6 Movie Heroes (Who Sucked At Their Jobs)
#3.
Father Lankester Merrin from The Exorcist
The exorcist from The Exorcist. If you've been seduced by Satan, bedazzled by Beelzebub or just want some free wine and wafers, then Father Merrin is your go-to guy.
Why He Should Be Good At His Job:
Father Merrin is the Vatican's point man when it comes to Satanic possession. When a little girl from Georgetown starts inexplicably acting like GG Allin, her mom hires Merrin to exorcise the demon. The man's street cred alone should be enough to kick Lucifer in his fiery red nutsack.
Why He Sucked At It:
When a film begins, the audience is generally treated to a scene of the protagonist doing something totally gee-whiz--be it Indiana Jones cracking his whip or pornstar Lisa Ann getting manwiched by a gang of lost pizza delivery boys.
In a movie titled The Exorcist in which Father Merrin is the titular exorcist, he doesn't perform an exorcism until the last quarter of the movie, and even then Merrin doesn't deliver. His grand duel with Satan ends with him dying of a heart attack off-camera, leaving only the odor of his evacuated bowels and wafts of "Tubular Bells" as evidence of such a showdown.
Thanks for all that unnecessary build-up, movie. You should've just named yourself The Expendable Guy.
#2.
Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars
Oh shit, we went there.
Why He Should Be Good At His Job:
He has telekinetic powers, can outrun a '69 Camaro, kick heroin in a day and deflect lasers using an even bigger laser... all while sporting the burliest beard this side of Kashyyyk.
He's Obi-Wan-Goddamn-Kenobi, and if it hadn't been for that Jedi vow of celibacy, he would've been all over more coed rump than butterfly tattoos.
Why He Sucked At It:
The entire Star Wars series is one long story of Obi-Wan falling asleep at the wheel. Despite all his vaunted Force and beard powers, Obi-Wan fails to prevent almost every major tragedy in the franchise's history.
Let's start with a critique of his precognitive Jedi mind tricks. In The Phantom Menace, Obi-Wan rightly calls that training Anakin Skywalker is a very bad idea. Even Yoda and Samuel L. Jackson concur, and when the most badass man and Muppet in the universe agree with you, you know damn well you're onto something.
Had Obi-Wan just Force-punted the brat from Jingle All The Way out a window right then and there, we would've been spared two films of Hayden Christensen (and treated to three new films of Han and Chewie: Intergalactic Party Cruisers). But no, he takes Anakin under his wing and adopts a million-man clone army along the way.
Oh, and did we mention that all the clones are of Jango Fett, the murderous bounty hunter who tried to kill Obi-Wan multiple times? Doesn't he notice that cloning the galaxy's deadliest hitman a bazillion times over is a totally Sithy thing to do?
Well, when Anakin and the clone army inevitably starting killing everybody, Obi-Wan finally gets his shit together long enough to lop 75 percent of Anakin's limbs off. And instead of ending the whiny Sith, Obi-Wan leaves.
He just fucking leaves the scene.
Come on, Obi-Wan, it's Darth Vader! He chopped up a hundred younglings just hours earlier! Also, it's not against the Jedi Code to mercy kill someone if he's slowly and painfully burning to death. Obi-Wan just trots off, leaving Vader wiggling around like a grilled Vienna sausage for the Emperor to find, repair and turn into a cybernetic James Earl Jones.
Obi-Wan's contingency plan is even more inept. When Darth Vader comes back to bite him in the ass, Obi-Wan picks the worst alias possible. Did he really think hiding as "Ben" Kenobi, the guy living down the road from Darth Vader's relatives on Darth's home planet of Tatooine was going to fool anyone?
We're not sure who's more incompetent: Obi-Wan (whose pseudonym included his last name) or the Empire (which--with its nigh unlimited resources--should've found Kenobi in 20 minutes, not 20 years).
This took too long.
So now that we've hit a new low and knocked the Jedi master who helped raise us down a peg, is there any cinematic heroes left who are above our rebuke?
#1.
God from Evan Almighty
Jehovah, Yahweh, The Alpha and the Omega. He also invented the Batmobile.
Why He Should Be Good At His Job:
He's God.
Why He Sucked At It:
God instructs Congressman Evan Baxter (Steve Carell) to build an ark so his family and neighbors can survive a horrific flood in their Beltway suburb. The cause of this deluge is a burst dam, which was shoddily built by corrupt Congressman Justin Long (John Goodman).
In the end, Evan learns the value of an A.R.K. (Act of Random Kindness), Long is exposed as a crook and Washington D.C. is ravaged by a tidal wave. Wait, what?
Look, we understand that the Lord works in mysterious ways. We also get that in the original Noah story, God punished mankind for devolving into a bunch of raging douchebags.
But in Evan Almighty, in the process of punishing only one (one) dude and teaching another guy to be a marginally better human being, God wreaks Hurricane Katrina, Jr. on a million or so Washingtonians.
Of course, Evan Almighty was a PG-rated family comedy, so we don't see any corpses. But seriously, you can't flash flood D.C., with its subway system and marshy topography, and expect everything to end up all sunshine and lollipops.
And even if you did save everyone using God Magic, did we need the collateral damage? Seeing as how the film contains such profound themes as "the environment is good" and "government waste is bad," it makes zero sense that God would engineer an ecological catastrophe that basically defunds FEMA for the next decade.
We forgive you for not making any you-damn sense, Lord. After all, Brick Tamland was created in your image.
"Thou shalt love lamp."
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In Obi-Wan's defense he's pretty awesome in "Star Wars: The Clone Wars"
ReplyHoly shit! Robocop's the original Sadako/Samara! He's so badass he won't give you none of that "you have seven days" nonsense. Instead, he pops right out of the TV, grabs your fridge, and mumbles something in Korean about "frieda chicken".
ReplyThe asian Robocop commercial is absolutely priceless.
ReplyGod in Evan Almighty must have messed up because his job is being a Magic n***o (I'm not racist, it's an actual term). A magic n***o is a black character that has to teach the lead white character a lesson for some reason. They oftentimes die in order to teach it to them.
ReplyFrustrated that he cannot die to teach the white lead a lesson because he is immortal, God goes all Old-Testament Mode on Washington D.C. and floods the whole place.
Actually, Jedi are allowed to get tail -- they're just not allowed to get married. Basically, they can do the "friends with benefits" thing. So Obi probably had quite a few notches on his lightsaber.
ReplyYou're a retard
Evan Almighty's producers were not exactly too sharp on avoiding fridge logic. The smart thing to do would have been to not make it at all; since Bruce Almighty was pretty self-contained.
ReplyA little bit evil maybe but I hardly think it proves God sucked at his job!
ReplyIts a movie, dude. Relax.
Okay. Let's give you God's job for a day and see how you do! Isn't there a movie about that?
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.
ReplyThere's actually a law that no buildings in D.C. can be taller than the U.S. Capitol, to symbolize that "no man is above the law." Of course, this was the LEAST of the movie's problems...
Yes indeed. Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi could get it from me anytime, anyplace.
ReplyAnyway Anyhow. I love him
A tidal wave is a wave caused by changing tides. What you're describing is more a flash flood.
Replyoh bite me he was just trying to be funny, you get what he meant
The 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?
I believe this argument only qualifies to those who believe in him.
"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.
Well yeah, but he is f*****g God.
I mean, he could've just used his God Magic and fixed the dam.
But then the bad guys wouldn't have learned anything!!
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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?
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesOf 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?
When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not, hmm?
Matthew Stover's rendition of "Revenge of the Sith" actually explains Palpatine's lack of Force ability for the Jedi to sense; to the eyes of Dooku, he was a black hole of power. Anyway, "the dark side shrouds everything."
The Jedi that supposedly commission the clones did not. It was orcharstrated by Dooku.
As for checking the commands built into the clones ... whoops.
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.