6 Movie Plots Made Possible by Bafflingly Bad Decisions
When it comes to making wise decisions, characters in a movie have a huge disadvantage: they don't know they're in a movie. The good guys wouldn't have been surprised by Darth Vader winning if they'd known from the outset they were in a movie called "The Empire Strikes Back."
But even then, you can't watch certain movies without realizing that these guys really should have seen it coming. Like...
King Kong
The Plan:
"Don't worry, Mr. Denham, we'll get you on your way in a jiffy. Let's just have a look at that shipping manifest. Let's see... 12,000-pounds of bananas... 250-pounds of animal tranquilizers... 300-pounds of raging gorilla... What's that you say? Oh, yes, it looks like you're right. Thirty thousand pounds of gorilla. My mistake. Well, everything seems to be in order. Sign here."
Why They Had It Coming:
We understand that Denham was supposed to be eccentric and ambitious to the point of insanity. But he didn't sneak Kong back into the U.S. by hiding him in his suitcase. A whole lot of people apparently signed off on the deal.
Do you know why they don't let you just take tropical monkeys home with you whenever you feel like it? It's because that would be a REALLY FUCKING BAD IDEA. And we're talking regular-sized monkeys here. Seriously, go on vacation and try passing through customs with a screeching live monkey clinging to your back.
Sure, the guys in the customs office in 1933 New York weren't dealing with the same restrictions we have today, but a little bit of basic common sense should have told them that a motherfucking three-story ape is not an acceptable import. Really, taking any kind of giant monster through customs shouldn't be this easy, or even possible.
He was royalty, though.
But not in the King Kong universe. Just stop and think about all the people who had to go along with his plan to display a giant, rampaging monkey in front of a Broadway audience. The trucking company should have refused to transport anything that could conceivably beat one of their trucks in a fist fight. The police should have stopped him for transporting unsafe materials. The theater owner should have taken one look at Denham's plan, a plan to stuff hundreds of people into a room with a giant gorilla and then wait for something interesting to happen, and he should have told the man to go directly to Hell and take his monkey with him.
This is apparently a world where not only did dinosaurs not go extinct, but somehow lawyers and insurance companies did.
Demolition Man
The Plan:
"Things are going well. I've released cryogenically frozen criminal, Simon Phoenix, to murderdeathkill my only enemy in all the world, and I've made sure to insert a program into this dangerous criminal's mind that makes it impossible for him to turn around and kill me, which he very much wants to do since I've been messing with his brain and treating him like the hired help, and also because he's a psychopath who pretty much wants to kill everybody."
Stallone threatening the least valuable part of Cocteau's body.
Why They Had It Coming:
"Oh, also he says that all he needs to complete his mission is for me to unfreeze a team of five fellow criminals from his old gang. Makes sense. What's that you say? The other murderers haven't been programmed with the 'don't murder me' safeguard? Eh, I'm sure it'll be fine."
There are all kinds of problems with Dr. Raymond Cocteau's plan to rid his utopian future society of the menace of graffiti, not the least of which is the issue of overkill, but his failure to protect himself from anything that isn't played by Wesley Snipes definitely tops the list. If the man who wants you dead asks you for the necessary supplies to make you dead, perhaps you should put a little extra thought into your answer. "No," for instance, might not be a bad choice.
Oh, come on. How can you say "no" to a face like this?
And even if you assume that giving an unfrozen crime lord from the past his own posse is a necessary risk, Cocteau already knows that people's brains can be fixed to make them not murder you. He already tried it, and it worked out just fine. What, did he fucking forget? Did he prematurely cross it off his "To Do" list by mistake?
Come to think of it, maybe Dr. Cocteau should have made the "don't kill Dr. Cocteau" programming mandatory for all the inmates in his cryogenic prison. You know, just in case of the incredibly unlikely event that something should ever go wrong with your warehouse of frozen psychopaths.
"I'll be the judge of that!"
The Plan:
"As it turns out, sharks have a protein in their brains which could lead us to a cure for Alzheimer's. Our scientists are already hard at work developing sharks with freakishly large brains. Oh, also their bodies are freakishly large. And their teeth and jaws. So! All we need now is someplace where we can house these deadly creatures and periodically poke at their heads with giant needles!"
Why They Had It Coming:
"Well, let's see, there's this abandoned submarine base in the middle of the ocean, totally isolated from civilization, with most of the structure underwater where it could easily be flooded. And there's a huge hole in the floor. Dear God, it's perfect!"
You know what might have been a better place for this lab? How about a nice little facility in the middle of Arizona, with a couple of big saltwater fish tanks? They didn't make these sharks so they could study giant super-shark behavior in a natural environment. The swimming death machines don't really need to be out in the actual ocean for this experiment to work. Being eaten alive does not need to be a common workplace accident.
Workplace safety aside, you have the bonus concern of what could happen if one of these monsters escapes, which actually happens in the opening minutes of the film. Here's an idea that might help you keep your killer fish from escaping: Don't put them out in the fucking ocean! We don't care how strong your fence is, it's still not as much of a deterrent as miles and miles of dry, shark-smothering land.
"Hey, good idea! And that would also be a perfect place to test our new air-breathing sharks and our prototype shark jetpacks!"
RoboCop 2
The Plan:
"Well, we've got good news for our shareholders, and we've got bad news. The bad news is that the last two prototypes for the follow-up to our popular RoboCop project have, well, offed themselves. And some other people. Good news, though, is that our own Dr. Juliette Faxx has some very promising ideas about harvesting a brain for the next prototype, that will overcome all of those limitations!"
Why They Had It Coming:
"Whose brain? Well, it's from a power-hungry psychopath. Oh, and she also has a wonderful plan to control her new cyborg with massive amounts of recreational narcotics, since, as we all know, junkies are notoriously docile and cooperative. I certainly see no possible way that this could backfire. All in favor of extending the funding on Project RoboCop 2, raise your hands. Ah, good! Unanimous again!"
To be perfectly fair, we can't put much of the blame on the technicians who worked in the Suicide Machine Laboratory, or even the crazy chick who pushed them to make that ball-stompingly dangerous monster in the movie's title. Villains and mad scientists are going to do villainous and mad sciency shit. It's what they're good at.
But who's the goofball who decided to keep funding a project that dependably produces nothing but large quantities of failure? Failure is not a marketable product, no matter how much of a surplus you've built up.
"How about tragedy? Can we sell that?"
And this is not a small project, we're talking tens of millions in high-end robotic shit. Did the board of directors sign off on this? They have to answer to somebody, right? With progress reports and so on? And reports to shareholders? And how did they think they were going to make a profit off this technology again?
If this is the way Omni Consumer Products does business, it's hard to imagine that any of their divisions are turning much of a profit. Oh, and if you thought the insurance companies behind the King Kong Broadway show were asleep at the wheel, holy crap. The good RoboCop does something every five minutes that opens them up to liability for property damage and civil rights violations. Seriously, call your insurance company and ask them what the premiums would be for your half-human junkie killbot.
The Plan:
"It's been about six months since the last of the diseased cannibals in Great Britain supposedly died out, but we've just found a survivor right outside our military-controlled safe zone, and she has an obvious bite mark on her arm. It seems likely that she may be a carrier for the disease. This is very serious business, so we've made sure to put her behind a locked door that can only be opened by those with a special key card, which is pretty much everybody in the building. We considered posting a guard, but that seemed a little excessive. I mean, let's not get carried away, here."
It's not like it's the end of the world.
Why They Had It Coming:
You may be wondering why we're not blaming the scientists in the original movie (28 Days Later) for creating a "turn anyone into a mindless murderer" virus in the first place. But again, you can't blame mad scientists for doing mad science. Also, we're pretty sure that right now some country's military is funding something even crazier.
But then you look at the behavior of the people who were in charge of containing the outbreak in the sequel, and there are no excuses. If there's one thing that your average military base does not have a shortage of, it's dudes with guns. So, why couldn't they spare even one of them to guard a goddamn door? You know, the door behind which is the carrier of a disease that just wiped out an entire country earlier that year?
Even a dude without a gun probably could have saved the day, here. "I'm sorry, sir, but you're not allowed in here," he could have said, politely but firmly, as the infected woman's husband tried to push past him to go and give her a kiss. Or they could have changed the code on the lock to keep out unauthorized personnel. Any sort of actual security procedure probably would have done the trick.
Perhaps they weren't worried about infection because they were confident that their contingency plan was foolproof. That would be the plan to take all the civilians in the building down to the parking garage, pack them closely together (you know how diseases can't spread if you're standing too close to the infected) and lock all the doors with the kind of chains that break when you push on them really hard.
The Matrix
The Plan:
"We evil machines need a new energy source. All our mechanical lives, we've depended on solar power, but now the sun has been blocked out by our human enemies. Wait. Our human enemies... Enemies... Enemy... Enermy... Energy! That's it! We'll harvest the natural electrical energy of the only things in this world that pose any danger to us! We can just breed them by the billions and keep them docile by forcing them to play the most boring MMORPG in history! It can't possibly fail!"
Why They Had It Coming:
Look, we know others have criticized the grossly inefficient energy infrastructure the Matrix bad guys came up with. But here's what's so irksome about it:
Remember when they told us that the city of Zion, last remaining stronghold of humanity, was powered with geothermal energy, a fancy term for heat from the Earth's core? And remember how the evil robots had those giant drill machines that could tunnel through rock like it was paper mache? Well, then congratulations are in order because you've just proved that you're smarter than the most advanced AI program in the futuristic world of The Matrix.
There's really no excuse for the evil computers to keep trying to fuel their giant death machines with human farts when they have a whole planet full of warm, molten, earthy energy goodness just waiting to be tapped. It's the equivalent of powering New York City with millions of hamster wheels in hamster factories all over the planet, only these hamsters have a tendency to escape, organize and try to murder you in your sleep.
Surrender, renegade!
Oh, sure, the massive rodent hunts might be good for relieving stress every couple of decades, and there's nothing wrong with wanting a little challenge in life, unless you're, you know, some kind of heartless machine functioning on nothing but cold logic.
Even if they didn't have the equipment or the know-how to tap into the Earth's core for power back when the sun was first blocked out, what in the hell made them think they had to use humans? Why not cows? Or elephants? Or rabid grizzly bears? Hell, they would have been better off with pretty much any animal, just as long as they went with one of the thousands of mammal species that does not know how to use a fucking computer.
When he's not writing for Cracked, Cezary offers questionable advice at drownyourself.com.
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For more movies that fail in the logic department, check out 8 Classic Movies That Got Away With Gaping Plot Holes and 6 Baffling Mistakes Every Movie Criminal Makes.
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