There are times when action movies are basically just there to test your sound system and the efficiency of your TV since otherwise, the tropes that are used so frequently just don’t make a lot of sense. This isn’t to say that action movies are dumb or useless, but at the same time, there are some pretty ridiculous things that happen in a lot of movies that are evidence that some directors will go the well and borrow a trope from time to time just because they need to throw in something that people are comfortable with and won’t question too much if they use it in the proper way. The main problem with that is that we HAVE seen that trope more than once and we DO tend to question it since it’s likely that we questioned it in the last movie we saw and will question it in the next movie that tries to use it as well. There are a lot of different useful and very meaningful tropes that can be used from one movie to another, but it’s also bound to happen that fans will start to ask, ‘why in the world does this happen in every movie?’.
Here are just a few of the ridiculous things we tend to notice that happen in a large number of action movies.
5. Weapons either don’t run out of ammo or are chucked aside when they do.
We’ve likely all seen movies in which guns never appear to run out of ammo, which is amazing enough to begin with since six-shooters should run dry pretty quickly while machine guns should go dry even quicker. But somehow that extra clip gets shoved in when no one’s looking and the action continues. But then, when the inexplicable happens and the gun runs out of ammo, a lot of action heroes, or villains, chuck it away for some insane reason. It’s still a useful bludgeon that can be used at least once or twice, right? But on top of that, there’s always a chance they might find more ammo somewhere. It is an action movie after all.
4. The amount of trauma during a fight is either way too little or should flat out kill a person.
A person gets slugged across the face and they go down like a sack of wet laundry. Or, a person gets smacked in the face multiple times with a steel pipe and they can still speak perfectly and are fully aware of where they are, who they are, and what day it is. Better yet, a person gets stabbed and doesn’t go into shock, or a person gets cut once in the perfect spot and bleeds out in a matter of seconds. The door swings pretty wide on action movies depending on what needs to happen in any given scene, and moderation is only ever taken when the action needs to keep rolling because they’re not quite to a climactic moment. Seriously, trying to hit a major artery in practice is hard enough, but in the heat of the moment, it probably won’t happen.
3. Wars between armies break down way too quickly.
Ever notice how one giant battle becomes a hundred different skirmishes the moment the story needs it to? Obviously the skirmishes are easier to film, but as an example, the movie 300 has the Spartans breaking ranks more than once when the history books reveal just how bad of an idea this would have been. Military formations were created for a reason and it’s more likely that a commander would single out and eliminate anyone that bothered to take their commands so lightly.
2. Drinking massive amounts of alcohol doesn’t mean much to certain characters.
Seriously, some people have a very high alcohol tolerance, as watching the TRY channel might tell you, but taking in enough alcohol to the point of near-blindness is still going to affect pretty much anyone. One of the best examples of this is in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Marion drinks a guy that outweighs her by quite a bit under the table and then goes about cleaning up the bar afterward. Seriously, she’d have been kissing the table in reality and probably wouldn’t have remembered her own name, let alone Indiana’s.
1. Hanging on to a ledge or the edge of a building with one or two hands is not realistic.
The only time this works is when a person is floating in a pool of water and doesn’t have to hold their own weight, since otherwise, a character would have to be insanely strong to accomplish this. It’s not just the weight of your body either, it’s the fact that gravity is working against you as your body is trying to fall in the opposite direction of where you want to go, which is bound to make your body feel even heavier than it really is. This is when being a lightweight comes in handy, kind of.
It’s great to love action movies, just don’t go thinking that everything you see is real.
