Wham! Line/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Darth Vader: Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.
Luke Skywalker: He told me enough! He told me you killed him!
Darth Vader: No. I am your father.

    • Unfortunately, the fact the line is so well known tends to reduce the effect.
    • And to a lesser extent, "No, there is another".
  • The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola has an interesting variant on this: a Wham! Line that turns on which word a character stresses in the sentence "He'd kill us if he had the chance."
  • The Princess Bride: "...when I hired Vizzini to have her murdered..."
  • The Matrix Reloaded: "Interesting...That was quicker than the others."
    • The Matrix Reloaded: "This will be the 6th time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it".
    • Before either of those: "You know, your predecessors showed more respect..."
  • The Ring: "Why did you help her? You weren't supposed to help her!"
  • Serenity: "These are just a few of the images we recorded and you can see... it isn't what we thought."
  • "It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people."
  • Rebecca: "I hated her!"
  • Kill Bill: "Is she aware...that her daughter is still alive?"
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Mac passes a piece of chewing gum to deaf/mute inmate Chief and Chief says "Thank you." This is the reverse of what happens in the book, as the reader knows this secret from the beginning and, we find out, so does Mac. See Literature for the corresponding Wham! Line.
  • American Beauty: "This is my first time."
  • Arguable, the best example of the final words of a movie being a Wham line: "Well, nobody's perfect!"
  • Hard Candy: "Aaron told me you did it before he killed himself."
  • What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Blanche: I watched you get out of the car and...I wanted to run you down. Crush you.

  • The Sixth Sense: "I See Dead People."
    • "Why did you leave me?"
  • The Shining: "You've always been the caretaker."
  • American Pie: "And this one time, at band camp, I stuck a flute in my pussy."
  • The Others: Is that how she killed you?
  • Repo! The Genetic Opera: "You have your mother's eyes, her hair. I was told you died with her." Classic Wham! Line example: you don't expect it, it's a major reveal (Nathan's been dressing up his daughter like her dead mom, wig and all, and told his friend she's dead), and it comes in the middle of a song where it's practically glossed over in favor of a much less shocking reveal ("I'm your...godmom").
    • Even bigger example: "He's been poisoning your medicine!"
      • Actually, right before that was "May I introduce you to the man who made you sick!"
  • Chillingly inverted in the Crapsack World of Visioneers, in that it's read on the back of a business card after what first appears to be the Wham! Line. "Kill the thing you love."
  • Wanted: "You're my son."
  • Inception: "The reason I knew inception was possible was because I did it to her first. I did it to my own wife."
  • Hostel: "Pay me? I pay THEM!"
  • Drag Me to Hell: "I've found your button."
  • Expect the final monologues from every Saw movie to be a big chunk of this and a little bit of "you should have seen that coming". Game Over.
    • "Hello, Mr. Hindle".
  • Orphan: "Tell him the little girl in that picture is not really a little girl. She's a grown woman."
  • Derailed: "Laroche, I chose this prison." Made even better in that it comes shortly after a wham moment when the viewer finds out that Charles unluckily got "placed" in the same prison as Laroche.
  • Erin Brockovich: "Would it be important if, when I worked at the plant, I destroyed documents?"
  • Primal Fear ends with one hell of a wham: "No, Marty. There was no Aaron."
  • Treasure Planet: "...right up until Flint pulled out my memory circuits so that I couldn't tell anyone about his BOOBY TRAP!"
  • Charlie's Angels

Dylan: [spelling with Scrabble letters] Enemy.
Knox: [kisses her] I know.

  • Chinatown: "She's my sister AND my daughter! My father and I... do you understand?"
  • The Conspirator: "There should only be three," referring to the number of nooses on the gallows.
  • Blade Runner provides an interesting example of how one line can affect a whole scene. When Roy Batty finally meets his maker, Tyrell, he wants more life. There are several cuts of the film floating around. In one cut, he says "I want more life, fucker". In the other, "I want more life, father". The entire nature of the scene is completely different between the two cuts from just that one change.
  • Explorers: "Ehhhh, what's up, Doc?"
  • Red Eye: "Just keeping the focus on you and your father."
  • Mystery Team: "Let's all just take a chill pill."
  • For laughs: Mel Brooks' 1976 Silent Movie was just that, with all dialogue on title cards which gets hilariously subverted in the scene where they ask mime Marcel Marceau if he would appear in their film. In the only audible dialogue in the whole movie, we hear Marcel--whose work is exclusively silent--say "Non!"
  • Algernon, assistant to the scientist Foot, from The Beatles movie Help!: "It's more than my job's worth to stop him when he's out like this. He's out to rule the world, if he can get a government grant."
    • Following the revelation that the Beatles made a big mistake getting help from Foot, he saw what the ring Ringo wore could do: "Fantastic! With a ring like that I could--dare I say it--rule the world."
  • The House of the Devil: "You're not the babysitter?"
  • "I am Iron Man." It's not the line itself, but the fact that Tony Stark delivered it in front of a live audience.

Nick Fury: I'm here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative.

    • And before that, setting up the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe and perhaps changing comic book movies forever, "You think you're the only superhero in the world? Mr. Stark, you've become part of a bigger universe. You just don't know it yet."
  • G.I. Joe the Rise of Cobra:

Rex: The time has come for the Cobra to rise. You will call me...Commander.

  • Battle: Los Angeles has one for the Marines while they are getting briefed on the "meteor shower."

"These objects are not falling at terminal velocity. They are slowing down."

  • Primer: On the second iteration of the bench scene, "I hope you're not implying that any day is unimportant at Cortex Semi." The words themselves aren't important; what's important is that Aaron says that line even though Abe, exhausted, had failed to say the line it had been a reply to on the first iteration, revealing that Aaron had used a fail-safe and was repeating lines from memory, too.
  • From Lion King II: "YOU WILL NEVER BE MUFASA!"
  • Rise of the Planet of the Apes: "No!" Caesar the chimpanzee's first spoken word.
  • And what is The Miracle of Morgan's Creek that's got the whole state in such a tizzy? "Six! All boys!"
  • In Captain America: The First Avenger, Schmidt is explaining to the SS officers his developments for a powerful weapon when one officer notices the map of locations Schmidt intends to destroy.

SS officer: "Berlin is on this map!"

  • Stage Door: "It's Kay. She jumped before I could stop her."
  • Return to Oz: "You will be rather attractive, one day, not at all beautiful, you understand, but you have a certain prettiness, different than my other heads...I believe I'll lock you in the tower for a few years, until your head is ready. And then I'll take it."
    • "My Ruby Slippers. They just... fell out of the sky one day- you were so anxious to get home. They're very powerful: they made it possible for me to conquer the Emerald City! Thank you.
  • In Batman: Under the Red Hood after Batman and Red Hood fought for a while, Red Hood escaped and said:

Red Hood: "You haven't lost your touch, Bruce."

Mike: Uh, sir? That's not her door.
Waternoose: I know, I know. It's yours.

Mike"So when's he coming back?"
Jody "Jebediah Morningside never does come back..."

Annie, disguised as Hallie: Maybe it's because he thinks I'm Annie.

Carola/ The Gargoyle: YOU PROMISED NEVER TO TELL!

HAL 9000: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

Sentinel: What you must realize, my Autobot brothers, is we were never going to win the war... For the sake of our planet's survival, a deal had to be made... with Megatron.

  • Den Osynlige (but clumsily ruined in its Foreign Remake, The Invisible): "I'm alive!"
  • Fight Club plays with this with the repeated line, "It's called a changeover. The movie goes on, and nobody in the audience has any idea." While this line appears earlier in the movie in reference to a projectionist inserting subliminal porn into movies, it's repeated by the narrator later in a fourth-wall breaking manner at a critical moment that the protagonist (and we, the audience) are starting to realise that certain things we'd taken for granted have actually all been delusions suffered by our protagonist and that we therefore have to go back and re-interpret the film so-far.
    • "Is this your idea of a relationship, Tyler?"
  • Downfall: "Steiner couldn't raise enough men."
  • Tootsie: "I'm Edward Kimberly"!
  • The Avengers

Steve Rogers: Doc, I think now is the perfect time for you to get angry.
Bruce Banner: That's my secret, Captain. I'm always angry.

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