Admittedly, there are many to choose from. There are whole websites dedicated to it. But here’s my favorite movie cliche/trope:
The bad guy shows off how much of a bad ášš he is.
Here’s how it works: The bad guys assembles a group of underlings. He tells them his plan. Everyone seems to think it’s a good idea except for one guy who wants out.
The bad guy then kills him.
Curiously, no one ever protests this or freaks out. At least not at the time. Sometimes there are recriminations but nothing ever comes of it.
Let me provide some of my favorite examples:
GOLDFINGER: Goldfinger describes his intention to rob Fort Knox. One guy says he doesn’t want any part of it. He winds up compressed in his car at a local junkyard. (Granted, Goldfinger winds up gassing all of them, but the principle remains the same.)
KILL BILL VOL 1: O-Ren Ishii gets her mixed background dissed. In an interesting twist, she beheads the mocker and THEN lectures everyone.
THE PHANTOM: Xander Drax describes his plan to bring together the Skulls of Tuganda. One guy wants no part of it; Xander throws a spear through him.
THE AVENGERS: No, not that one. The British one. Baron DeWinter has everyone in teddy bear outfits and winds up shooting the complainer.
BATMAN: The Joker lays down the law and when one guy bucks it, the Joker electrocutes him.
And that’s not even counting the scenes where guys like Blofeld or Doctor Evil execute guys just cause they’re dìçkš.
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One of the most traumatizing: Professor Ratigan feeds a drunken associate to a cat when he refers to him as a rat in THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE.
And considering “rat” was the rhyming word in the song, it really wasn’t fair.
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Monologuing as Syndrome called it in the Incredibles. One of my favorite moments in that movie when they bring that up.
…and not to be “that guy” but I think you meant Kill Bill Part 1 not Pulp Fiction. I was racking my brain trying to remember a biracial killer in Pulp Fiction for a few minutes before I thought about that.
On another note, it’s been years since I watched Goldfinger. What in the world was Goldfinger’s reasoning for killing the other guys with gas? Weren’t they going along with his plan?
That’s always been one of the boo-boos of Goldfinger… he dishes out the plan to the remaining hoods in his rumpus room, and then… gasses them all to death anyway.
It’s a good scene in that it clues the audience into A) how his plan is going to work and B) shows how ruthless he really can be, but on the other hand, when people think about it later, it’s one of those “duh” moments… why bother telling them all this when you’re going to kill them anyway?
But… it’s stuff like that which is part of the charm of older Bond flicks, IMO, and certainly some of the best scenes in the Austin Powers movies capitalized on it.
I’m pretty sure he just wanted them to realize what a great plan it was and felt the need to brag.
A good way to keep the cliche while actually making it useful would be to assemble the hoods / what-have-yous, tell them the plan, ask them for any holes they see in it, then kill them all and address whatever holes they were able to think of to try to genuinely outwit the hero.
Chris
TIME BANDITS had my favorite take on that moment. One of David Warner’s minions questions the Great Wizard Evil, and he is immediately blasted out of existence. A moment later, the wizard then says, “Good question,” and then calmly addresses the deceased man’s remarks.
See, I never thought of that trope as “the bad guy showing what a bad ášš he is.” I thought of it as him having a really severe problem with anyone that undermines his authority and being awfully over-sensitive. It made the bad guy seem weaker in my eyes, not really a true leader. Maybe I’m over-thinking it.
My favorite: foreigner whose native language is some reasonably well-known usually Western European language speaks English really well, including technical terms and otherwise difficult words.
Yet, for some reason, said foreigner doesn’t seem to know the English words for “Yes,” “No,” “Please,” “Thank you,” “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” “friend,” basic pronouns, numbers one through ten, etc.
“Por favor, Señor Smeeth. Investing in your computer-controlled inertia-responsive regenerative hydraulic braking systems manufacturing would save mucho lives and make us all wealthy indeed, ¿si?”
On yours: I’ve thought that it might be interesting to turn it on its ear. Say, in comics, if some new guy took over AIM or HYDRA or The HIVE or some such, and turned out to really care for his underlings (or at least pretend to). He understands failure of ordinary human henchmen against superheroes and never punishes them for such failure, let alone with summary execution. If an underling dies as a side-effect of some operation (not direct superhero action, of course, but some unfortunate happenstance), rather than dismissing it as the just reward of failure, he provides an expensive funeral, establishes a stipend for his widow and surviving family, and vows revenge on behalf of the fallen.
As such, the henchmen come to admire and respect and even love the leader and thus fight all the harder for him, making them more difficult for the heroes to defeat without killing them.
More than flying dudes, more than the police looking the other way on ultra-vigilantes, what I find hardest believe about comics is that anyone would ever work for the Joker, Green Goblin, etc.
The BEST CASE scenario is that Batman beats the crap out of you. The real world mafia or drug kingpins aren’t terribly nice groups of guys, but their business model at least allows for a non-zero possibility of your getting rich. The smart ones even try to avoid killing people most of the time because of the negative attention it draws.
Working for the Scarecrow? You’re just begging to be poisoned to test a batch of fear of inadequacy gas.
There is one thing even harder to believe, at least in the DC Superman comics.
So, Doctor Doom’s modus operandi, then. 🙂
I thought of Dr. Doom in that context, too. In some relatively recent Marvel comics (admittedly ones going for a humorous take), HYDRA is said to have a great medical plan for its employees. Probably the best example of the Evil Matermind who values his lackeys is Hank Scorpio of the Globex Corporation from “The Simpsons” — A really nice guy, except for that whole “world domination” thing.
Psst, O-Ren Ishii (played memorably by Lucy Liu) had her mixed Asian American heritage dissed in Asia by an Asian member of her (presumably, All-)Asian gang in the first part of KILL BILL.
I like the variation when a team’s leader faces UNARMED some threat, confidant because the TEAM is packing heat with weapons drawn and aimed. I can’t find that trend in TV Tropes website, but J. Michael Straczynski used it several times awesomely on BABYLON 5 with John Sheridan and Michael Garibaldi being unarmed while their respective security team is behind them with weapons drawn and aimed at the threat in question.
Btw, does Darth Vader’s force-choking of dissenters, ad nauseum in EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (and inverted at the start of RETURN OF THE JEDI by Vader merely hinting at displeasure), count as the most famous example of Peter’s favorite movie cliche?
I just assumed Vader didn’t kill that guy in RotJ because it would have only caused more delays and made the situation worse. Kinda like the soldiers not getting executed for treason in Band of Brothers.
You should watch the film RAVENOUS, to see what happens when the villain explains his plan. 🙂
Another classic takes place in A VIEW TO A KILL, and in this case the victim isn’t even a henchman, he’s a businessman who refuses to go along with Walken’s scheme and is firm and yet very polite about it. He gets thrown off a skyship for his troubles.
http://klipd.com/watch/a-view-to-a-kill/100-million-dollars-skyship-scene
I could just never figure out how the bad guys in question ever took a meeting with anyone like that. If your response to disagreement and questioning is murdering the person who does it, why in the hëll would anyone come to discuss your hot new plan with you?
Bad Guy #1: “Hey, you remember that last meeting with that Norman Saint Sauvage guy where he laid out his crazy plan for world conquest and killed the two guys that wouldn’t go along with it?”
Bad Guy #2: “Yeah. What about it?”
Bad Guy #1: “He just sent us an invite to discuss his new crazy plan for world conquest.”
Bad Guy #2: “F*ck that.”
I mean, these guys have supposedly been around for a while now and have well known issues with this kind of thing. Showing up means you disagree and die or agree, face the good guy, and die. Maybe the alternative to not sending a firm RSVP acknowledgment is a bomb under your escape hatch jetpack or something, but if it’s that bad I figure that they would reply in the negative by killing the guy who wants the meeting.
“Maybe I’m over-thinking it.”
I think I win that one.
It’s a small thing, but why is it whenever a character removes a necklace either from themselves or another person, they always yank it off straight down? Apparently the “clasp” has yet to be invented in the cinema world.
Though in a criminal organization you wonder about this. in certain despotic regimes like North Korea, this seems to actually take place. Of course leaving a brutal dictatorship is harder than leaving a crime gang.
Hopper explaining the realities of the ant/grasshopper dynamics to his mildly questioning underlings in A BUGS LIFE. They weren’t even undermining his authority; they just didn’t see the big picture.
In no particular order-
(1) The monster, bad guy, or unknown thing (to be referred to as ‘X’ from here on out)is moved to some sort of confinement facility that will be broken out of by the end of the first act. Someone asks, as someone always asks, if the facility can really contain X. They’re always laughed at and assured that this facility is state of the art, that they’ve taken all precautions, and that escape is simply impossible.
Do these people not watch movies? Do they not know that escape is always possible when X or something like X is involved? And why do they always have to be that dámņëd stupid and smug about it? Why can’t we have the people at the facility agree that this is going to be a problem and later, at the time of the escape, be shown doing something other than carelessly playing video games or doing the Time’s crossword puzzle while completely ignoring the security monitors and alarm systems until after the lights turn red and every ear-splitting alarm in the place goes off.
(2) “Hi, I’m the lead female character in this particular action/horror/sci-fi/fantasy/whatever epic. I don’t like you, I find you annoying, and we’ll be flinging insults at each other for approximately 3/4 of the movie. We’ll then spend parts of the last quarter of the film naked and going at it like animals in heat.”
(3) Cars explode for any and every reason one can think of. Shoot a car with a small caliber handgun and it will explode. Crash into another car and both cars will explode. Take a sharp drop off of a higher than normal curb and the car will explode.
Unless, you know, it doesn’t. In the exact same film that twenty cars explode in giant, building rattling balls of flame after being shot, rammed, dropped, or walked away from in low angle, slow motion cuts, there will be a car, a normal, everyday, not souped-up car, that the hero or some other person connected to the hero will get into that will be shot with roughly 100 rounds of ammo, crashed into a half dozen other cars, driven into and through part of a building, jumped over a bridge, bunny-hopped over another vehicle, and have half its body removed and yet still be drivable.
(4) In sci-fi, we are the be all and end all. Us. Humans. We’re the example of where evolution should be heading and we’re told by whatever godlike beings that we meet that they were once like us while we would one day be like them. And it’s only our potential, our destiny to one day be like them, that seemingly spurs action, good or bad, by the godlike beings.
Q screws with us because we’re better than them. The Q have more power, are more evolved, and can do things that we can only dream of, but we’re still better than them so Q screws with us. The powerful, godlike entities step in and intervene on our behalf because we are destined to one day be like them and take their place when they move on. We can help lesser species and cultures because it’s the right, proper and noble thing to do, but they seem to only do it because we are great and will one day be greater.
I’ve always wanted to see one of those serious, Star Trek type of space stories where the human does the Kirk smile and sets up the line where we get the ‘we were once like you and you will one day be us.’ line and instead get told that, no, the godlike beings stepped in and stopped what was going on to keep us, the evolutionary dead end that we are, from screwing things up so badly that it might actually impact things outside of our little corner of the universe while another godlike being is muttering in an annoyed tone of voice about how they’re still amazed humans progressed beyond flinging their own poo at each other from the treetops.
(5) This is a state of the art prototype. It’s a one of a kind and the only one like it in existence. Well, you know, other than the one that will show up later in the film when conveniently needed for the plot to advance, to explain the bad guy being able to do what he did, the good guy and bad guy having the big showdown, etc.
(6) Either the parent or the child is the hero, and they’ve been estranged from one another for years before the monster’s attack/earthquake/alien invasion/whatever takes place and suddenly they have to find each other and make up. Because, you know, just hoping against hope to find your loved one(s) when the ship hits the sand ain’t enough apparently.
(7) Everyone knows martial arts.
Everyone.
Even the aliens know martial arts.
(8) Everyone knows martial arts, so no one is smart enough to just shoot and kill the hero from the distance or to face the hero with odds greater than 2 to 1 against.
Seriously, ten bad guys watch the hero beat the šhìŧ out of a bad guy. Then nine do it. Then eight do it, Then seven do it…
(9) Telephones used by the hero to convey vital information that will then be explained to the other characters (and the audience) are magic. Total time the hero spends on the phone- Ten seconds. Total time it takes him or her to rely the information they were just told to everyone else- 2 to 3 minutes.
(10) A main character will name their greatest fear in the first half of the movie and they will face that very fear in the second half.
And it doesn’t matter how goofy it is or where they are for this to happen. Sharks killed her entire family years ago on a fishing vacation. She tells her traveling companions that she’s more afraid of sharks than anything in the world. They’re in the middle of Yekaterinburg, and you can bet that the crazy slasher/killer or mad scientist that kidnaps them has a pool full of great whites and that she will have to face that fear. A lead character says that his greatest fear is left-handed, cross-dressing, Asian, lesbian midgets with a slight lisp and a habit of singing The Andrea True Connection’s greatest hits (both of ’em) karaoke style when in a fight and, by god that character will face a left-handed, cross-dressing, Asian, lesbian midgets with a slight lisp and a habit of singing The Andrea True Connection’s greatest hits (both of ’em) karaoke style when in a fight before the end of the film.
Jerry, I would love to see a film with your ideas. It would be a metafictional blast. Of course, it could only be appreciated by people who get the joke; sadly, there would probably be reviewers who would pan it by saying it was the most cliched film they’d ever seen (missing the irony)…
Anyway, great ideas.
Saw something like this in an old episode of Chuck just the other day. Chuck and bad guy facing off, both with guns. Of course, both want to know who is really better so they put down their guns and raise fists. Bad guy does jump kick at Chuck’s face, Chuck slides under bad guy. Fist fight ensues.
But I really thought it would have been great (and trope busting) if it had been Chuck’s plan to get the bad guy to set aside his gun, slide under the bad guy’s leap and … pick up bad guy’s gun and just end the fight right there.
Andrea True had TWO hits???
My favorite is a variation of your #4– The God-like alien who tells us how superior he is to us. “You’re pitiful supplications are as the buzzing of tiny gnats!” he says “Why, to one such as me you are but ants! Ants, I say!”
And I’d like Kirk or Reed Richards or Rula Lenska or whoever to smile sweetly and point out that We do not bother TALKING to ants. If I were to walk down the sidewalk stomping on ants and telling them how powerful i was compared to their pitiful antness I would be justifiably locked away in a happy home. Once Galactus starts telling Reed how infinitely superior he is it’s game over. We’re having a conversation, oh mighty douchiness, time to put away the power trip.
Wait… We don’t talk to the ants while stomping on them? You couldn’t have mentioned this six or seven years ago?
One trope that’s always puzzled me is this: the villain tells a character their plan. The person they’re talking to actually tells the villain that they’re going to the authorities/otherwise going to try to stop them. The good character then seems caught off guard when the villain subsequently attempts to kill them.
the bad guy in Dogma specifically says that he’s seen way too many Bond movies to divulge all of the details of his plan, no matter how close he thinks he is to winning.
“Dan, I’m not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I’d explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome?”
“I did it thirty-five minutes ago.”
One of my favorite instances of this was actually in Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy (Star Wars). Luke manages to escape an imperial tractor beam. Thrawn questions the technician in charge of the beam, who says he had never been taught how to prevent that tactic. Thrawn speaks with both the technician and the teacher, then kills the technician. He then turns to the teacher and says something along the lines of, “From now on you will teach all your students how to prevent this.”
Right, I remember that – that’s when the Empire has that “interceptor” ship that lets the drag other ships out of light speed, right?
My favorite “bad guy kills the henchman for disagreeing with his plan” comes from Batman Returns. After the Penguin explains his caper, one of his guys says:
HENCH: Uh… Penguin? Isn’t that a little..?
PENGUIN kills him.
PENGUIN: No. It’s a lot.
The bad guy then kills him.
Curiously, no one ever protests this or freaks out. At least not at the time.
…
GOLDFINGER: Goldfinger describes his intention to rob Fort Knox. One guy says he doesn’t want any part of it. He winds up compressed in his car at a local junkyard.
To nit pick, Golfinger doesn’t really fit the trope since, as far as all his associates, Goldfinger let’s the guy leave. It isn’t until he’s in the compactor, far from everyone’s view, that it’s clear he’s getting killed.
So if Goldfinger was showing everyone what a bad ášš he was by killing the guy who protests, he sure went about it in an ineffective way.