The Implausibility Scale

I’ve had the idea for this list for a few months now, and over that time I’ve thought of new examples, added to the list, and rearranged the order. Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general has produced decades worth of far-fetched plot twists, action scenes, and character changes, but the past few years have seen some exceptional examples, and a few films and TV series have practically turned implausibility into an art form.

I’ll admit a certain amount of inspiration for the concept came from sportswriter Bill Simmons’ Unintentional Comedy Scale. This isn’t supposed to be a conclusive or exclusive list; it’s more of a guideline about where I would rate certain scenes or sequences. The scale rates as high as 100, with the list getting steadily more implausible as it goes, and the tip top most implausible example or examples rating a 100. Ideally, such a list would work so that you would read #65 and say, “now that’s implausible, but I’d believe it before I’d believe #66″ and so on, though a lot of it is just for fun and the list doesn’t strictly follow that formula. Hope you’re entertained, and feel free to add your own examples and where you think they should rate.

I should also note that I’m picking and choosing my implausibilities here, as I’m including, for the most part, only examples that I’ve actually seen, and examples of scenes or sequences that defied logic and/or reason. Because of this I don’t include scenes from sci-fi or fantasy type movies like The Matrix, which has some far-out action scenes, but which take place in a reality not governed by normal laws of physics, and thus they make sense within the movie’s own internal logic (until the whole plot jumped the shark in the 3rd film, but that’s another topic).

I’m beginning the list at #60 and moving on from there. Fair warning: a few of the examples cited here may be plot spoilers to those who haven’t seen those films or TV shows.

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60: TV personality Katherine Heigl sleeping with, getting pregnant by, and ultimately deciding to have the baby of immature and unemployed pothead slob Seth Rogen in Knocked Up. Two of those three might happen, all three happening would be very unlikely.

61: Rachael Leigh Cook as the average, un-pretty girl in She’s All That.

62: Kenan Thompson scoring a goal on a lengh-of-the-ice “knucklepuck” shot at the end of the Junior Goodwill Games championship hockey game to tie the score and force overtime in D2: The Mighty Ducks. No way the shot would have flown that straight or that far, or that they could have gotten away with having him secretly change into another player’s jersey. And the Icelandic coach’s reaction is priceless (“The goalie! Nooooo!”)

63: Joshua Jackson’s character arc in the Mighty Ducks movies. In D2, he’s team-oriented and unselfish to the point of giving up his spot on the team right before the championship game to make room on the roster for a teammate who has just recovered from an injury. In D3, he’s selfish and arrogant, only wants to play as a scorer and yells at his coach who wants him to play defense.

64: Anakin Skywalker’s character arc in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I didn’t believe it for one second.

65: The dialogue in any radio ad for Just Brakes.

female caller – “Wow, you repair disc pads and brake shoes and inspect and rotate the balance on all four wheels?! That’s an even better deal than when I bought my car new!! Why do you do it, Just Brakes?”

Just Brakes repair guy – “Because at Just Brakes, we really do care.”

66: The dialogue in any radio ad for Ovaltine. (“MORE OVALTINE, PLEASE!!”)

67: 5’7” Tom Cruise as a star defensive back on his high school football team, and getting recruited by several major colleges in All The Right Moves.

68: 5’9” Jamie Foxx as an NFL quarterback in Any Given Sunday. That’s a good 3-5 inches shorter than any pro team would want their quarterback to be.

69: Sarah Jessica Parker falling for Dennis Quaid in Smart People; Amidala falling for Anakin in the Star Wars prequels; and Maggie Gyllenhaal falling for Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction.

70: Luke Wilson actually being a bestselling author in Alex & Emma. In real life, the story he and Kate Hudson come up with in the movie wouldn’t have gotten a passing grade in a junior college writing course, let alone a six-figure advance.

71: “Tool Time” actually being a popular show on Home Improvement. In real life it probably would have been cancelled in under a month.

72: The impossible aerial maneuver James Franco pulls with his World War I-era fighter plane to slip behind and shoot down the plane of his ace German archenemy in Flyboys, a maneuver right out of Top Gun, I might add.

73: The Middle Eastern villains in season four of 24 conveniently speaking English when counter-terrorist agents manage to listen in on their cell phone conversations. That series could fill a list like this on its own, but I’ll be nice and only include this one example.

74: The end of the $500,000 poker tournament in the movie Maverick, where on the final hand, with the three remaining players betting all their chips, they show hands with four 8’s, a straight flush, and a royal flush, respectively. There’s no way all three of those happen at the same time, the odds are too astronomical. But I’d believe that before I’d believe…

75: Estella Warren’s improbably nice skin, hair, and makeup in the 2001 Planet of the Apes remake. Humans have been enslaved for hundreds of years and the women still have a hidden supply of lipstick? Sure…

I might also add the three-day stubble Martin Henderson sports for all of his scenes throughout the length of Flyboys. He has one of those razors that only exist in the movies, one that allows characters to always look like they haven’t shaved in a few days.

76: President Andrew Shepard’s (Michael Douglas) speech during a press conference at the end of The American President, which is full of combative and hokey dialogue no President would ever say, and even has Shepard utter the line: “You cannot address crime prevention without getting rid of assault weapons and handguns. I consider them a threat to national security, and I will go door to door if I have to, but I’m gonna convince Americans that I’m right, and I’m gonna get the guns.”

No President in his right mind would make such a statement publicly, and any who did would have next to no chance of being re-elected (at least one would hope). Also, I think the movie’s screenwriter (Aaron Sorkin) missed the irony in the President promising to “go door to door if I have to” in order to “get the guns” just minutes after praising the ACLU and calling it “an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights”, because apparently his copy of the Bill of Rights doesn’t include the 2nd Amendment. (Note: The scene is hokey, self-congratulatory, and emotionally exploitative enough on its own, but when you add the music in the background and the serious, uncritical looks on the faces of the reporters as he’s talking, it’s almost comedic).

77: Orlando Bloom’s “Who has claim? No one has claim” speech before the siege of Jerusalem in Kingdom of Heaven, which is only slightly more historically improbable than Leonidas’ “an age of freedom” speech in 300, or Joely Richardson’s “It’s a free country. Or at least it will be” line in The Patriot.

78: The boxing arena spectators in Cold War-era Moscow chanting American Rocky Balboa’s name as he fights against the Russian giant Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. A rough equivalent might be a baseball movie set in Boston where Red Sox fans chant Derek Jeter’s name.

79: Pretty much any episode of CSI (including both spin-off series).

80: Any movie where a character gets a few simple lessons or pointers on fencing or swordplay, and then becomes a near master swordsman in about 5 minutes of screen time (see: The Mask of Zorro, Kingdom of Heaven, The Last Samurai, The Count of Monte Cristo, and the hobbits in The Fellowship of the Ring.)

81: The end of Alien vs. Predator where the Predator saves Sanaa Lathan’s life and essentially joins forces with her for a short while, which goes against everything previously known about the Predators.

82: The endings of The Fast and the Furious and the 2007 version of 3:10 To Yuma.

83: Angelina Jolie as Colin Farrell’s mother in Alexander (she’s just under a year older than him).

84: Any McDonald’s TV ad that portrays the employees as young, clean cut, good-looking, always smiling, and nearly always white or black. Have the producers of those commercials ever been inside a McDonald’s?

85: Nicholas Cage and John Travolta being able to shoot and hit people or airborne objects from long distances, but frequently being unable to shoot each other even when they’re 5 feet apart in Face/Off.

86: The plot of National Treasure.

87: The plot of National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

88: Jack Sparrow and the crew of the Black Pearl turning the ship completely upside down by running back and forth across the deck in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. (There’s also the para-sailing bit near the end of the movie, which might rate slightly lower).

89: The action sequence in Live Free or Die Hard that immediately precedes this line: “You just killed a helicopter with a car!“

90: The long jungle sequence in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that includes: A. Mutt (Shia Lebouf) swinging on vines through the trees following a pack of monkeys, B. Marion Ravenwood driving a Jeep off the edge of a cliff and onto the branches of a tree, which gently lowers the vehicle onto the river below before swinging back and swatting some Russians who are climbing down the cliff, C. the Jeep (and its 5 passengers) going over 3 large waterfalls in succession without anyone falling out of the car or getting any scrapes, bruises, or concussions, and D. Indiana Jones never once losing his hat the whole time. The quantity of implausibilities in those 10 minutes piles up high enough to make it among the most implausible things ever put on film, but to save room I’ll mention them all together and take the rough average of their implausibility scale rating.

91: The Tom Cruise-Dougray Scott motorcycle joust/beach fight sequence in Mission: Impossible II. Neither character should have been able to walk (if they were even still alive) after a collision like that, which you can see at the end of this video clip.

92: In Transporter 2, Jason Statham driving up the levels of a parking garage, crashing his car through a short concrete wall at the edge of the roof, then still having the inertia to fly well over 100 feet forward through the air and land on an upper floor of a nearby building under construction. You can see it at the 4:40 mark of this video clip.

93: The scene in the 2005 King Kong remake just before Kong goes unconscious after having bottles of chloroform thrown at him. Just before this, there’s a shot of lots of men throwing ropes and a net over Kong and actually holding him down, which would seem more than a little unlikely since earlier in the film Kong had picked up and thrown a Tyrannosaurus, a dinosaur that weighed between 7 and 8 tons.

94: The bus in Speed hopping and flying over a long gap on an unfinished highway overpass and landing safely on the other side, with the speedometer somehow staying above 50 mph the whole time. The jump occurs just before the 4:00 mark in this video (warning: contains some R-rated language).

95: The entire plot of Flightplan. The villains would have needed psychic powers or a crystal ball for their plan to have worked the way it did. I’ve never seen any other movie be so interesting and then completely fall apart in the third act the way that movie did when the plot was revealed.

96: Jeff Goldblum hacking and sending a computer virus to an alien computer system from an earth-based computer system in Independence Day. Apparently, those aliens can manufacture fighter ships armed with laser guns and deflector shields and can communicate telepathically, but they can’t be bothered to update their anti-virus software.

97: Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt surviving an F5 tornado without a scratch by tying themselves to the pipes of a water well just before it passes right over them at the end of Twister.

98: In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the title character surviving a nuclear bomb blast by shutting himself inside a 1950s-era refrigerator, feeling no ill effects from the fridge being blown hundreds of feet away by the force of the blast, and not getting radiation poisoning when he climbs out of it and stands directly under a mushroom cloud and breathes the air. Who does he think he is, Chuck Norris?

99: In Wanted, the scene where James McAvoy is supposed to kill a guy in a limousine as he drives along the side of it, but finds the limo has bulletproof windows. So Angelina Jolie, working with him, drives her sports car toward McAvoy’s, then hits the brakes just as they’re about to meet, and an invisible ramp allows McAvoy’s car to shoot up off her car’s hood, fly up into the air, and flip over the limousine where an open sunroof gives McAvoy a clear shot at the guy (which he takes) before his car harmlessly lands back onto the street and he drives away. In real life, this would result in a fiery crash and the guy in the limo would speed away from the scene laughing. You can see an edited part of this scene at about the 2:00 mark of the movie’s third trailer.

100: The sequence in Transporter 2 described here by Roger Ebert:

“Seeing the reflection of a bomb in a pool of liquid under his car, and knowing that the bad guys will not explode it while they’re standing right next to it, the hero races the car out of a garage and up an incline, spinning the car neatly through the air, so that it makes one complete rotation and the bomb is pulled off by a hook on a crane, exploding harmlessly as the car lands safely. Uh, huh.
I could observe that this is preposterous, but the fact is, I laughed aloud.”

So did I, as I’d never seen anything so outlandish before. The scene is so ridiculous (and also fun in its own way) that not even comic books or video games would try something like it. On the Implausibility Scale, I don’t think it will ever be topped by any movie that takes itself the least bit seriously.

*101: I’m adding one extra example to the list, a clip from the 1985 Indian movie Adavi Donga, starring Indian movie icon Chiranjeevi. I’m putting an asterisk on it and not putting it with the others because it was probably designed as a parody, though without seeing it in its full context it’s hard to know. I saw this clip over the weekend (and posted it in a previous blog) and decided that parody or not, it completely shattered the Implausibility Scale. The brief clip involves a horse skidding underneath a large trailer (with its rider still on it) and a pursuing Jeep leaping over that same trailer at its driver’s command (apparently, vehicles in India can jump when their driver stands up slightly in the driver’s seat). It truly has to be seen to be (dis)believed.

Comments and additions are encouraged.