This month we asked the team, “Which movie tropes are so overplayed and annoying that you roll your eyes at them every time they appear?”

Siting Duck: The concept of villains being the heroes in their own stories can make for an interesting thought experiment. One of the more compelling examples involves the idea wherein Batty is the hero and Deckard is the villain in Blade Runner. Yet when such analyses are converted into fiction, the end result more often than not reads like a particularly hacky fanfic.

One of the more obnoxious instances of this in recent memory is Wicked. What particularly makes it grate my cheese is how the scenario wherein Elphaba is misunderstood and unjustly persecuted while Glinda is a manipulative slitch with good publicity is derived from the (IMO overrated) 1939 MGM musical. In particular, much of what makes Glinda in that adaptation so equivocal in deconstruction is how she’s an ineptly assembled Composite Character. Plus the lines that are seen as implicating Glinda as a bad actor (such as, “Only bad witches are ugly,” and “Now begone, before somebody drops a house on you.”) never came from L. Frank Baum’s pen.

As for Elphaba’s characterization, it brings to mind the Dudley Do-Right episode where Snidely Whiplash (speaking of green-skinned reprobates) is on trial for his chronic tying ladies to railroad tracks. Nell Fenwick is his defense, and she closes with a brazenly manipulative appeal claiming that Snidely had once been a sweet innocent kid who had a tying obsession that got out of hand and how he’s not at fault but rather society is. And of course this tawdry demagoguery succeeds because Dudley Do-Right is a cheap melodrama. The difference however is that Dudley Do-Right is a parody of cheap melodramas and is not meant to be taken seriously. And neither should Wicked.

Drake: There are just so many eye-rolling tropes, it’s hard to choose. Outrunning a fiery explosion is always a good one, as are the supergeniuses who seemingly know everything about well, everything. Then there’s that ‘90s favorite where child hackers are able to access any computer, often with a Mac!

But if I have to pick just one, the “it’s just a flesh wound” trope is incredibly annoying and should be rolled up into a ball, thrown into a hole, and buried in concrete. Getting shot in the arm or the leg doesn’t somehow make the damage taken less severe. Granted, you aren’t hit in the brain or the heart, but limbs carry a huge amount of nerves and blood vessels that will be severed and very likely permanently damaged by a bullet, and that’s not counting the possibility of a round connecting with an artery, or splintering a bone, or destroying a joint.

The chance of significant blood loss is considerable, and that’s not even factoring in that your epidermal layer has been compromised and infection is now a virtual guarantee. And also that the bullet’s impact has hit with such a velocity that it’s permanently damaged the surrounding tissue area and is going to leave a massive scar.

But all too often the hero shrugs off all of that and just grits through what could well be a terminal injury and treats it as a minor annoyance. Nah. A well-choreographed gunfight is still a cinematic good time, but let’s leave all of the old Hollywood BS about the negligible results of a bullet wound in the dustbin.

Don’t want your hero to suffer through a realistic outcome of getting wounded by gunfire? Then don’t have them get shot. Pretty simple.

Justin: My particular tropish pet peeve isn’t any one specific thing but rather a generalized ball of “lazy writing.” There are so many of these stock phrases and rehashed conversations that you hear over and over again, especially in scripts that are obviously churned out for cheaper products, like kids films. Once you’ve heard “We’ve got COMPANY!” you know you’ll hear it a thousand times more by writers who can’t be bothered to think up anything else.

That’s what burns me here. It is sheer laziness. There are lackluster (mostly modern) movies I’ve never seen before where, at certain moments, I can predict word-for-word what’s going to be said next. That’s not because I’m psychic, it’s because it’s what’s always said. You can predict the comeback to whatever the villain says, or the tired conversation back-and-forth where two people are misunderstanding each other, and it’s almost not worth watching the next few minutes.

I think that’s why we flocked so hard to indie films, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Kevin Smith, Kevin Williamson, and the like in the ’90s. They were the anti-lazy writing brigade, delivering fresh conversations and self-aware dialogue that was too smart to fall into tropes. Unfortunately, Hollywood’s gotten so far away from that today that scripts sound like they’re made by gen AI. Maybe they are.

Al: Did you know we only use 10 percent of our brains? Yep, we’d all be psychic superhero computer whizzes if we could only access that other 90%. We might as well just scoop out one of those lobes entirely, right?

This trope makes 100% of my brain — WHICH WE ARE ALL USING ALL OF THE TIME — irrationally angry. And I think I could swallow it if it had a basis in some wacky, “strange but true” science fact that was stretched to a sci-fi extreme, but it’s not. It’s just a lie based on pseudoscience from over 100 years ago that’s being propagated by lazy screenwriters. I hate Hate HATE this trope. HATE IT.