Improbable Aiming Skills/Film

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Examples of Improbable Aiming Skills in Film include:

• In Mystery Men, the Blue Raja can hit pretty much anything with a fork
  • Also the Spleen demonstrates his keen sharpshooting. If you want to know what he uses for ammo, just pull his finger.
• Pretty much any Hollywood depiction of Robin Hood, ever. Robin was no doubt relatively handy with a bow, but in reality you can't shoot a hangman's rope with a longbow and wooden arrows from 50 metres away on demand (no, nor can they split an arrow every single time, sorry). The longbow was fearsome as a weapon of war because of its range and armour-penetration, not its accuracy—for that, the English had tens of thousands of peasants shooting at armies of Frenchmen.
  • It's not just Hollywood: several of the ballads have Robin performing feats such as splitting willow wands in two or shooting a fleeing man at a distance of a mile while on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • As a note, the longbow was brutally accurate... at shorter ranges, and requiring much greater time and patience than an open battle could give (think sniper, or ambush). Robin still pushes it more than somewhat.
• John Woo's Hard Boiled.
• In the Star Wars movies, Padmé and Leia both apparently never miss their target. Definitely raises some questions regarding George Lucas' attitude towards women (not bad, though). Of course, Leia has the Force working for her, but that still doesn't explain her mom...
  • Sure it does. Or did you forget? Authority Equals Asskicking.
  • As noted in the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy page the protagonists display a level of technical competency (Or luck) that most mooks look completely incompetent by comparison.
• In Star Trek: Insurrection, the crew need to shoot down small and fast flying drones that are teleporting the Baku. They almost never miss.
• Legolas also demonstrates a truly astounding aim with his longbow in The Lord of the Rings—of course, improbable skill with a bow is a feature commonly credited to elves in most fantasy settings. However, since they usually live very long time, with aging not being (much of) a problem for them, it usually makes some sense. Legolas is, at this time, just shy of three thousand years old -- he's had a lot of time to practice.
  • Also, it's mentioned in both the movies and in the novels that Elves have spectacular vision, and at one point, Aragorn asks Legolas to look for what a band of Uruk-Hai is doing, and while said Uruks are well out of eyeshot for Aragorn (and the viewer), Legolas apparently has no problem seeing them.
    • And his feats of eyesight mentioned in the book including counting both the fast-moving Riders of Rohan and their riderless horses and observing that their leader is very tall while said Riders are still several miles away.
  • And the couple of times he's shown pulling a multishot on screen, its at point blank range against a large target (presumably because a larger beast needs a larger wound).
  • Subverted during the Helm's Deep siege when he inexplicably fails to kill one lousy Uruk torch-bearer twice, both times hitting his shoulders.
    • Justified: He's firing from almost directly above, the Uruk has a thick sloping helmet on so going for a head shot is pointless, and the purpose of shooting him in the collar bones is to try and make him drop the torch. Unfortunately, they apparently picked the torch-bearer for having the highest pain threshold in Saruman's horde.
• There have been at least three cases (specifically The Magnificent Seven, Blake's 7 and Firefly—the latter two are probably homages to the first) where are a character is commended for a good shot only for them to say they were aiming somewhere else.
  • The Mel Brooks send-up Robin Hood: Men In Tights. Robin has the noose around his neck, but gets saved when Achoo the Moor (Dave Chappelle) fires an arrow that slices the noose from the gallows, allowing him to escape. We later find out that the target was the hangman.
  • In Farscape, D'argo at one point throws his sword and impales a Peacekeeper mook through the heart at impressive range for using a heavy blade that was by no means designed for throwing. When complimented he replies that he was aiming for the Peacekeeper's head.
  • On one episode of Criminal Minds, while in a hostage crisis, Spencer Reid shoots the crook and mass murderer dead center of the forehead. Not only was he said to have failed his firearms qualification that the start of the episode, he claimed he'd been aiming for the guy's knee. At a distance of about six feet, that's a spectacularly bad shot.
    • He was joking. See the Accidental Aiming Skills trope entry about it on the Criminal Minds page.
  • Also seen in Sinbad the Sailor (with Maureen O'Hara and a very acrobatic Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) wherein the mostly useless comic relief stuns everybody by felling a threatening Bad Guy with a crossbow. Afterward admitting he did it by aiming "at everything else"!
  • In the film Geronimo, the titular character manages to shatter a jar of whiskey just as an opponent is taking a drink from several yards away. When he's commended for a good shot, Geronimo unabashedly admits, "Not so good. I was aiming for his head."
• Ridiculously fast and accurate shooting was one of the standard features of Spaghetti Westerns and one of the things that distinguished them from standard American films of any quality. Ironically, Clint Eastwood's ability to Quick Draw a handgun, shoot, and kill any number of men in any fight without missing a shot—or being hit in return—was seen by some critics as making his films more realistic ("gritty, rugged") than the plausible shooting skills of a John Wayne, Glenn Ford, Jimmy Stewart, or Randolph Scott film.
  • This was subverted in Unforgiven, where Gene Hackman's character explains that a true gunman must sacrifice speed for accuracy. In the end, Eastwood's character wins only by shooting carefully at close range.
  • Speaking of John Wayne, in his final film he specifically disavows this trope, noting that he owes his reputation as a shootist to an unflinching readiness to kill his opponent, not fancy quickdraw skills or even accuracy.
  • Parodied in Blazing Saddles, when The Waco Kid shoots the guns out of the hands about ten Mooks in two seconds.
• In Hitman, the film of the game series, Agent 47 scores an impressive streak of headshots with his pistols during the hotel escape scene.
• Used heavily in Shooter, especially the helicopter scene. There are snipers good enough to find a target, adjust for wind and drop, and fire in less than a couple seconds, but there aren't any live ones that would try to hit the rotary blade on a helicopter.
  • He was aiming for the engine/motor housing for the rotary blade, a pronounced feature on most heavy helicopters, and after several shots he hit it. It still boarders on improbable but it's closer to reality than the scenario described above.
• Shoot Em Up is basically an entire film dedicated to this trope.
• The Blaxploitation film Three The Hard Way has the heroes with glorified cap pistols defeating the Mooks who have fully automatic machine guns.
• The 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake offers a borderline example with the character of Andy, who proves to be very accurate with zombie-killing headshots. Of course, the man owns a gun store, and is shooting from the safety of his roof using a high-powered rifle with a scope. And there's the fact that there are so many zombies, it's like trying to drain the ocean with a teaspoon...
  • Averted in the original movie, where the two SWAT guys are accurate shooters whereas the civilian helicopter pilot is inaccurate and panicky, until he has time to practice under the tutelage of one of the SWAT men.
• Subverted in Shaun of the Dead, where the gang has to team up in order to reliably use a rifle "that actually works". The scene plays out exactly like the earlier one when Shaun and Ed are playing Timesplitters at home. Their aim does improve, though.
• No mention of Land of the Dead yet? Charlie, the mildly-retarded sidekick, has a "good eye," as he puts it. He can shoot a dwarf in the head behind cover from across a room in the middle of a riot. And he nails a zombie in the face by firing inches past a teammate's head, though he does complain that it was a little off-center. When offered an automatic weapon that can fire 14 rounds per second, he just says "I don't normally need that many."
• The Bourne Supremacy features an instantly-fatal shot against a human target at around 200 metres. The target (Marie) is not only moving away, she's inside a car travelling at about 20 mph, the shot is through traffic and the sniper hits on his first shot from a standing position.
  • Kind of a subversion though, since he was actually aiming for the guy next to her (Bourne). This is just a weirdly specific miss.
• The Arnold Schwarzenegger movie True Lies is full of this trope and enemies who attended the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy as well. One scene in particular stands out: Arnold's character is escaping down a snow covered hill by sliding down it on his back and using a pistol to take out pursuing enemies on skis, at night; the aforementioned enemy marksmanship can be seen here as well.
  • Commando had a scene when Arnie's storming the villain's mansion and is picking off henchmen with seemingly no effort.
• In House of Flying Daggers Jin fires off four arrows in quick succession at the four soldiers attacking Xiao Mei. Not only does each of them hit the target, said target is a spot where the arrow will stick in their clothes without hurting them since the whole thing is a setup for him to earn Xiao Mei's trust.
  • They also all manage to impact at about the same time, which is pretty unlikely.
  • In this movie, anyone who throws the flying daggers never misses the mark. They even went through the trouble of using Wanted style improbable physics.
• Wanted. Improbable Aiming Skills: The Movie. How bad? Throwing a curveball with bullets, shooting the wings off of insects, shooting down an enemy's bullet intentionally, and on and on. The fact that the ads showcase this and tell nothing about the plot... well, be afraid. Be very afraid.
  • It's out now, and it's worse than you feared. Bullets fired from guns don't need to go in straight lines. With a flick of the wrist, an assassin can get a bullet to swerve around an obstacle and hit a target directly behind said obstacle. Yes, that means they can shoot around corners without relying on ricochets to change the trajectory. The most Egregious example, hands-down, comes in the climax. A member of the Fraternity (a secret society of assassins that decides who to kill by studying textiles) has decided that the abilities wielded by the assassins are too dangerous in the hands of mortals. This rebellious member fires a single bullet that travels around the room in a circular path, killing most of the remaining members, and comes back around, hitting the person who fired the bullet. Rule of Cool and all that.
  • In the original comic series, Wesley is an impossibly good shot beyond any rational measure (it's a superpower). In the first comic he is forced to shoot the wings off of flies, in the end he does so by closing his eyes and shooting wildly around the room. Needless to say he succeeds. His father is also murdered by an unseen gunman who shoots him from "two cities away". Like the movie the plot of the comics is based entirely on Rule of Cool.
  • It's just because Timur Bekmambetov does what he wants. (If you're curious, he directed the movies Night Watch and Day Watch, both of which were also largely funded on Rule of Cool.)
  • This is taken to its logical extreme in the comic. Wesley and his father are literally perfect shots; at the end of comic, Wesley's father forces him to execute him, because a few weeks ago he missed a target (with a pistol) at about half a mile, chalking it up to old age. He can't imagine being less than the absolute best.
• In Support Your Local Sheriff James Garner is asked to demonstrate his gun handling skills and manages to both subvert and play the trope straight. He begins by tossing a washer into the air and shooting at it with his pistol, then claiming the bullet went through the hole. The skeptical townsfolk ask him to repeat the stunt, although for the second shot a piece of tape is applied to the washer. Guess where the second bullet goes?

"(gulp) I hope you didn't take no offense at anything we may have said earlier.."

• • Later on he drives a nail into a board by shooting it.
• Inverted in the Iron Man movie, where a mook in a tank picks off Iron Man while he's engaged in a dogfight. The mooks with firearms are also pretty sharp, if only to demonstrate the imperviousness of Iron Man's phlebotinum suit.
  • Inverted in the other direction as well. Iron Man relies on a super efficient targetting system to headshot multiple badguys holding Human Shields rather than just eyeing it.
• Played straight in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in which Arnie manages to hold off an entire army of cops... with a minigun... without even injuring one. His kill counter even has a decimal place that shows 0. After all, John Connor told him not to kill anyone.
  • This was ironic, since in the original Terminator Arnie seemed to have flunked from the Imperial Stormtrooper Shooting Academy; he needed a taget-pistol with laser-sighting, just to hit someone at point-blank range; and he took out an entire bar-full of other people with his Uzi while missing his intended target, since his aim was so bad. Of course it was a different timeline, so perhaps the Terminators became more accurate; but still he was exactly the same Terminator to all other appearances.
    • To be fair to the original Terminator, both shots taken in the bar sequence would have been hits had they not been interfered with -- in the instance with the laser-sighted pistol the Terminator was hit with a shotgun blast in the back at the instant it was pulling the trigger, throwing its aim off, and the Uzi burst would have gone directly into the back of Sarah Conner's head had it not been intercepted by someone stepping immediately behind her at just the wrong instant.
• Averted in the original RoboCop. Robo can pull off all kinds of amazing feats of ballistics, including neutering a would-be rapist by shooting through his victim's skirt, but it's all programming—the original Murphy couldn't shoot for beans, and after a Directive 4 malfunction takes his targeting systems offline, neither can Robo.
  • In the third movie, RoboCop shoots the gun out of a villain's hands—then continues to shoot it, and it bounces in the air for a few seconds almost as if it were attached to a string.
  • In the TV series, he has a habit of using ricochets to hit people.
• Spoofed in the comedy Bullshot (1983). "By rapidly calculating the pigeon's angle of elevation in the reflection of your monocle, then subtracting the refractive index of its lens, I positioned myself at a complementary access... and fired. It was no challenge at all."
• Quigley from Quigley Down Under. Partly justified by his being a marksman and his enemies being a little too into flashy quick draws and the like.
• Done awesomely in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. In the climactic car-chase/shoot-out (which involves a coffin containing the body of the victim, a delivery truck, and an overpass), Harry, the coffin, and a revolver go skidding over the bridge: the coffin snags on the railings, partially open with the victim' hand hanging out; Harry manages to grab the corpse's hand and save himself, and then, with the other hand, plucks the gun out of midair and shoots the big bad right in the heart. The bad guy's response is priceless.
• Last of the Mohicans does this near the end of the final battle. Hawkeye charges into a small group of the enemy, shooting two Kentucky rifles simultaneously from the hip -- and hitting a separate enemy with each shot.
• Joked with in Treasure Planet, where Dr. Doppler (who doesn't appear to have held a gun before) manages to shoot and hit his mark exactly.

Captain Amelia: Did you actually aim for that? Dr. Doppler: You know, actually, I did.

• Humphrey Bogart reminds how flippin' awesome is to be an American in the wartime propaganda film Sahara were a German aircraft does two flybys of our heroes, and is unable to hit the broad side of a tank in the middle of the desert while Bogie on the other hand, can shoot a single plane down, despite flying at high speeds at a great distance with just one shot of his sidearm. Wow.
  • The strafing scene is defensibly realistic; it's a lot harder to hit something with a ground-attack aircraft than it looks. The pistol shot is still ridiculous.
• The Joker in the 1st Tim Burton Batman film hits the speeding Batwing...with a handgun with a 3 foot long barrel.
  • In a similar vein, Batman manages to completely miss the Joker while strafing him with twin mounted machine guns earlier in the scene.
• The Grammaton Clerics in Equilibrium are masters of Gun Kata­­, which the film states is in part a mathematical system for determining aiming angles with the highest probability to hit. Cleric Preston displays this repeatedly, usually taking out a half-dozen or more opponents with robotic precision.
• In the movie version of I Robot, Bridget Moynahan shoots a robot attacking Will Smith with her eyes closed. He's less than happy when he finds out... but, "it worked, didn't it?"
  • Not to mention Will Smith pulling out two guns and hitting his targets while jumping off the back of a moving motorcycle.
• Enemy at the Gates, though it's justified in that the whole movie is about two exceptional snipers. The Nazi major in particular has some insane skills, including the ability to shoot through a piece of string the hero is trying to use to retrieve his out-of-reach rifle.
• Subverted in Inglourious Basterds. One lone Jewish girl escapes the Nazi soldiers who kill her family and starts running towards the hills. Colonel Hans Landa sees her, and aims a small pistol at her. He carefully takes aim, even though by then she's much too far away for him to hit, and just before she runs over the hills and out of sight, he yells BANG!, and puts away his gun.
  • "Au revoir, Shoshana!"
• McQ. At the beginning of the movie the title character shoots a hitman fleeing from him at an impressive distance with a six-inch magnum revolver, much to the awe of a witness. However this crack shooting is not carried on in other scenes, where admittedly he's being shot back at. However when McQ gets his hands on an Ingram MAC-10, the question of accuracy becomes moot.
• The Boondock Saints: Immediately after the Dynamic Entry into the Russian mobsters' hotel room, the Sibling Team happens to get caught up in some rope, and then draw weapons and outfire nine mobsters. Of course, they do this all while dual wielding 9mm pistols, upside down, and spinning, after having a good eight foot drop. And they don't miss. Lampshaded, multiple times, afterwards.
• In Dragonheart, Brother Gilbert finds out that he is naturally a perfect shot with a bow and arrow. This puts him directly into a moral conflict as he's a priest and abhors killing, but the villagers need to be protected from the evil soldiers. He eventually gets around this by using non-lethal shots and triggering traps.
• In the second grade Marc Dacascos movie, DNA, the movie's climax involves the main character diving off a cliff into the water, holding a small rocket launcher, turning around mid-air and blowing the monster to pieces with one single shot. Granted, it was from point-blank range, but considering the circumstances, it's still pretty impressive.
• Relentlessly spoofed in the Austin Powers movies. There are some scenes where Austin fires around two or three shots, resulting in around 20 bad guys falling down dead at once.
• In Tombstone, despite most of the fight scenes featuring close range shooting still resulting in misses, on both sides, Wyatt Earp manages a shot to the throat while both are on horseback, Wyatt leaning off his saddle and shooting from under the horse's neck. This is achieved with a single bullet from a pistol that in an earlier scene required six shots to hit one of the Cowboy's once.
• In Crocodile Dundee, Mick Dundee can hit just about anything he wants precisely. Shown by his knife throw against one of the punk kids and later killing off a security camera feed with a stone.
  • The knife was a bit risky, but he lined up the stone for several seconds before throwing it. Unusually good, but not magically so.
  • Sue Charlton in the climax of the second film, shooting dead a drug lord from some distance away, on the first shot, when she's probably never touch a gun in her life.
  • At the end of the first movie, the limousine driver downing a crook with an improvised boomerang
• In one of his movies, Charlie Chaplin throws a rock after a fleeing badguy and knocks off his hat from three blocks away.
• In the 2005 version of King Kong, Jimmy, who has never handled a gun before, manages to shoot several huge wetas off of Jack, who is moving. With a Tommygun. And he didn't kill Jack either. The characters didn't look nearly shocked enough.
• Subverted in Orphan by the end of the movie when Max picks up a gun that Kate had dropped earlier and aims it at Esther, but ends up shooting the ice they're standing on instead.
• Subverted in Starsky and Hutch when Hutch is held at gunpoint Starsky offers to take a shot at his captor with Hutch's permission. Despite the fact that Hutch vehemently refuses to give permission, Starsky spins around and takes the shot but misses wildly and hits their boss instead.
• Seso in Prince of Persia the Sands of Time.
• Parodied in Top Secret with Scary Black Man Chocolate Mousse, who at one point manages the extraordinary feat of firing a machine gun at full-auto into a melee and hitting only the bad guys.
• Jason Voorhees. Tends to prefer melee weapons, but give him a crossbow or something like that, and prepare to be called "Snake" the rest of your life. In Freddy vs. Jason, he actually throws his machete through a guy's chest as he's running away from him.
• Duncan by the end of Mystery Team.
• Peggy Carter in Captain America the First Avenger makes some amazing shots. One of them is putting a bullet through the head of a Nazi driving in a car at least a block away.
  • Can't forget Cap himself and his ludicrous ricochet shots with the shield.
• In the 1954 Davey Crockett On The Mississippi Crockett subverts this. Crockett is challenged to a trick shooting contest in a tavern. Crockett walks around, carefully lining up pans and pictures and other objects, then takes a shot with 'Becky' his famous long rifle over his back with a mirror. It *does* bounce around until he apparently catches the bullet with his teeth. He later reveals he had the bullet in his mouth the whole time and wasn't really worried about the ricochets.
• Major Dallas displays exceptional aim when taking out sundry Magalores on the flying hotel, starting with a triple headshot from across the auditorium, proceeding on to take out at least seven bad guys with a single burst of full-auto, without harming any civilians, and finishing up with a William Tell style headshot of the lead mangalore, over the head of one of the hostages. To be fair though, he actually appeared to have to aim that last one.
• Robot Jox: Subverted: Tex, a retired Jock, is famous for a match where he defeated a technologically far superior Russian opponent with a shot that precisely hit a weak spot he had no way of knowing about. When asked about this, he dismissed it as being pure blind luck.
• The Matrix: Agent Smith manages to shoot Morpheus's ankle though a wall. (A minute earlier, he missed Neo in a helicopter at short range, but at that point he was still thrown by Neo firing a minigun at them.)
• In The Avengers, Hawkeye offhand-backhands a flying Chitauri with an arrow.

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