplest shape for persons to go through.
Power machines that emit lights while working. If your transformer or generator started to emit light you’d run. Light in power generation is always a side-effect and always a bad one.
Mona Lisa is painted on board not canvas.
It’s real simple. Thomas Crown is actually Dr. Who (as is Mary). The briefcase and bag are both built with the same technology as the TARDIS.
Exactly. I was waiting to see how on earth he was going to fit the painting into that tiny briefcase. And then bang, magic happens. Suspension of disbelief destroyed. How on earth could they think no one would notice? It’s not even like it’s contradicting something learned in school; it’s a fact we all know from experience.
I haven’t read the Harry Potter books, but my mind boggled when I watched the third movie and found out that the good guys had A WORKING TIME MACHINE that nobody bothered to use in the first two movies.
Personally, I have problems with suspension of disbelief when it comes to super-speed characters in superhero movies (like Quicksilver or The Flash). There’s usually a scene where it seems like everyone else is in slow motion and the super-speedster is moving people around like they’re life-sized Barbie dolls. I’m pretty sure that (in real life) if you try to move a person’s arm at Mach 5, then bad things will happen to that arm. Yeah, I know, Speed Force inertia fields mumble mumble.
I had problems with the movie Ant-Man, too; they flip-flopped so much between shrinking does/doesn’t preserve mass that I found it irrationally annoying.
As I’ve mentioned many times before, my Willing Suspension of Disbelief got shattered in the second Indiana Jones movie (Temple of Doom) when they jump out of a falling plane with only an inflating life raft. I’m sorry – when they hit the ground in that thing, they were dead, or so badly injured that they were effectively dead. Then they slid down a snow-covered slope and sailed off a cliff , falling a long distance until they hit a very shallow river. And so they were killed again.
And all this was at the very beginning of the movie.
I’m sorry, but once you abuse my suspension of disbelief like that, you have a hard time getting it back. I don’;t have a problem with hundreds of years old booby traps working, or magic potions that change personality, or a guy getting his heart torn out and still living, or angels/devils from the Ark of the Covenant. Once we’ve hit that point, I’m immersed in the movie and don’t care. But don’t pull that stuff at the outset.
Although I have to admit that the inconsistency of sending only as much water as it contained in a giant pot after Indy in some tunnels – when we’ve seen that there are giant pits and cravasses in between – doesn’t carry much conviction.
I remembered Mythbusters testing that out, and checked to make sure I remembered the result correctly.
I did. Verdict: Busted.
I found it rationally annoying 
. As I stated upthread, I’ll suspend disbelief for just about any fantastical rules as long as the movie is consistent about them. And the Ant-Man movies were just inconsistent. In some scenes, he retains his full mass at tiny size, and it’s an explicit plot point. Which creates a lot of problems in terms of real-world physics and physiology, but I’m more than willing to disregard that and go along with the bit. But then in other scenes, it’s a plot point that he doesn’t retain his mass. And there’s no rhyme or reason. DC’s Atom at least has the handwave in most modern depictions that he can alter his size and his mass, so he can deliberately choose to be tiny and at full mass or tiny and at proportional mass. Ant-Man in the MCU movies just seems to either have full mass or proportional mass depending on which one makes the specific gag in that scene work.
What? They didn’t also test the ice-box scene from the fourth movie? You would think working with nuclear explosives would have made them jump for joy!