As movie tropes go, one of the classics is how villains in James Bond films always design some elaborate death for the super spy and then leave him unattended.
This has been mocked relentlessly, of course, perhaps most hilariously in the 1997 Mike Myers hit Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.
Dr. Evil: Scott, I want you to meet daddy’s nemesis, Austin Powers
Scott: What? Are you feeding him? Why don’t you just kill him?
Dr. Evil: I have an even better idea. I’m going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death. All right guard, begin the unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism.
[guard starts dipping mechanism]
Dr. Evil: Close the tank!
Scott: Wait, aren’t you even going to watch them? They could get away!
Dr. Evil: No no no, I’m going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, I’m just gonna assume it all went to plan. What?
Scott: I have a gun, in my room, you give me five seconds, I’ll get it, I’ll come back down here, BOOM, I’ll blow their brains out!
Dr. Evil: Scott, you just don’t get it, do ya? You don’t.
We all know it’s ridiculous, yet we still love Bond, one of the most successful movie franchises of all time.
I caught part of another successful franchise this weekend when I watched Lethal Weapon 2.
The most blatantly implausible feature of this film is the badly executed attempted murder sequence when the evil South African drug cartel gets fed up with police interference in their scheme.
The criminals dispatch with great efficiency all the other cops on the team, but when it comes to Murtagh and Riggs, the two guys they most want to get rid of, they become bumbling clods.
They send two guys after Murtagh, who go after him in hand-to-hand combat. He kills them with a nail gun (which we were conveniently introduced to in a previous foreshadowing scene). As an aside, you can’t shoot a nail gun like a real gun, it has to be pressed up against a hard surface.
Then they try to get Riggs by shooting up his trailer from a helicopter.
He escapes and when they catch him again, they try to drown him by putting him in a straight jacket. We already know he can get out of that situation by dislocating his shoulder as we learned at the beginning of the movie when he did it to win money from his fellow officers.
Of course, this doesn’t even come close to being the point at which one must suspend disbelief. In the first place, there is no way these two guys are still cops after the mayhem and destruction they caused in the first movie, another trope that goes back at least to the Dirty Harry franchise.
Then we have to ignore the fact that diplomatic immunity is depicted with glaring inaccuracy. Given the activities of these so-called diplomats and the evidence police had against them, even the highest ranked diplomat would, at the very least, have been expelled from the country.
But the villain in this movie isn’t even an ambassador, he is a consul general, a high-ranking bureaucrat to be sure, but not one who would be immune from criminal prosecution.
There are dozens of other smaller things, other tropes we put up with for the sake of entertainment, like cars randomly blowing up and implausible escapes such as the car they use to break out of the shipping container at the end of the film being able to gain enough momentum inside the container to break out of the container.
It’s silly, but the movie would not be very entertaining if things worked the way the do in the real world.
And there is something very appealing about the maverick character with the to-hell-with-the-rules attitude taking on the untouchable villain and his evil henchmen.
It is a perhaps a stand-in for the little frustrations of our day-to-day lives that gives us the capacity to suspend our disbelief and cheer on the James Bonds and Martin Riggses of the cinematic realm.
It is not any easy thing for me to do, though. It’s not simply a passive act of turning off my critical thinking faculties, I actually have to work at letting things go, just ask anyone who has ever tried to watch a movie with me.
