Film and TV Clichés [2]


A couple of years ago I put up a nom on the subject of irritating screen clichés. I was delighted at the manner in which cunters weighed in on the subject and kicked these tiresome tropes to death.

Or so I thought. Annoyingly, another batch of hackneyed scenes and tired lines has crept out of the woodwork for me to have a go at, because lazy scriptwriters and directors just can’t see past them. So ‘don’t you die on me’, because ‘we’ve got a situation here!’. Here are just a few examples that invariably elicit an ‘oh for fuck’s sake’ response from me.

Cut to a scene in any detective drama. Some fashionable types are at an art exhibition or the launch of some singer’s new record, chit-chatting and sipping champagne. Suddenly there’s a scream, the tinkle of a glass breaking, and yells of ‘oh my Gahhd!’ as the star is found face down, a dagger in the back. A female voice off camera then bleats ‘somebody call 911!’.

Then you’ve got the scene where the good guy and the bad guy finally face off. Before all hell breaks loose, the villain feels obliged to philosophise on the nature of his relationship with the hero; ‘you know, it doesn’t have to be like this. We’re not so different, you and me’.

How about the one where the male/female buddy cops are drinking coffee on a stakeout and she says (there’s ‘chemistry’ building between them, remember) ‘ok, so are ya finally gonna tell me what’s really going on between you an’ Maddie?’. He looks into the middle distance, ponders for a second or two, then replies ‘it’s … complicated’. Oh and let’s not forget the one where the treacherous spy chief sneers at the in-over-his-head hero ‘you’ve absolutely no idea what you’ve gotten into!’.

I could cunt indefinitely on this subect, but unfortunately, ‘we’re running out of time!’.
Sadly, ‘this ends now!’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_kBdnziEFA&t=28s

Nominated by : Ron Knee

136 thoughts on “Film and TV Clichés [2]

  1. Columbo was brilliant.

    But in every episode the villain would stay around trying to outwit him.

    If the scruffy little detective starts taking too much interest in you and turning up at your house at all hours, don’t hang around.
    Fuck off to South America, get some cosmetic surgery and buy a wig.

    He’s on to you.

    • Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote too. Don’t be put off by the doddery little old lady routine.

      She is ruthless when sniffing out wrong ‘uns. I’m surprised no TV bigwig teamed her up with Mrs Marple in a transatlantic buddy detective series.

      • Everywhere the old bag went there was a murder. Bet her friends stayed away from her.

      • I preferred to stick with Joan Hickson, the best Miss Marple in my opinion. Even Agatha Christie agreed with me before she died.

      • Apparently she solved well over 250 murders in her time. Made Poirot look like an amateur.

    • Any detective, just as a main suspect turns to go;

      Oh, just one more thing…’

  2. The hamshanks always like a happy ending in films, to alleviate all evil goings on in their pathetic lives.

  3. What about that cunt Magnum P.I.
    So fucking predictable, every episode he’d solve 3.141592 cases….

  4. A villain being beaten to withiin an inch of his life, stabbed and shot once or twice just for good measure inevitably falls to the floor dead. Silence falls.

    Then, just as our hero / heroine / theyroine staggers to their feet to leave, the ‘dead’ villain’s bloody hand grabs their ankle and more fighting resumes. Until he’s clubbed to death by a lampshade base (or other handy domestic item).

    All The Time.

    • Or someone gets kicked in the nuts and miraculously leaps up two seconds later and beats the shit out of the other guy.

  5. Good one.

    Equally annoying is the way in which the good guy, on the floor from a severe kicking for the first two minutes of the showdown and being taunted, suddenly acquires a look of steely resolution before leaping to his feet to knock seven bells out of the black hat.

  6. Group of people / family members / gap year students gaily travel to remote location like the outback, an abandoned country house, caves under Bulgaria, the Rockies, Border country. They are whooping and laughing whilst taking selfies and such-like.

    Something goes wrong with their transport.

    “Hang on. I recognise this place. I’m sure we’ve been here before” Time passes …

    “Did you see that?” “What?”

    A drawn-out bloodbath ensues…

    • We like to watch episodes of Midsummer Murders now and again to take the piss out of it…concerning a series of small villages somewhere vaguely in the South of England, with an unfeasibly high murder rate. Populated by elderly spinsters, nosy shopkeepers, vicars ,bored housewives and usually one very rich twat who has ideas above his station ( usually gets bumped off first). The victims fall foul of long held local customs and get dispatched in bizarre fashions – the one that sticks in the mind most is the story of a restaurant critic who got battered to death with a giant spoon.

      • Not forgetting the high number of ethnics who now populate middle England.

        In the minds of ITV anyway.

  7. Baddie can’t hit goodie with a submachine gun from 20 feet. Goodie takes out baddie right in the head from 50 yards with a 9mm pistol while baddie is fucking off at a rapid rate on a motorbike.

    • I was always amazed by the fact that a dozen baddies with machine guns couldn’t nail Steven Segal. Not even a nick to the arm. He’d pop up from behind the sofa that had just taken a thousand rounds on his behalf and nail each of them one at a time with a single shot from a hand gun (which fires twenty rounds without a reload)

      • You could hit the fat cunt from a mile away with a pea shooter these days..karate Demis Roussos in a circus tent.

      • John Wick. Another series my contemporaries rave about but to me a very pedestrian revenge action/thriller.

      • Apparently John Wick’s on screen kill count stands at a measly 439.

        Bloody fanny.

    • This is so true, moggie63.

      Anyone who knows something about real guns knows how their use and operation is massively misrepresented in movies and on TV. It’s like a video game. Unlimited ammunition, no recoil, not loud, deadly accurate at any distance without the aid of a scope. And the timeless classic – any round which misses its target simply disappears and never keeps travelling at high speed only to hit something/someone else behind the target. Jeez!

      If you do see someone change out a handgun magazine, you never see them pick up the empty mag. These things are expensive!! And how many spare magazines do some of these people have on them? Ammunition is heavy!!!

      Then we have trigger discipline or a lack thereof. There are 4 universal gun safety rules, one of which is: always keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot. TV baddies/goodies/cops/military routinely run around with their fingers on triggers and never suffer an unintended discharge. Ridiculous.

      The TV/movie glamourisation of firing a gun at another human being is not a good thing. Gives wrong ‘uns bad ideas.

      • And it’s daft when the baddy inevitably runs out ammo. He shakes the gun vaguely in the direction of the good guy *click!
        click!*, glowers at it for a second, then angrily hurls it to the ground.

      • Goodie kills 20 baddies with his 9 shot automatic, throws gun away, runs after well armed main baddie but doesn’t appear to need any of the loaded baddies’ guns he’s just run past.

      • Oh yes, that’s a classic too. Ignoring dropped firearms which contain unused rounds.

        Mrs Yank and I were watching True Lies the other night. At one point, Jamie Lee Curtis fires and drops what looks like an Uzi machine gun or pistol. It continued to fire as it rolled down some steps, hitting and killing all the bad guys in the process.

        Oh dear.

  8. Someone who’s been wounded in some form or fashion and is lying prostrate on the ground will be frantically attended to by a cop/colleague/ER personage and they’ll always say, “Stay with me”.

    If ever you find yourself in this situation and the person trying to help you says, “Stay with me”, you know they’ll be filling out your death certificate in about 2 minutes’ time.

    • So true.

      Equally, if there’s somebody kneeling over you with a big fake cheesy grin on their face, saying ‘everything’s gonna be just fine!’, you’ll be cashing in your chips imminently.

  9. Why do they always when some twat is on the floor and on the way out grab their hand and say ” stay with me”, where the fuck else are they going to go .

  10. Lots of things that continually crop up in films annoy me, it’s as though the directors have no imagination. Like when someone opens a pill bottle and finds it empty. This doesn’t happen in real life. What do you do when you swallow the last tablet, put the bottle back in the cupboard? No you throw it out.
    Others are when someone tickles a person while they’re on the phone trying to put them off their conversation, someone nearly falling from a train, someone’s on the run and their car breaks down, someone’s trying to keep silent and they drop something on the floor. Also someone being brought out of retirement to do something no-one else is capable of.

    • Female heads of super secret time travel or faster-than-light projects who all look about twenty, with an arse you could crack hard bolied eggs on.

      Female cops who all look about twenty, with an arse you could crack hard bolied eggs on, who take a two-hand gun grip and yell ‘Stop! Police!’ at a hulking suspect. Suspect promptly legs it. Cue a chase down sleazy NY or LA alleys, with suspect hurling bins at cop, before seven stone cop hurls sixteen stone suspect to floor before cuffing him.

  11. FBI agents who shout ‘hey, you, stop’ when they’re 30 feet from the suspect instead of just walking up and grabbing the cunt. Unnecessary chase ensues.

  12. My Dad was a cop, one week away from retirement….
    His last case….
    They told him to look the other way….
    But he just couldn’t let things lie……….
    Now I’m out looking for answers and revenge…..

    ahem….oh…. erm.. where was I?
    Oh yes common tropes/clichés?

    Mis-matched Cops – see Lethal Weapon, 48 hours, Dragnet, Tango and Cash, Rush Hour.

    The 5″ nothing, 7 and 1/2 stone, plucky “Girl Boss” (Usually played by Ruby Rose or someone similar )who doesn’t take shit from anyone and does everything better than any other character can somehow take on a group of 6″4, 16 stone, grizzled ex-Navy Seals armed to the teeth.

    That one male character who is the hapless loser and the butt of every joke and everybody sneers at, but if he were actually real, he would be classed as having some sort of learning difficulties and have a carer and live in supported accommodation.

    • The James Bond cliché that they pointed out in the Austin Powers films where the hero is in a certain death situations – being lowered into a shark tank or strapped to a rocket.

      Rather than watching him die the supervillain just walks off and leaves our hero unattended so that he can then use a gadget to escape.

    • The ‘strong female character’ has very quickly become a very annoying trope (see eg Disney ‘Star Wars’ ).

      Ultra smart, iron will, icy cool, humourless, driven, impatient, arrogant, charmless.

      And utterly boring.

      • The snarky, arrogant, unrelatable, ultra capable female who does everything better than everyone and is smarter than everyone even the person who was her teacher (usually a straight older male).
        Who strangely nobody likes.

        See Rey in the abysmal modern Star Wars films, She-Hulk.

      • The ‘feisty’ female character who shouts a lot and would do ‘anything for her kids’.

        Jodie Fucking Foster.🙄🤢

  13. Here’s a few more:

    Woman shoots serial killer / rapist / psycho, but only once and then without checking he’s dead, throws the gun down and slowly walks away, or sits down next to the supposed dead body.

    Teenage girl walking home at night, hears rustling sound from alleyway, trees etc and goes to investigate, usually saying ‘hello, is there anyone there?’ Next scene is morning with her corpse surrounded by cops and pathologist, one of whom will say, ‘don’t these kids ever learn?’ Mother comes running up screaming ‘My baaaby !!!’

    People in getaway car switch on the radio, always in time to hear a newsflash about themselves and the newsflash always says where the roadblocks are being set up.

    Man and woman in getaway car being chased by cops, when man tells woman to take over driving and they easily manage to swap seats at 150mph.

    Hero steals a crappy old car and easily manages to evade capture by villains in a squad of high powered vehicles. I saw a film where Tom Cruise did that, managed to outrun about six turbo charged Mercedes whilst driving a shitty old Lada through Moscow.

    • Tom Cruise does that in Top Gun Maverick, using an old F-14 captured by the Russians (and still fully armed) to dogfight two SU-57s.

      Utter nonsense.

  14. Spacecraft that fly around like jet fighters.

    Satellites breaking their orbit to investigate somewhere using little pffs of gas.

    Forcefelds

    Yaaawwnn…

  15. Wot, no Bollywood?

    “Tell my goat I need it by my side. Or, best of all, in front of me… “

  16. The Chosen One/Messianic figure:
    Neo in the Matrix, Superman, Luke Skywalker, Mila Jovovich in the Fifth Element, Olivia Wilde’s character in Cowboys Vs Aliens, Sam Winchester in Supernatural.

  17. NeverEnders and that fat bald alcohol soaked cunt, Phil Mitchell.

    The cunt is 63 years of age, yet he is still king of ‘ver manor’ and he wins every fight wielding a baseball bat as he beats blokes in their 20s and 30s. Fucking absurd. If it were a real rough working class area, some younger, fitter, hungrier and angrier hard case would have battered and deposed that fat cunt years ago.🙄

  18. Real historical figures now portrayed as sambeaus in TV dramas.

    Cunts who now go on game/quiz shows, and they don’t know about anything.

    The ridiculous convoluted cat and mouse crime drama. With villain as an intellectual who has a psychic bond witth the cop (see The Fall, Marcellla, Broadchurch and all that other crap).

  19. Villains and evil cunts portrayed as sympathetic charracters all of a sudden. See Hannibal, Bates Motel, Slagelina Jolie in that Malefacent shite, the Wizard of Oz witch.

  20. Estate agents always being on hand to show people the property in person. Pricks.

  21. Off topic, but I see that Henery Hawk of Hewitt is publicly gushing about his time with his ex, Chelsy Davy. Along with the Megain Mantis coronation no-show, I reckon the axe is hovering over the Markle marriage. And it can’t come soon enough….🤔

  22. Doctor Whoke. Where every position of power – political, scientific and military – is held by wimmin. Including the Chinese army.🤣🤣🤣

  23. More CuntEnders cliches…

    The ‘Me sister is me mum’ storyline (done at least three or four times).

    The ‘Orrible Uncle Ernie/Archie/Harry raped me’ incest plot. Again, multiple outings.

    Janine Butcher murder tally. A bigger body count than Jack the Ripper.

    Rapes. murders and arson at the Queen Vic. And it’s still not been closed down.

    Utter fucking shite….🤣

  24. Much as I loved it, Space 1999 used to have a regular cliche. The Alpha crew would go astray or worship a false god who was after killing them, and they wouldn’t believe Commander John Koenig. Then, at the last minute, Koenig would get them out of it.

    Then there was Mr.T drinking the drugged milk before he got on a plane in the A Team.

  25. On Tne Buses.

    Olive being a greedy selfish useless unemployable and sex-free fat cunt.

    Arthur looking like he’s about to be executed.

    An inifinite stream of dolly birds who view aging lecherous busmen Stan and Jack as sex gods.

  26. Cunters, cunters….you’re spending far too much time in front of screens. This thread is a testament to wasted feckless hours, and incipient clinical obesity.
    Have a nice country walk, and when you return home, write yourselves something original and cliche-free.
    Going by the record here, some of you might find that rather hard…

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