5 Sequels That Created Hilarious Plot Paradoxes

5 Peter Parker's Dad Really Loves Hide-and-Seek

Ironically, what is easily the least offensive scene in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 also happens to create the strangest plot hole in recent memory. Let's go back to the beginning of the first Amazing Spider-Man (aka "the first second attempt at a Spider-Man origin story"), when we see a young Peter Parker playing a spirited game of hide-and-seek with his dad ...

... only to find his dad's office ransacked, setting in motion the wheels of a sinister conspiracy:

The story of this conspiracy is later fleshed out at the beginning of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, when we see exactly why Peter and his family were the victims of espionage-driven home invasion:

That would be Peter's dad, Richard, stealing sensitive information from his top-secret lab at Oscorp and speeding the hell out of there to leave an equally top secret "If I die and you find this 10 years later" message for his son ...

... who is currently poking around in Richard's ransacked office:

So ... Richard Parker stole information from his lab at Oscorp that was so sensitive, he knew he had to rush home to his basement and leave a video will explaining everything in the event of his mysterious disappearance, but the first thing he did when he frantically burst through his front door, Oscorp security no doubt hot on his trail, was set up an elaborate game of hide-and-seek with his son that included putting a broom in a pair of his shoes and hiding it behind a curtain to trick Peter and make the game more cerebral.

No wonder the bad guys were able to sneak onto Richard's private plane -- he easily wasted half an hour setting up this game with his son when he should've already been on his way to Mexico.

4 The Skyscrapers of Chicago Must Be Made Up of Other Transformers

It's a challenge to single out a specific plot hole as being more baffling than the hundreds of others in the 10-plus-hour robo-parade honoring Michael Bay's throbbing ordnance boner that is the Transformers series, but here goes: The one absolute we can count on in any Michael Bay film is that when things explode, they totally explode. So when the third Transformers film ended by plunging the entire city of Chicago into crumbling detonation fire, we were appropriately treated to a view of Chicago's newly crushificated skyline:

In Age of Extinction (or Age of Ex-STINK-tion, as we like to say here in the offices of comedy), which takes place five years after the previous film, we clearly see that the destruction of Chicago was a major event in the Transformers universe:

And yet, a few scenes later, we see a completely intact Chicago getting attacked by space invaders yet again:

For reference, that building on the right is 900 North Michigan, which was featured in the mosaic of destruction at the end of Transformers 3 five years ago:

Somehow, being bombarded by hordes of robots has given us the ability to rebuild an entire city twice as fast as it took us to rebuild Ground Zero, which was two buildings. Considering how Earth has essentially become an open carnival for giant shape-shifting motor demons, the only possible solution is that the defeated skyline of Chicago has been replaced with Transformers who turn into office buildings and condos, like a slapstick comedy star standing in place to cover for a statue he just hilariously broke.

After emerging from the first film's developmentally challenged scientific brain trust, the super smart simians in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes go out of their way to tell us that 10 years have passed since they first entered the Redwood Forest after rampaging through San Francisco. In that short decade, they've managed to build not only their own little ape city, but a formidable army of ape soldiers on top of that. And at some point they managed to build a livery and learn how to breed and ride horses.

Just how many apes are we looking at there? Five hundred? A thousand? Either way, that's almost quadruple the size of the ragtag team we saw make it across the Golden Gate Bridge in the first film, and only half of that group was artificially intelligent apes. The other half was random monkeys from the zoo.

We don't need to bring math into this -- 10 years is way less time than it would take for such a small population to become an army of pissed-off horse-riding circus performers. And how are there so many gorillas in the new film? The only hyper-smart gorilla from the first movie got himself perished doing something best described as "less than hyper-smart":

Gorillas take 12 years to mature to the size we see in the new film, which is slightly less time than it takes for apes. Where did all these super-smart adult battle monkeys come from, then? That really leaves just one possibility: Clearly the apes encountered a family of Sasquatches in the Redwood Forest, and the Sasquatches, with their manlike sexual prowess and intelligence, helped them create and train a new generation of warrior apes that ride horses. It's literally the most realistic option.

2 The Nazi Scientist in Captain America Is Clearly a Wizard

In Captain America: The First Avenger, Cap's super best friend, Bucky Barnes, gets blasted right the fuck out of a haunted Nazi doom train and goes flying into a Swiss gorge hundreds of feet below:

Pig-voiced Nazi scientist Arnim Zola is immediately captured after Bucky's apparent death:

The next time we see Zola, he's being interrogated by Tommy Lee Jones, who cruelly forces Zola to watch him eat dinner:

And that's the last time we see him. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, we flash back to Bucky's unfortunate train accident, wherein he somehow survives the fall and is dragged off by Hydra soldiers ...

... one of whom is Zola himself. Zola then oversees Bucky's transformation into the Winter Soldier during a montage wherein Zola's echoed voice tells Bucky that "the procedure has already started."

So ... did Zola make a clone of himself or something? As we clearly saw in the first movie, he gets immediately captured, on the train, right after Bucky falls out of it. When did he find time to escape custody, sneak down the mountain, gather up Bucky's half-dead corpse, perform experiments on it in a Hydra lab, and then sneak back in time to be interrogated by Tommy Lee Jones? Zola never goes back to Hydra -- the second film explicitly tells us that he remains with the Americans until he dies and has his brain uploaded into a giant computer. So unless he discovered some way to astral project his way into both the Swiss wilderness and a Hydra laboratory, this doesn't make any sense.

1 X-Men: Days of Future Past Turns Trask into a Mutant

With X-Men: Days of Future Past, director Bryan Singer publicly promised to mend the continuity of the previous six X-Men movies, which had gone so far afield that the plotlines implied by all the inconsistencies were objectively terrifying. Ironically, Singer's pledge to right all the wrongs wound up creating one of the most hilarious continuity errors in the series by way of Dr. Bolivar Trask:

Trask is the supervillainous brain behind the infamous Sentinel robots of the X-Men universe and the chief antagonist in Days of Future Past. He's played by Peter Dinklage with an awesome 1970s thunderstache, and while we certainly can't blame Bryan Singer for wanting to cast a talented and popular actor in that role, the problem is that Bolivar Trask has already appeared in an X-Men movie -- he was in X-Men: The Last Stand, where he was portrayed by Bill Duke, better known as Mac from Predator:

You're probably wondering what we're getting at here, but if you look closely at the two photos, you'll begin to notice a few discrepancies. Specifically, these two actors are literally occupying opposite ends of the physical-appearance spectrum -- Peter Dinklage is a 4.5-foot-tall white man, and Bill Duke is Mac from Predator. This means one of two things: Bolivar Trask either is secretly a shape-shifting mutant or spent the intervening few decades between these two films doing a shit-ton of CrossFit or something.

David is an editor for Cracked.com. Feel free to tell him how much he hates movies on his Twitter account.