6 Movie Heroes (Who Sucked At Their Jobs)
Cinema heroes exist to be everything we're not. Therefore we want them to be crack shots, kung fu masters, tactical geniuses and furious, furious fornicators.
So why is it that we barely blink when they spend the entirety of the film puttering about and screwing things up? Here are six movie heroes who did their jobs so damn poorly that, in retrospect, they'd barely make good sidekicks.
#6.
RoboCop
RoboCop is our second favorite robotic police officer from Detroit (our fave is obviously the Motor City's O.G. killbot, ED-209).
Why He Should Be Good At His Job:
He's a cop and he's robot. Period. There is no fudge factor, no gray area. He is literally programmed to do things by the book.
Why He Sucked At It:
Let's analyze RoboCop's very first case step-by-step.
A perpetrator wielding a machine gun is robbing a convenience store. RoboCop arrives, is promptly shot 30 times and shrugs off the bullets like NERF darts, and proceeds to disable the crook's firearm by bending its muzzle. Now that the criminal is disarmed it's time to slap on the handcuffs and...
BOOM! ROBOCOP CLOTHESLINES THE SUNUVABITCH INTO A FREEZER! BLAM! CRIPPLETASTIC! WOMP!
Our cyborg hero then leaves the store... without arresting the guy. OK, so it was his first day on the job--maybe he had the first time jitters. Perhaps he'll show a little more restraint with his next case ...
KAPOW! HE CASTRATES THE BASTARD WITH GEOMETRY!
Again, RoboCop makes no real effort to apprehend the crooks. It goes on like this for the next 90 minutes. All in all, RoboCop arrests only one criminal during the entire movie. The rest of his time is spent alternately maiming people (three guys) or blowing them away (he racks up a body count of 16).
This is pretty confusing as RoboCop is, in fact, hardwired to be a good guy and has the free will of a VCR. Who the hell programmed him to be a cop? The T-1000?
And we're not even going to get into the time RoboCop stole that nice Korean family's fridge.
"YO I'M ABOUT TO EAT!"
#5.
Danny Ocean (and the Other 10 guys) from Ocean's 11
Danny Ocean and his gang are the world's greatest thieves. Their chosen vocation is stealing the world's valuables to a tasteful jazz-house soundtrack.
Why They Should Be Good At Their Job:
Well, the other characters in the movie keep insisting they're the best. And between the 11 of them, they possess more combined skills than MacGyver with an iPhone. Their roster includes a Chinese gymnast, the guy from both Hotel Rwanda AND Hotel for Dogs, and three of People magazine's "Sexiest Men Alive"... including two two-time winners!
Even though Andy Garcia's casino mogul knew Ocean was up to something, Danny's team nonetheless robs his casino easily. They even have enough time to reminisce in front of the Bellagio's fountains about the halcyon days of Las Vegas. You know, before Sammy Davis, Jr. started hanging with Richard Nixon.
Why They Sucked At It:
For a bunch of dudes robbing a vindictive millionaire, Ocean's 11 were plum awful at concealing their identities. Indeed, if it hadn't been for Ocean's 12, we just would've assumed that days after the first movie, the LVPD would've found a circle of 11 dead men in the Nevada desert with their heads up each others asses.
Things immediately go sour when Danny Ocean introduces himself to casino owner Terry Benedict at the start of the film. As the caper progresses, six of the 11 show their faces to Benedict during the pre-heist setup.
And they're not sporting hilarious prosthetic noses or $1,000 fat suits, mind you--they show their unadulterated, handsomely chiseled mugs to Benedict himself, point-blank and under memorably wacky circumstances in a camera-filled casino.
Above: a bad disguise.
These guys built a 1:1 replica of Benedict's casino vault and a robotic getaway van. You'd think they'd pony up for one or two dollar-store fake mustaches.
Of course, the first 10 minutes of the sequel show Benedict catching all 11 masterminds, thereby proving that, without question, they are shitty thieves. And given that Ocean's 12 was borderline unwatchable, we'd have preferred just imagining the "dead-in-the-desert-with-heads-up-their-asses" scenario.
#4.
Johnny Utah from Point Break
Keanu Reeves plays Special Agent Johnny Utah, college quarterback turned FBI agent turned undercover mole in a gang of surfers/bank robbers, in the greatest movie about surfing, bank robberies and people of all time.
Why He Should Be Good At His Job:
He's played by Keanu, brah. His limited vocabulary and vacant gaze will aid him immeasurably in infiltrating a band of free-spirited wave junkies.
Plus, his quarterback training gave him the power to punt Rottweilers.
Why He Sucked At It:
Johnny Utah had his space cadet surfing persona down pat but apparently showed up hungover to the rest of FBI academy. Why do we say this? Because he was a totally incompetent as an undercover cop.
Throughout the film, Utah breaks almost single tenet of undercover work, from "Don't befriend your target" to "Don't sleep with your target's ex-girlfriend" to "Don't partner up with Gary-fucking-Busey"...
...to "Don't reveal your identity to the target during a pointless chase scene and get pissy and unload your firearm into the sky in a suburban neighborhood."
By the end of Point Break, Special Agent Utah makes zero arrests, gets Busey and most of the robbers killed, and allows Bodhi, the ringleader, to escape and commit suicide by riding the bitching-est wave of all time.
Since Bodhi died in Utah's custody, there's a possibility Johnny could do some jail time. Looks like the only thing he'll be riding for a while is a lifer's raging hard-on.
Ugh, I liked Bruce Almighty, but Evan Almighty was just plain awful. The title didn't even make sense because he was at not point almighty.
ReplyWhatever.
you know what's funny about the flood scene in Evan Almighty? Skyscrapers in D.C. There are tall buildings....but no skyscrapers.
ReplyYes indeed. Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi could get it from me anytime, anyplace.
ReplyA tidal wave is a wave caused by changing tides. What you're describing is more a flash flood.
ReplyThe thing about God being an almighty super being is he only really needs one sentence to justify himself. "I'm God, shut the f**k up."
ReplyGet mad at him all you want for doing things "wrong". He's God. You don't like it, get your own plane of existence. I see way too many people these days trying to limit what God is, and isn't allowed to do. It's not what he should and shouldn't do, it's what he can and can't do, and what he can do is everything. Do you really want to be picking fights with someone like that?
"Also, it's not against the Jedi Code to mercy kill someone if he's slowly and painfully burning to death."
Reply[Citation needed.]
Although I love the star wars series that is something that always bothered me, that they never do their job as well as it could've been done. It always made me think that if in some alternate reality if I could be a Jedi then there wouldn't be any thing left of the Sith because with those abilities I would be so badass that I would hunt down and destroy them all. And while I'm fighting through them I would have a droid slice into their electronics and play the "All your base are belong to us" song.
Reply"Hunt down and destroy" is really more the Sith's territory.
As much as I agree with your writings, I just can't bring myself to admit that Obi-Wan sucks. It'd be like losing a part of my soul.
ReplyTo be fair to God in Evan Almighty, he wasn't to blame for the flood. The whole point at the end was that the guy was using cheap materials and cutting corners in the building of the dam to make money.
ReplyWhich is what caused the flood. It only rained for a matter of seconds, and the dam broke.
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ReplyWhat about James Bond? He's a secret agent who constantly tells everybody who he is! And even if he didn't, what with all those car-crashes and explosions and being the only guy in the rain forest wearing a tuxedo, everybody in a 20-mile radius pretty soon nows he isn't just some random dude who happened to be passing on the way to the shops.
ReplyOh, and there's his habit of constantly ending up in bed with women he knows are enemy agents, which I'm pretty sure is strongly discouraged among real spies. And look at all the top secret state-of-the-art spy equipment they give him. What does he do with it every time? He breaks it, thus costing the British taxpayers the price of a new hospital, then walks off, leaving his bullet-proof invisible car that turns into a submarine to be very thoroughly examined by the enemy! Surely that can't be standard procedure?
My theory is that Bond only gets those jobs because all the other 00 agents are so accident-prone that they always die in the first minute of the movie, leaving nobody available but Bond, who is incompetent but incredibly lucky. Look at all the times the bad guys didn't kill him when they had the chance, and had plans so elaborately convoluted that they probably would have fallen apart if somebody had sneezed at the wrong moment, let alone Bond rushing around randomly crashing helicopters into anything that looks as if it might explode in a gratifying fashion. And what are the chances of a space station having an emergency stop button?
Obviously whenever there's a long gap between Bond movies, it's because one of the other 00 agents managed to stay alive long enough to do the job quietly, like a secret agent is meant to, without dropping any nukes into volcanoes to see if the whole island will blow up, or only some of it.
That's why Bond never works with any of his team-mates like real spies do - they know what he's like, and they're terrified to be within a hundred miles of him, because he's basically World War 3 in a tuxedo.
I agree with whatever it is you said.
Seriously though, there's a reason I never liked the Bond movies.
^ I've never bothered watching any 007 movies because thats pretty much the idea I got about it when someone tried convincing me to watch it.
What I'm more interested in in who in the Jedi Council forgot to check the list of commands for the Clones? Presumably, they would have been programmed or drilled into them from birth, so asking the tall eel-guys that made them "Hey, is there anything that we, as Jedi, ought to know about how you are training these guys?" Also, didn't a Jedi originally commission all of them? What was he, a Sith in disguise?
ReplyOf course, consider Yoda is... a million years old? There's still the issue of the fact that Palpatine faked his death as a jedi master in the first place. Soo... nobody at all recognized him? Or sensed his force powers or whatever? It's still a plot hole burned into the side of a gigantic plot abyss.
Also, how did Yoda age so quickly? In the first movies he was all kick-ass, jumping around, doing flips while fighting, having hair, etc. And then 20 years later he's suddenly ancient, no hair, and he dies. What's up with that?
While the audience might believe initially that "The Exorcist" refers to Father Merrin, ultimately it really is Father Damien who is the exorcist.
ReplyMost impressive.
Welp, the result in Evan Almighty is that nature was soon gonna take what it lost. ARK was merely a small accessory. The sugar flower in a cake. Only thing is that it aint sweet for us
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesUmmmm, whut???
hahahaha thats deep bro
Fynbelle, you aren't allowed to get weird in here unless you're sharing.
What about the pilot from the 2001 planet of apes? I think he crashed every pod thing he tried to fly; and was eventually out-piloted by a chimpanze.
ReplyWell, if there's one thing that everyone who isn't religious knows about religion, it's that pretty much every deity sucks at being a deity. They're all big on killing a bunch of people, often in horrendous fashion, because screw that one guy.
ReplyI think what happens is that eventually gods get tired of dealing with our shit. Hell, I would.
except no aftermath whatsoever happened, no looting, no deaths at all, which wouldve been in the hundreds...ironically by creating a situation where all those people would be in one place and killed,
as a wiccan you should know mystical beings are crazy as hell and their logic is backwards to us because they operate on a higher level where time is irrelevant, kinda like dr.manhattan in watchmen built a machine that could kill himself and didnt realize it lol
In Obi-wan's defense, the reason he chose not to kill Anakin is the jedi command states not to strike down the helpless. He chose to leave it to the will of The Force. (And that is a direct quote from the novelization of Revenge of the Sith)
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesThe time it took you to read that book? It never comes back, you know. Gone forever.
not to mention when you do a prequel you are handcuffed to make sure certain s**t happens
Actually, I thought the books were fantastic.
It is also very important to remember that the only reason Terry found out who robbed him is because François Toulour TOLD him.
ReplyWell Obiwan only took Anakin in after his master Quigon wanted to, and the clone army was ordered to be created by some old master, and Obiwan not killing someone was based on the Jedi code, so the blame isn't entirely on him. Though I wouldn't trust him with battle tactics though, seeing how he jumped right in the middle of a room full of droids when he fought Grevious in episode3 instead of waiting for the storm troopers to come and blast everything away
ReplyAll of Obiwan Kenobi's failings can be explained away, but I still don't understand how all those Jedis were murdered by stormtroopers!!
ReplyThat.. actually makes sense.