Idiot Plot: Difference between revisions

* In ''[[Best Laid Plans]]'', the entire plot is moronic, but the viewer doesn't learn this until near the end. It starts with a deadbeat kid (Nick) learning that he's inheriting nothing from his dad (he'd expected to get a tidy sum of money so he could move away and start a new life). Nick meets a girl ([[Reese Witherspoon]]). They hit it off and become a couple. A co-worker asks Nick to help him rip off a drug dealer. Nick would get $10,000 just for driving. Nick agrees, they pull of the job, but end up getting caught by the drug dealer who demands Nick pay him $15,000 in return. Nick then plots to steal a valuable artifact from a house where his friend is house-sitting. To keep his friend from reporting the theft, he sets up a scenario where his girlfriend has to sleep with his friend and she threatens to charge him with rape. The friend panics and cuffs the girlfriend to a pool table and calls Nick. Nick pretends to kill his girlfriend and puts her in the trunk of his car. The drug dealers steal his car, then let him walk home where they're waiting for him, so the reason for stealing the car is beyond me. When they ask him for the money, he finds out it was all a scam because there are peanut shells on the floor and his supposedly-dead friend eats peanuts. He realizes they weren't drug dealers after all. They were college graduates who set up the elaborate scam to pay off their student loans. Aside from the other intricacies of the plot, four guys committing numerous felonies and faking the death of Nick's co-worker hardly seems worthwhile when the payoff is only $3,750 each, which would only make a small dent in most student loans. Plus, their reasoning was overly optimistic. They had thought he had inherited some money, but then assumed he would turn right around and pay the $15,000 on demand.

* [[Tim Burton]]'s ''[[Beetlejuice]]''.

** Everybody here's a [[Turn of the Millennium]] troper who can confidently use and troubleshoot computers and text editing software at the basic level ''at the very least''. Remember [[The Eighties]] joke about how only geniuses could program VCRs? The Maitlands were [[Country Mouse|Country Mice]] - a small-town architect and a housewife. The Deetzes were yuppies - and so were the caseworker and her fellow afterlife bureaucrats!

* The main reason [[Fritz Lang]]'s ''[[Woman in the Moon]]'' is remembered for its accurate rocket launch sequence and nothing else is because the rest of its overlong running time is a melodramatic idiot plot. The most glaring example is that the heroes take the villain along on the mission, fully knowing his evil intentions. Yes, he threatened to blow up the ship if he didn't go with them, but did it occur to ''none'' of the crew that they could knock him unconscious and leave him behind just before liftoff (or better yet, have him arrested) and go to the moon and he would be helpless to retaliate? The entire third act would've gone much smoother, especially since no villain would have meant no gunfight which means no bullet hole in the oxygen tank which means no depleted oxygen supply which means everyone could have happily gone home with their gold, the end. ''But no'', they ''had'' to be idiots.

[[Category:Idiot Plot]]

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