What an Idiot!/Film: Difference between revisions

* ''[[Minority Report]]'', where a cop who is racing to prevent a murder. He is armed with foreknowledge imagery of the crime, but it stymied when confronted with a row of identical houses.<br />'''You'd expect''': He would turn out a siren, loudspeaker, or simply shout out that the police were outside of the building.<br />'''Instead''': He takes several seconds to figure the one detail that was different about the correct house, then quietly races into the building to surprise the murderer.

** Far more importantly, when that same future-viewing device shows him and several coworkers that he will commit a murder himself, along with a heaping helping of details including the exact time, he runs. I'll grant him that, since the machine saying you will commit a murder is by itself enough to get you arrested and indefinitely cryogenically frozen with apparently no trial. However, what he does next is totally nonsensical.<br />'''You'd expect''': He would stay the hell away from wherever the murder was supposed to take place, and continue staying away until twenty minutes before it was supposed to happen, then take a taxi over to headquarters and show up three minutes before he's supposed to kill someone in a completely different location and say "Look, I'm here, not killing anyone, and you didn't have to arrest me for me not to kill someone. Therefore I'm not guilty." Or some variation of the above, the main part being that he avoids doing it and uses the fact that he didn't do it as evidence that he isn't a murderer.<br />'''Instead''': Convinced this was a plot to frame him, he goes all-out trying to find out who's responsible, committing many illegal acts. When at the end of the time limit he realizes he is standing outside the very building his future victim is in, charges in and confronts the guy, who turns out to just be a very bribed man who then ''uses'' Anderton to commit [[Suicide by Cop]]. That's right, in trying to prove his innocence he knowingly charges right into the scene of the crime, and nearly commits it. Clearly, he never heard about [[Self Fulfilling Prophecies]]. On the other hand, he proves there is no such thing as fate by refusing to kill the man. Not that it works out well for him. <br />'''To Be Fair:''' If he thinks that the man is going to be killed by someone else and him being framed for it, then he still has a compelling need to show up on the scene -- he's a police officer and he has a duty to try and save the victim's life, and the rest of the police force isn't going to be responding to the scene because they think ''he's'' the killer.

* ''[[Election]]'' sees a paranoid teacher put in charge of counting the votes in the class election. Much to his horror, he sees that his least favorite student Tracey Flick has won, but the election was [[Decided by One Vote]].<br />'''You'd expect''': He'd simply erase one checkmark for Flick and replace it with one for her opponent. It's not unheard of for someone to change their mind in the voting booth, after all. He also could have just stuffed the papers in his pocket. It's not like they'd frisk him.<br />'''Instead''': He casually tosses two votes for Flick into the trash can, taking no effort to disguise or bury the papers they're written on. [[Finagle's Law|Naturally]], the papers are discovered and his voter fraud is caught.

* ''[[Pan's Labyrinth]]'' sees the normally intelligent and bookish Ofelia given the task to enter a magical room and retrieve a knife that's under the care of a monstrous, sleeping guardian. Said guardian will only ''remain'' asleep as long as Ofelia doesn't touch any part of the [[Schmuck Bait|sumptuous feast]] that's sitting on the table in front of him.<br />'''You'd expect''': That Ofelia would remember ''every'' single [[Fairy Tale]] she's ever read that featured a situation ''similar'' to hers that had gone sour; that she'd remember the admonitions of the ''very'' scary-looking faun who'd given her the task, the disturbing, sharp-nailed cenobite-like guardian who is sitting at the end of the table ''and'' the time limit that she's working under, AND that she would complete her task and get the hell out of there as quickly as her prepubescent legs could carry her.<br />'''Instead''': She stops to dawdle long enough to eat two grapes, thus awakening the ravenous guardian, which proceeds to chow down on the fairies and then try to eat ''her'' as well.