With three minutes left on the clock, Officer Broman got the call to head south on 17th Street and hit the gas because the victim was five miles away in a locked container with no oxygen left for her to survive. Good thing he got there just in time and that’s just one of the film tropes the writer used to slay through this episode of Hill Street Rookies.
Most of the time, viewers find film tropes in television shows but they’re also found in movies when filmmakers need solutions to get their heroes through challenging scenarios. It’s nothing for the writer to spin through the options like a list of contacts on a Roledex. Just pull out a solution that works and Voila, the script practically writes itself.
Retired Spies
When a highly trained spy goes into retirement, what is the purpose of bringing him back out of it? Is she a threat? Is it because he’s the only one who can save the world? If she can answer these questions, then the writer has an easy premise for a movie.
Check out Pierce Brosnan’s The November Man for notes on how a retired CIA operative is brought back into the world of espionage to do an extraction. Obviously, the CIA is running low on extractors who have the special skills it takes to get a colleague out of a situation. There is no one left alive who can pull it off!
To me, a retired spy is like a sleeping dog. Let him lie. First of all, there is no sense in waking him up. And B, disturbing that dog will turn out to be the world’s worst nightmare if we’ve learned anything from the movies.
Total Destruction
What I find ridiculously annoying is the sheer disrespect for property in movies. Just watch Canary Black with Kate Beckinsale to witness cars crashing through landmarks and taking out storefronts. They demolished a perfectly good outside diner and they probably didn’t even apologize. They just wrapped filming one day and left this quaint village exactly the way they destroyed it.
Let alone, look at what they do to the entire infrastructure a town needs for the residents to survive. In Godzilla vs. Kong, the big lizard and the ape totally annihilated Hong Kong by the way they ripped through powerlines and knocked over skyscrapers. I know the roads weren’t good to drive after they were finished with their little tiff. It was just in 2021 and it would be nice to know if that little town in China has recovered since then.
Missed It By This Much
In The 355 with the crew Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, and Lupita Nyong’o, a tough team has to save the world from a special decryption program drive that can shut everything with a keystroke, or something like that. A drug lord has it for some reason and a rich mastermind wants it obviously, which is all set to happen at the beginning of the movie.
Of course, viewers are used to things going wrong and that’s what makes the movie happen. If everything ran smoothly, there would be no reason to tell the story. But this one is ridiculous! The rich mastermind has his hand right by the device when his own bodyguard pulls him away from it as the Colombia DNI raids the drug lord’s compound.
The bodyguard takes it upon himself to keep pulling his boss away even after he orders him to stop. We’re not talking about the device being across the room or a few feet away. We’re talking about millimeters. If you slow the movie down to a crawl, you might even get to see him touch it. That’s how close we almost got to having a five-minute story instead of two hours.
Clocks
For this particular trope, we’re going to look at Castle for several scenarios. Of course, there are ticking time bombs. But also, this team knows how to fly across town in no time flat.
For the first scenario, let’s look at Season 3 Episode 17 when New York City is about to be blown up by a dirty bomb. Of course, Castle and Beckett find it with more than enough time to stop the clock. There are at least two minutes left! No big deal. But communications become strained and there is no solution until Castle figures out that all he has to do is grab the wires and pull them all at once, which he does in the last second.
The second scenario is just like the first when Beckett steps on a pressure-sensitive bomb in Season 5 Episode 22. Castle decides to stay with her when everyone else is evacuated from the building. After talking about their life together and reminiscing about the past, they figure out how to dismantle the bomb, which Castle does with no time left. Not ten seconds. Not five. He doesn’t leave any time at all on the clock. Why solve the problem sooner when you have all that time left?
In this final scenario, we have it all in Season 7 Episode 5. When a social media psychopath is live-streaming two brothers who are about to die, scores of fans are patiently waiting. As Becket drills the kidnapper, she pulls clues out of him and figures out where they are.
All Esposito and Ryan have to do with four minutes in which to do it is get across town to the killer’s old high school, run through the building to find them in the locker room, and unplug the laptop. Ryan is standing right by it when he yells, “Javie, the wires!” Instead of doing it himself, he expects Esposito to hop across the room to handle that nearly impossible task.
That particular grouping of scenes has several of my favorite film tropes. Getting across town in mere minutes when on any given day, that trip would take about twenty minutes or so. Of course, we have the clock counting down to the last second. But now we add that special moment when Ryan could have pulled the wires himself but yelled for Esposito to do it because you know, that’s the extra tension this scene needed.
Calling the Cops
When a character figures out who the killer is, it’s a good idea to call the cops and let them in on it. But what’s not a good idea is making the call when the killer is standing right in front of them.
In Lucifer, Dr. Martin finds out that her estranged husband is a murderer in Season 3 Episode 7, “Off the Record.” They are in her office when she tells him that she’s going to call the cops. Now I don’t know about anyone else but when I figure out who the killer is, I don’t threaten to call the cops while he’s still standing there.
I normally wait until he leaves. But, that’s not how Dr. Martin handled it. She told him she was going to do it and she even picked up the phone. That’s about the time the unthinkable happened when he knocked her to the floor. It drew some blood. Thankfully, he’s a new killer having only done it once. He doesn’t really have the taste for it yet. So, he pulls himself out of his temper tantrum and comes back to his senses before he ends up doing it again.
Film tropes are not always annoying. Sometimes, they’re just amusing. I mean, how many times can the same thing keep happening to these actors again and again? Don’t they watch the movies?