Too Dumb to Live/Film: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

== Note: As a [[Death Trope]], [[Handling Spoilers|all spoilers on this page are unmarked]]. ==

* In ''[[Skyline]]'', with LA full of alien monsters eating everything that moves, our heroes decide to try and escape in cars with big, growly engines and in broad daylight. Granted, their chances weren't all that good whatever they tried, but at least on foot and at night they had some small hope of evading detection. And let's not even think about the fact that their entire daylight plan was to escape by boat. From flying aliens. Yeah, that will work!

* In general, [[Adults Are Useless|parents in horror films,]] [[Not Now, Kiddo|when they ignore]] [[Adults Are Useless|every sign possible that something is trying to hurt their child, to the point that it looks like]] [[Abusive Parents|emotional abuse.]]

** Considering that Luke demonstrated that the speeders can change elevation, racing through the trees at ground level in the first place qualifies everyone involved. On top of that, after Luke had been knocked off his speeder, his foe doubles back to finish him off rather than continuing on to get help, as all of the speeder troopers were commanded to do (and is the reason why they bolted from the scene in the first place).

*** A reasonable argument could be that, once dismounted, Luke used Force influence to convince the trooper to swing around and try to kill him. If you watch closely, Luke pulls out his light saber before the trooper turns around.

** Also, the Imperial ground forces in general in ROTJ deserve this. Locating your sensitive base in the middle of a forest where there's plenty of places for the hostile natives to hide? Oh, and wearing bright, gleaming white armor to a fight in said forest? Apparently, the Empire never invented camouflage.

*** [[Star Wars Expanded Universe|They did]] ''[[Genre Savvy|after]]'' [[Genre Savvy|that!]]

{{quote|'''Burke''': No, no. You're wrong there, Dr. Harding. We'll lose them once we leave their territory.

'''Sarah''': No, don't bet on it. Tyrannosaurs have the largest proportional olfactory cavity of any creature in the fossil record with the exception of one. }}

* Jesse from the second ''[[Alien vs. Predator (film)|Alien vs. Predator]]'' movie. Her companions already killed the Alien in the stairwell, but she runs away and screams, forcing her companions to chase after her through a more heavily Alien-populated section of the hospital. Then she dies when she gets into the path of the Predator's disc blades. The Predator wasn't even ''trying'' to kill her, she just runs straight into the middle of a fight between the Predator and Aliens and gets hit ''by accident''. [[What an Idiot!]].

** There's also the part near the beginning when the pizza delivery boy and his brother go down into the sewer for his car keys at night and nearly get killed by the Predator. It wasn't even like it turned to night by the time they got to the sewer, they clearly waited until night to go down, presumably so no one saw them doing it. Granted they didn't know that the Alien or Predator were on Earth yet, but still one would think that going into a sewer at night is just asking for ''some'' sort of trouble.

* Half of Gotham in the 1989 ''[[Batman (film)|Batman]]'' movie seems Too Dumb to Live. It was already common knowledge that the Joker had murdered many people, but that didn't stop them from diving at the cash he offered in public. He even said into a microphone, "Now comes the part where I relieve you, the little people, of the burden of your failed and useless lives," but they're too engrossed to listen. A minute later, many are dead. And some who aren't dead yet ''still'' grab for cash.

* ''[[Batman Returns]]'' gives us The Ice Princess who is shown to be a ditz when she can't remember whether the lights come on and then pushes the switch or vice versa, but the real crown jewel is when she stands on the edge of a building; it's no wonder The Penguin so easily got Batman framed.

* In ''[[The Dark Knight Saga]]'', a guy is still driving towards the Joker at the end of the epic car chase sequence. Joker shoots up the car and the car crashes (the fate of the driver is not shown on screen). As pointed out on the movie's [[Riff Trax]], "If you're still driving ''towards'' him at this point, you deserved that!"

** An employee figures out that Bruce Wayne must be Batman, and wants to blackmail him. Lampshaded by [[Morgan Freeman]]'s character: "Let me get this straight. You think that one of your clients - one of the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world - is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands, and your plan is to ''blackmail'' this person?"

* ''Every single human being'' in the ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]'' film ''[[The Creeping Terror]]'' qualifies. The title monster eats people, but in order to do so it has to reach them by moving very slowly. However, because idiots simply sit there and scream rather than run away, they suffer the grisly death that their stupidity deserves. The fact that [[Special Effect Failure|they have to crawl into its mouth to be eaten]] doesn't help.

* Also another film riffed by ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]''; ''[[Women of the Prehistoric Planet]]''. A group of guys try to walk across a pit of acid on a small branch, and one them ends up falling in and dying. There was a path around the pit a few steps away.

** This is based on a very ''early'' scene from the book, where he, Merriman, and the Lady are holding a three-person circle of power in the Hall while the Dark tries to beat down the door, and they break his concentration by convincing him briefly that they've got his family captive. He lets go of his new comrades' hands, and the Lady has to temporarily die to save the day. Then Marriman actually explains a little bit, although he has an infuriating habit of explaining nothing, ever. (Will's also only just eleven in the book.)

** The '''only''' good thing about that movie is it had the [[Doctor Who|Ninth Doctor]] as the villain.

* ANYONE who buried anything in the burial ground in ''[[Pet Sematary]]'' after seeing the initial results (heck, after the initial ''warning'' for that matter). You'd think that after seeing what happened to Church the cat they would have stopped, but the guy then proceeded to bury his hit-by-a-truck toddler son Gage, who then came back and killed his wife. [[What an Idiot!|If that wasn't enough yet,]] he then '''buried his wife there''', and she mercifully put an end to his chain of idiocy.

** This is easily explained by the book. The burial ground calls out to people, and at one point the main character mentions that he feels great when going off to bury Church. Besides, the main character is insane with grief after Gage dies and just loses it when his wife and Jud get killed as well.

** Klatuu's people deserve extra stupidity points as well. Consider that their entire motivation for destroying humanity is to preserve the non-human portions of Earth's biosphere. They then set their nanotech-based weapon on "Dissolve Everything", ''including rocks and trees!'' In the immortal words of Robert Asprin, "Very inferior as superior beings go."

* Jake Sully in ''[[Avatar (film)|Avatar]]''. On his first day there, Jake is told that [[Death World|Pandora is a dangerous world that will do its best to kill him]]. He is told this by a [[Badass]] [[Colonel Badass|colonel]]. A badass colonel who [[Good Scars, Evil Scars|is himself scarred by Pandora]]. Scarred with wounds that he got ''[[Everything Trying to Kill You|on his first day]].'' What does Jake do? Wander off and ''start touching random crap''! He is [[Designated Hero|the hero]], so he does not actually ''die'' here, but it would be perfectly believable if he did.

* The [[Animal Wrongs Group]] at the beginning of ''[[28 Days Later|Twenty Eight Days Later]]''. After being explicitly told that a monkey is infected with a contagious disease, one of them frees it anyway.

** The US Army in ''[[28 Weeks Later|Twenty Eight Weeks Later]]''. They allow unsupervised access to an asymptomatic infected, who consequently infects someone. Then they evacuate another one to Europe where the whole thing starts all over again.

*** Even so, they lacked the most basic security measures, such as placing guards around an individual who carries the most dangerous pathogen known to humankind. Nevermind how children were able to sneak past outside of the safe zone as if they were sneaking out of a high school during a lunch break...

* Balian ([[Orlando Bloom]]) in ''[[Kingdom of Heaven]]''. It makes more sense in context and is more like a case of lazy writing, but Balian's inaction is the prime reason behind the Big Battle of the film. His refusal, on many occasions, to kill a blatantly evil and dangerous character (a French Templar named Guy de Lusignan, played by Marton Czokas), is the prime reason behind the siege and the Big Battle of the film. Guy and his conspirators are the ones that provoke the war between Muslims and Christians, and their intentions are made clear (in-story, i.e. to other characters and not just to the audience) from the outset, and yet Balian doesn't make a move, and he refuses to do anything when his advisors/friends repeatedly express their concern. He doesn't come off as noble, more like an idiot and a passive character. Many characters die as a result of his course of action (or, rather, inaction), but he survives the film. In the film's epilogue with King Richard I he should probably say: "I'm the blacksmith, and the main reason you have to retake Jerusalem from Saladin, I'm the one that should be thrown in a dungeon full of Twilight merchandise." This film is not worth watching for this very story element, it's a classic case of a story where if the main hero acted within common sense, there wouldn't be much of a story to be told.

** Those who do stay in the library, decide to burn books to keep warm. Books that they have to take off the ''wooden shelves'' to burn.

*** Wooden shelves have to be broken up to fit in most fireplaces, and are usually painted/stained with substances that release toxic fumes when burned. Books were the safer alternative by far. The dumb part was in tearing them apart and burning them page by page rather than using some loose pages as firestarters and then burning entire books- that would have been much more effective.

** Then there was the scene meant to be a [[Crowning Moment of Heartwarming]] in which Frank is dangling from a glass roof. The glass starts to crack and Frank decides to make a [[Heroic Sacrifice]] because there is no way the glass can support Jason and his weight. [[Fridge Logic]] sets in when you realize Jason is holding onto two steel support beams that could have easily held the weight of the sled, the entire party, and probably an elephant.

* The Prison Guard in ''[[Con Air]].'' This Prison Guard and FBI Agent Larkin have just found a box labeled "Do Not Open" in the cell of Cyrus Grissom, a criminal genius, terrorist, murderer, and general all-around [[Complete Monster]]. Larkin goes to fetch the bomb squad, explicitly ordering the guard to not open the box. Literally the second Larkin is out of the room, the guard sits right down on the bed and opens the box. [[Stuff Blowing Up|He is immediately blown to smithereens.]]

* Very much Frank of ''State of Grace''. A mafia boss who goes to extreme lengths to kill his own friends and relatives just to satisfy the requests of another gang, against which he fears to lose in case of a mob war. It's really no surprise that he ends up being topped by Terry, his last remaining childhood friend, with even more added irony cause Terry was actually an [[Reverse Mole|undercover cop]] and was having qualms about busting Frank and the others.

* Makes the perfect couple with [[Bond Villain Stupidity]] in ''[[A History of Violence]]'', where all the mobsters, including their boss, dies horribly by the hand of the protagonist [[Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?|due to their inability to just kill him off at the first occasion.]] The result is particularly hilarious when we learn, just before the last shooting, that in spite of all the talking and the stalking the villains performed earlier, their intentions was REALLY and JUST and PLAINLY to see the protagonist DEAD. Bonus points for the fact that they even know he was the ultimate [[Badass]] from the very start.

* '''EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER''' in ''[[Splice]]''. Their so friggen stupid that when they all get killed or even raped by the monster, it's hard not feel as if they had it coming. When your characters are so stupid that you don't feel bad that they're getting raped and murdered by a horrible genetic monstrosity, something is obviously wrong.

* Many of the traps in ''[[Saw]] II'' required the participants to be terminally stupid in order to kill them. Most of them are therefore effective.

 

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