What action movie sequence should have killed/ seriously injured someone?

[Accelerator]

I'm talking things like leaping off buildings, grabbing a ledge while falling, or taking on beatings which should have sent a person to the hospital.

[Thrudd]

Basically every action movie sequence ever.

[Knaight]

I'm seconding the "basically every action movie sequence" position. That said, special notice goes to the ridiculous, ridiculous chase scene in Ong Bak. Is it my favorite sequence? Absolutely. Is jumping through a looped spool of barbed wire during a chase actually a great way to get seriously injured? Also yes.

[Tvtyrant]

I'm talking things like leaping off buildings, grabbing a ledge while falling, or taking on beatings which should have sent a person to the hospital.

I got injured doing 50 pushups at the start of quarantine, and again this Saturday riding my bike on a hot day without water. People die falling off chairs on the regular, so I'm going to go with "any scene where people do something athletic in any film ever."

A great example is in The Other Guys where Mark Wahlberg punches a man off a motor cycle. That likely would have severely injured both of them, in a film parodying dumb action tropes like walking away from explosions or jumping off buildings.

[Traab]

Any martial arts mass combat scene should end with the hero beaten to a bloody pulp. Seriously, jackie chan, bruce lee, jet li, doesnt matter, they are all going to be beaten to a bloody heap by that squad of two dozen goons because irl they dont attack you one at a time or in a pattern that lets you smoothly transition from punch to block to deflect to knockout blow. Also, real people tend to not fall down after one hit in a fight. Oh knockouts absolutely DO happen, but not like you see in martial arts fights. So while you and your first opponent are trading blows, the other dozen are hitting you on every exposed surface they can reach. Because you cant just punch them in the jaw then move on to the next guy.

[hungrycrow]

Any martial arts mass combat scene should end with the hero beaten to a bloody pulp. Seriously, jackie chan, bruce lee, jet li, doesnt matter, they are all going to be beaten to a bloody heap by that squad of two dozen goons because irl they dont attack you one at a time or in a pattern that lets you smoothly transition from punch to block to deflect to knockout blow. Also, real people tend to not fall down after one hit in a fight. Oh knockouts absolutely DO happen, but not like you see in martial arts fights. So while you and your first opponent are trading blows, the other dozen are hitting you on every exposed surface they can reach. Because you cant just punch them in the jaw then move on to the next guy.

Jackie Chan at least does what you should do: run away and use the environment and improvised weapons to stop them from just cornering you and attacking all at once. Of course in real life you wouldn't be able to rehearse the fight for three months, so eventually you'd slip up one of your fancy acrobatics and quickly get surrounded.

[Accelerator]

Well, then I guess I should change the title.

I'm writing a story, and I"m trying to draw in contrasts between the 'real' world, and the world of 'heroes'. Basically, I'm searching for examples where heroes do things that would cripple a normal person, and I want to specifically draw attention to it.

[Peelee]

After reading the titl, my immediate thought was to jump in and comment, "all of them. Every single one. You can trip and if you fall wrong you can die, the insane stuff they do in movies is leagues beyond that."

Anyway, I wanted to make a note on this in particular:

I'm seconding the "basically every action movie sequence" position. That said, special notice goes to the ridiculous, ridiculous chase scene in Ong Bak. Is it my favorite sequence? Absolutely. Is jumping through a looped spool of barbed wire during a chase actually a great way to get seriously injured? Also yes.
First off, seconding the love for Ong Bak. If anyone hasn't seen a Tony Jaa movie, I highly recommend fixing that. But, more importantly, Jackie Chan was pretty blunt about his death-defying stunts: he openly admits anyone can do what he does on-screen; it's just a matter of getting it right. The dude is a perfectionist, and with his Golden Harvest production company, he can keep trying to film a shot over and over until he gets it right. That's why those movies tend to be better than the handful of mainstream Hollywood movies he's done*, because they don't want to have to have 40, 50, however many takes it requires to get a stunt, for each stunt. They'll just get a good-enough shot and use editing or effects to make up for it. The outtakes at the end of his movies? There are loads more where they come from, he can basically pick and choose the most entertaining outtakes to put in, because he fails a lot for each success in the finished product. He is the film-star version of Bruce Lee's man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.

This is the long-form version of what Knaight said; you can jump through a looped spool of barbed wire in a movie, but dang if that isn't the worst possible idea if you don't have fifty chances to do it and a mountain of safety equipment for the times you fail.

*For one notable exception off the top of my head, The Foreigner was just fantastic. The man was abjectly terrifying in that movie. It had a lot in common with First Blood, just these otherwise quite competent armed forces being destroyed by a ghost. Holy crap The Irishman was good. If you haven't seen it go see it, go now, stop reading this I promise you it's not as good as that movie was.

ETA:
Any martial arts mass combat scene should end with the hero beaten to a bloody pulp. Seriously, jackie chan, bruce lee, jet li, doesnt matter, they are all going to be beaten to a bloody heap by that squad of two dozen goons because irl they dont attack you one at a time or in a pattern that lets you smoothly transition from punch to block to deflect to knockout blow. Also, real people tend to not fall down after one hit in a fight. Oh knockouts absolutely DO happen, but not like you see in martial arts fights. So while you and your first opponent are trading blows, the other dozen are hitting you on every exposed surface they can reach. Because you cant just punch them in the jaw then move on to the next guy.
One of the many reasons Jackie Chan is my all-time fave for martial arts movies is he does get hurt, in-character. He usually uses that for comedic effect, but he loves to point out that yeah, you can't really shrug stuff like that off**.

Of course, he then continues battling, but hey, it's a movie.

**The best example of this is the final fight in City Hunter, when he looks for weapons to defend against the steel bars can't find any, and defiantly raises his arms as defense. That movie had a huge amount of problems, but also had was able to match the lows with equally numerous and soaring highs, like that scene.

[Accelerator]

Basically every action movie sequence ever.

Any particularly good examples?

[Bohandas]

Well, then I guess I should change the title.

I'm writing a story, and I"m trying to draw in contrasts between the 'real' world, and the world of 'heroes'. Basically, I'm searching for examples where heroes do things that would cripple a normal person, and I want to specifically draw attention to it.
Like in literally different worlds or different groups within the same world. For the former check out Last Action Hero for the latter check out Exalted

[Dienekes]

Any martial arts mass combat scene should end with the hero beaten to a bloody pulp. Seriously, jackie chan, bruce lee, jet li, doesnt matter, they are all going to be beaten to a bloody heap by that squad of two dozen goons because irl they dont attack you one at a time or in a pattern that lets you smoothly transition from punch to block to deflect to knockout blow. Also, real people tend to not fall down after one hit in a fight. Oh knockouts absolutely DO happen, but not like you see in martial arts fights. So while you and your first opponent are trading blows, the other dozen are hitting you on every exposed surface they can reach. Because you cant just punch them in the jaw then move on to the next guy.

Eh. Thing is, I’ve seen a couple bar fights and you can look up fights and see, this doesn’t actually always happen. There is a ridiculous amount of posturing in fights and it isn’t all that uncommon to see members in a group context standing around and/or getting in each other’s way in an actual fight. Especially if they’re untrained.

Mind you, I’ve never seen a group of trained bodyguards work together. That probably has a dynamic much closer to what you’re describing.

[Peelee]

Well, then I guess I should change the title.

I'm writing a story, and I"m trying to draw in contrasts between the 'real' world, and the world of 'heroes'. Basically, I'm searching for examples where heroes do things that would cripple a normal person, and I want to specifically draw attention to it.

Quick and dirty example, punching the face. Good odds you'll break your hand because the front of the skull is not shaped in a comfortable way for fists. Or, if you instead hit the top of the skull, it's a really hard bone, like hitting a wall. There's a reason head injuries skyrocketed in boxing only after they got super padded gloves.

Movies, if a punch is thrown, 90% chance it's going to the face. 0% chance its going to break the puncher's hand.

First person who responds with 1992''s Gladiator gets punched in the face by Brian Dennehy.
ETA:
Like in literally different worlds or different groups within the same world. For the former check out Last Action Hero for the latter check out Exalted

Accelerator, watch Last Action Hero. It's perfect research for what you're looking for.
I may also be biased in favor of anything written by Shane Black.

[hungrycrow]

Knocking someone unconscious. In movies they'll wake up later with a headache. In real life that means a serious concussion.

Jumping or being thrown through glass is a good way to get stabbed by a hundred broken glass shards.

[Tvtyrant]

People almost never get eye injuries in movies. Car accidents where the windshield breaks, chemicals, fist fights. It is very easy and common to get eye injuries in RL.

[Peelee]

People almost never get eye injuries in movies. Car accidents where the windshield breaks, chemicals, fist fights. It is very easy and common to get eye injuries in RL.

Safety goggles should really be for more than just laboratories and high-risk endeavors.

[KatsOfLoathing]

Jumping or being thrown through glass is a good way to get stabbed by a hundred broken glass shards.

This one, big time. Windows are both a lot more durable and a lot more dangerous than any Hollywood action movie wants you to believe. TV Tropes has a whole trope dedicated to it (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SoftGlass). Most instances of people jumping through glass windows in films and TV would probably result in A) not hitting it hard enough and just bouncing off, bonus points for breaking whatever body part hit the glass first, or B) getting about two dozen deep cuts from all that glass slicing into your skin, and possibly bleeding out not long afterwards.

Ironically, a recent action movie I recall that didn't play this myth straight is Incredibles 2. Elastigirl breaks a window by throwing a chair at it rather than jumping through it at one point, and at another the Screenslaver opens a window before jumping through it.

[NotASpiderSwarm]

For an exception to the above, car chases are pretty reasonable. A lot of the times, they actually have professional drives doing those tricks/corners, with some editing to make it look cooler. Now, an amateur doing any of that would die instantly, and even professionals are only doing those tricks because it's a controlled environment with every step pre-planned, but they're at least usually possible to attempt and survive.

[Zarrgon]

Die Hard:

1.The glass cutting poor John's feet....ok, most of us have stepped on broken glass right...it HURTS. Like "you can't walk on it" and that is just one peice. John steps on dozens of them, quickly...and likely digs them into his feet. Then we get like ten seconds where he pulls out the glass and bandages his feet. I really doubt he would be able to walk after that....

2.John drops the chair of C-4 down the elevator shaft and then "jumps away" when he sees the explosion race up towards him (at the speed of light you know). Ok...kinda simple, you can't "jump away" from an explosion. By the time he saw it...he would have felt it too....

3.Jumping off the exploding roof while tied up to a, er, fire hose... Um, this is simple "fall of the building to your death".

4.John is under the table, bad guy is on top of the table with a machine gun. A machine gun that, er, can't shoot through the table top...though John does it with a handgun like seconds later.


Any action movie:

*People take cover from gun shots behind a car. Ok, depends on the gun, bullet, angle and car.....but in general cars make for poor cover. Even more so car doors(car doors are NOT made of one inch armor plate).

*The explosion that knocks you down. Ok, if you are close enough to an explosion that it knocks you down....you are not getting back up as your dead. A crazy example is Fairgame: Cindy Crowford walks out of her house and on her deck over looking the lake...then her house explodes and she is tossed way out into the lake and lives unhurt.


For a fun Twist....a couple actors, like Keenu Reeves and Tom Cruise really DO some of the stunts their character does. In the vast majority of Tom Cruse movies, that is really Tom himself doing the stunt. And sure it's a stunt and "safe"...but still, like Mission Impossible 5: Tom really did hang on to the outside of a plane as it took off (sure he had a harness)...but still he was hanging on to a plane for real!

[Kitten Champion]

Die Hard:

1.The glass cutting poor John's feet....ok, most of us have stepped on broken glass right...it HURTS. Like "you can't walk on it" and that is just one peice. John steps on dozens of them, quickly...and likely digs them into his feet. Then we get like ten seconds where he pulls out the glass and bandages his feet. I really doubt he would be able to walk after that....

2.John drops the chair of C-4 down the elevator shaft and then "jumps away" when he sees the explosion race up towards him (at the speed of light you know). Ok...kinda simple, you can't "jump away" from an explosion. By the time he saw it...he would have felt it too....

3.Jumping off the exploding roof while tied up to a, er, fire hose... Um, this is simple "fall of the building to your death".

4.John is under the table, bad guy is on top of the table with a machine gun. A machine gun that, er, can't shoot through the table top...though John does it with a handgun like seconds later.

It's really nothing compared to the later Die Hard entries. Once you get into Live Free or Die Hard - or Die Hard 4 - he goes round the bend. The part where he's chased by a fighter jet while driving a semi and manages to escape getting cut to ribbons by its vulcans, destroys the jet's engines, climbs atop of said jet while it's flailing around mid-air, and jumps off just before it explodes and slides down a convenient bit of concrete, feels like something Captain America might be able to do and not a fundamentally mundane middle-aged human cop.

Still, that's nothing compared to the cartoon shenanigans the Fast & the Furious franchise has gotten into. That scene where they drive a car from one skyscraper into another one dozens of meters away is particularly jarring, but any given action scene makes you question "why aren't these people super-dead? They're just glorified drift racers and auto mechanics"

[Peelee]

For an exception to the above, car chases are pretty reasonable. A lot of the times, they actually have professional drives doing those tricks/corners, with some editing to make it look cooler. Now, an amateur doing any of that would die instantly, and even professionals are only doing those tricks because it's a controlled environment with every step pre-planned, but they're at least usually possible to attempt and survive.
Do not underestimate the mighty Scion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUYbu5DJA1U)!

Die Hard:

1.The glass cutting poor John's feet....ok, most of us have stepped on broken glass right...it HURTS. Like "you can't walk on it" and that is just one peice. John steps on dozens of them, quickly...and likely digs them into his feet. Then we get like ten seconds where he pulls out the glass and bandages his feet. I really doubt he would be able to walk after that....
I'd be amazed if he got all the glass out, as well. A single drinking glass falls and after spending minutes cleaning it up, you can step and get a tiny shard of glass you couldn't even see in your heel. When you walked all over shattered glass, there's definitely some you won't find until you put pressure on the foot only to discover fresh new pain.

2.John drops the chair of C-4 down the elevator shaft and then "jumps away" when he sees the explosion race up towards him (at the speed of light you know). Ok...kinda simple, you can't "jump away" from an explosion. By the time he saw it...he would have felt it too....
Aye, those shockwaves are no joke.

3.Jumping off the exploding roof while tied up to a, er, fire hose... Um, this is simple "fall of the building to your death".
I'm always amused when falls from great heights are stopped short of the ground. Like, neither the height nor the ground are really the problem, it's the sudden change in speed that's the problem. Spider-Man catching Mary Jane 30 stories down a 60 story building is like a truck's front fender "catching" Mary Jane a few feet off the ground after she fell off a 30 story building. Not too helpful there, Pete.

It's really nothing compared to the later Die Hard entries. Once you get into Live Free or Die Hard - or Die Hard 4 - he goes round the bend. The part where he's chased by a fighter jet while driving a semi and manages to escape getting cut to ribbons by its vulcans, destroys the jet's engines, climbs atop of said jet while it's flailing around mid-air, and jumps off just before it explodes and slides down a convenient bit of concrete, feels like something Captain America might be able to do and not a fundamentally mundane middle-aged human cop.
The Last Boy Scout is the best Die Hard movie. And, as a bonus, it has the one funny Wayans brother.

Oh, hey, look, it's Peelee shilling a Shane Black movie, what a surprise.

[NotASpiderSwarm]

It's really nothing compared to the later Die Hard entries. Once you get into Live Free or Die Hard - or Die Hard 4 - he goes round the bend. The part where he's chased by a fighter jet while driving a semi and manages to escape getting cut to ribbons by its vulcans, destroys the jet's engines, climbs atop of said jet while it's flailing around mid-air, and jumps off just before it explodes and slides down a convenient bit of concrete, feels like something Captain America might be able to do and not a fundamentally mundane middle-aged human cop.I will point out, that chase is bull. He does the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do with a tipping semi and somehow that fixes the flip.

Such a bad movie.


Still, that's nothing compared to the cartoon shenanigans the Fast & the Furious franchise has gotten into. That scene where they drive a car from one skyscraper into another one dozens of meters away is particularly jarring, but any given action scene makes you question "why aren't these people super-dead? They're just glorified drift racers and auto mechanics"The first movie of that franchise was about stealing DVD players. Now they just had a car chase vs a Russian nuclear sub. It's full-on D&D power creep.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Die Hard:

There was a YouTube channel dedicated to analyzing exactly what injuries John would have received in all of the movies and when, let me see if I can track it down...

EDIT: First movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnHKv2G0wCw), movies 2-5 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PVZ2ajOnKg). He actually likely would have survived the second one.

[Bohandas]

People almost never get eye injuries in movies. Car accidents where the windshield breaks, chemicals, fist fights. It is very easy and common to get eye injuries in RL.

Or more accurately, they never get eye injiries during the action of the movie. There's plenty of characters with eyepatches or with that scar that starts on one side of the eye and continues on to the other side.


I'm always amused when falls from great heights are stopped short of the ground. Like, neither the height nor the ground are really the problem, it's the sudden change in speed that's the problem. Spider-Man catching Mary Jane 30 stories down a 60 story building is like a truck's front fender "catching" Mary Jane a few feet off the ground after she fell off a 30 story building. Not too helpful there, Pete.

Actually, Spiderman's probably a bad example here, since he's usually swinging in an arc from a relatively elastic silk cord, rather than going sideways or upwards or stationary like Superman usually is

[understatement]

I'm always amused when falls from great heights are stopped short of the ground. Like, neither the height nor the ground are really the problem, it's the sudden change in speed that's the problem. Spider-Man catching Mary Jane 30 stories down a 60 story building is like a truck's front fender "catching" Mary Jane a few feet off the ground after she fell off a 30 story building. Not too helpful there, Pete.


Or the part where they land in water or on a car and somehow walk away alive...seriously. Those people should be a bag of body mush from the fall.

[Kitten Champion]

It's funny to mention Spider-Man, he's the one Superhero I can think of where one of his most famous story-lines depended upon not magically succeeding in saving someone from falling merely by catching them before they hit the ground.

[factotum]

I'm always amused when falls from great heights are stopped short of the ground. Like, neither the height nor the ground are really the problem, it's the sudden change in speed that's the problem. Spider-Man catching Mary Jane 30 stories down a 60 story building is like a truck's front fender "catching" Mary Jane a few feet off the ground after she fell off a 30 story building. Not too helpful there, Pete.

This is why, in the original Superman movie, you still see the background moving for a second or two after Supes catches Lois Lane falling off the building--because the guys who made that movie realised that stopping her dead in her tracks would be no better than her hitting the pavement, so she slows down gradually. Would still be a fair bit of a jolt, just a survivable one.

Surprised no-one has mentioned the infamous "Indy in a fridge" scene from Crystal Skull yet--that guy is dead after hitting the ground, regardless of the fridge. In fact, that seems to be something movies often also get wrong--they have someone in super-armour fall off a building and survive hitting the ground, but it's not the impact that kills you in that case, it's the sudden deceleration, which the armour is going to do nothing to mitigate. It might survive the fall, its occupant won't.

[Morty]

It's not really any less probable than many other action movie staples, but for some reason whenever I see a punch-out drag on for a few minutes, it strains my suspension of disbelief. It feels excessive after a while, even aside from how both/all participants should have no teeth left by the end of it.

[Bohandas]

Or the part where they land in water or on a car and somehow walk away alive...seriously. Those people should be a bag of body mush from the fall.

Well they should be dead at any rate, but plausibly still in one unmangled piece. Like the notorious photo of the suicide of Evelyn McHale, where the car she landed on is all broken and smashed but she doesn't even look dead

[Yora]

I recently saw someone compare The Fifth Element to the recent Die Hard movies, and concluding that it's action scenes are much more realistic.

As much as I love the stunts in Fury Road, there is one scene in which Joe flips his car at full speed without wearing a seatbelt and Rictus standing on the back, and they both are completely unharmed. Not even bruised or dazed. Nothing.

Coming back to people getting thrown by explosions, I think you could always replace the shockwave with the front of a truck to estimate how bad it hurts. It's not like being picked up by a strong wind. It's a supersonic shockwave delivering all its kinetic energy to your body before it can even start to move.
There's a Will Farell movie where he gets knocked to the ground by an explosion and then complains how it hurts much more than in the movies. And I am pretty sure he is just knocked over without being thrown into the air, so his pain could be completely realistic.

[Knaight]

Let's talk explosions, real fast: Specifically it's usually not the fireball that's dangerous (though there are "explosions" that are basically just high temperature gas expansion which can still be really dangerous, e.g. backdrafts) but the actual blastwave.

The trope where the hero and explosive both blow up in the water and it's safer? That's abject nonsense. Compressibility is a good thing in the fluids between you and things that go boom, and air is way more compressible.

[Lvl45DM!]

I'm talking things like leaping off buildings, grabbing a ledge while falling, or taking on beatings which should have sent a person to the hospital.

Any scene where a being strong enough to throw a whole person throws someone into a wall would break their damn back.
Any scene where a being strong enough to lift a whole person up by the throat would crush their throat or break their jaw.
Any scene where a backhand blow strong enough to send someone flying would shatter ribs, crack skulls and pulverise organs.


Die Hard:

4.John is under the table, bad guy is on top of the table with a machine gun. A machine gun that, er, can't shoot through the table top...though John does it with a handgun like seconds later.


OBJECTION
the bullets clearly go through the table, but the guy is firing one bullet at a time because he can't get a clear shot at John, because he can't see him, and John is moving. He keeps herding John until he has no place to go but has to reload, since he figures, since John isn't shooting back, he's outta bullets. But John was just not shooting him because he couldn't get a clear shot and was scrambling for his life.

Also another scene in Die Hard, theres an explosion late in the movie. Its about 50ft feet away from him, and he dives into a pool with a stone wall. He would definitely survive that.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

A rather famous thing that kills you outside of the movies at this point is jumping into/onto water, from high enough. And that happens at lower heights then one might instinctively grasp. Up to about 10 meters in height (about the height of a three story house or ~30 feet, technically more like 33 feet, but one should never used accurately looking numbers when giving broad guidelines) you can do a lot of things wrong, land badly and only get hurt a bit. The old timey circus trick where you belly flop into a very shallow pool is performed with jumps up to around 10 meters. After this the odds of injury go up fast. Cliff diving competitions usually go up to about 20 meters (~60 feet), have professional divers as contestants and still have an emergency medical team standing by. At 60 meters (~180 feet) a jump is almost always fatal. At the very least you typically dislocate both legs and bleed out while you drown. There have been plenty of exception, including people who got slowed by a lucky gust of wind, people who had just the right mixture of a light weight and high bone strength, people whose parachute sort of party opened and the world record waterfall kayaking, but the amount of non-exceptions is much, much higher and it's definitely don't try this at home territory.

(Note on the plus side: large jumps into water tend to happen near large waterfalls in movies, because they look cool. Right underneath a waterfall in the bubbly water is thé place where you might survive a very high jump into water, the bubbles break the surface tension and make the water less dense. You are probably still going to die from hitting the riverbed or getting sucked into the "hole" at the bottom of the falls and drown horribly, but the initial surface contact itself is slightly less deadly.)

I suppose I do not need to mention that any movie jump where someone lands on a car flat on their back with another person landing on top of them would be more much more damaging than a proper landing in water from the same height, not less. It looks cool, but that one meter dent in the roof is not going to save you, and neither is any body armor.

[Lvl45DM!]

I suppose I do not need to mention that any movie jump where someone lands on a car flat on their back with another person landing on top of them would be more much more damaging than a proper landing in water from the same height, not less. It looks cool, but that one meter dent in the roof is not going to save you, and neither is any body armor.

I mean. Body armour would help a little. Depends on how far you fell.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I mean. Body armour would help a little. Depends on how far you fell.

Body armor spreads out the impact. The force of a bullet applied to an area the size of a bullet leaves a hole, the force of a bullet applied to the whole of your torso does not. Falling flat onto your back the force is already spread out. You can't really spread it out further, it's too much force. (Except if you're using sci-fi gravitics that let you spread out the force over all molecules of the body rather than just the front layer, that would work great.)

In sports like snowboarding stiff back braces are used to prevent injuries like breaking your back, but that too is mostly due to spreading out the force. It's for falls onto something like a metal rail from maybe a few meters in height. It would barely do anything coming from the top of the building. It's also a very different design from most body armor.

[snowblizz]

Die Hard:

1.The glass cutting poor John's feet....ok, most of us have stepped on broken glass right...it HURTS. Like "you can't walk on it" and that is just one peice. John steps on dozens of them, quickly...and likely digs them into his feet. Then we get like ten seconds where he pulls out the glass and bandages his feet. I really doubt he would be able to walk after that.... It's an office, likely they do have some kind of safety glass that's not quite as liable to create really bad shards. Yes despite that he pulls stuff out of his feet. At least they do show him being actually hurt. Despite this I have to say I think it's kinda brilliant in how they already in the first scene of the movie set this up with John getting the advice to take his shoes off. And follows on with goons with too small feet. It's not that realistic but honestly, it sort of follows it's own internal logic and I appreciate this "attention to detail".

Now you know what bothers me in this scene? The German terrorists have to speak English to each other to be understood. Seriously, Gruber first shouts in German to shoot the glass but his German speaking minions do not understand him until he screams it in English loud enough for the audience to clearly hear? wtf?


2.John drops the chair of C-4 down the elevator shaft and then "jumps away" when he sees the explosion race up towards him (at the speed of light you know). Ok...kinda simple, you can't "jump away" from an explosion. By the time he saw it...he would have felt it too.... Wait are you claiming an explosion moves at the speed of light? That's just no right. It's totally possible to see the explosion coming towards him. But it's kinda ridiculous because you don't want to be staring at the explosion to watch it go off... and if you *hear* it going off you are dead.



4.John is under the table, bad guy is on top of the table with a machine gun. A machine gun that, er, can't shoot through the table top...though John does it with a handgun like seconds later.
The depiction doesn't actually show it can't, the bad guy isn't really aiming it. He is firing rather wildly into the tabel and around and John is maybe a meter further along all the time. That's sort of the poitn of the last part of the exchange. The bad guy has vented his anger randomly shooting of his machine gun and is about ready to put a whole mag worth of bullets through the table. Basically up util the end of the table he is playing with John. Also a machinegun fires pistolrounds, not necessarily more powerful than every pistol. And it matters what bullets you have, the machinegun looks like something that may actually be specifically equipped with rounds that are made to avoid overpenetration. John may simply have better AP on his rounds. Not that any office furniture I've seen would likely be stoppign either. Just sying ti is possible.
So 1) the terrorist isn't actively trying to hit John through the table at first, 2) the machinegun isn't necessarily more powerful than John's pistol.


At least in Die Hard John tends to be visibly banged up and seemingly in pain. Even though he continues functioning beyond what one might assume. Then again there are recorded instances where people keep performing despite grevious injuries. Usually though in action movies I feel that window for action is ridiculosuly long, ie entire movie almost.

Overall though in movie fight scenes where people hit each other to me it seems they pummel each other impossibly thorougly.



For a fun Twist....a couple actors, like Keenu Reeves and Tom Cruise really DO some of the stunts their character does. In the vast majority of Tom Cruse movies, that is really Tom himself doing the stunt. And sure it's a stunt and "safe"...but still, like Mission Impossible 5: Tom really did hang on to the outside of a plane as it took off (sure he had a harness)...but still he was hanging on to a plane for real!
One of the Mission Impossible movies where Tom jumps between buildings and grabs onto the rooftop he actually breaks his foot IRL doing the stunt. Apparently continuing on for abit running on it to finish the scene.

[Majin]

There was a YouTube channel dedicated to analyzing exactly what injuries John would have received in all of the movies and when, let me see if I can track it down...

EDIT: First movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnHKv2G0wCw), movies 2-5 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PVZ2ajOnKg). He actually likely would have survived the second one.

Also from the same channel with the same premise, Home Alone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WKgNyvsNDM). If realistic, those movies would have been pretty bloody. Well if you believe the theories, Kevin does grow up to become Jigsaw...

[Lvl 2 Expert]

O, a funny example of a subversion of the general idea of this thread: when filming The Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger had to punch in a car window. The window had for this stunts been replaced with stunt glass. But through some unfortunate sequence of misunderstandings Arnold punched the wrong window. Luckily for him he was Arnold Schwarzenegger and didn't hold back, so it actually worked and only hurt rather than injured him, which would not be the case for most people (or maybe even when using a less ****ty car). Later in The Last Action Hero he has a scene referencing this experience, when his character comes into the real world and notices that in here punching in a car window hurts.

I'd say Home Alone doesn't count, that's pretty solidly in the realm of slapstick. At the very least all the sequels are.

[factotum]

The trope where the hero and explosive both blow up in the water and it's safer? That's abject nonsense. Compressibility is a good thing in the fluids between you and things that go boom, and air is way more compressible.

But on the other hand, the shockwave will have a harder time moving through the water because of its density, so it won't have as much effect if you're at a distance. When Barnes Wallis was designing his famous bouncing bombs, the whole reason he had to do that was because dropping a bomb even a few yards from the dam wall just wouldn't stand any chance of breaking it--the blast would be dissipated through the water before it reached it. In order to break the dam wall the bomb literally had to be almost touching it, in which case the incompressibility of the water worked to your advantage and ensured most of the blast went into doing damage.

[Traab]

Bullets dont travel through water well. You see a lot of action flicks where the hero dives under water and there are bullet trails moving all around him, bullets travel, at best, two feet before either breaking apart into harmless debris or just stopping due to resistance. It was wild to watch mythbusters test this. The stronger the gun, the sooner the bullet shattered. A sniper rifle bullet basically disintegrated on contact with the pool.

[Brother Oni]

Sword fights - the vast majority of sword fights ended in the first couple of passes, with a ridiculous percentage ending in mutual kills. It's only something like 5-10% of sword fights end up like the movie style back-and-forth duels.

Knife fights - both people are getting cut and at least one of them are going to hospital.

Hand to hand fights - unless you take them out in the first technique or so, it devolves into a very messy back and forth. John Wick is a great example of both as he takes out guys in the first hit or two then ends up in a wrestling match if he misses.

Getting shot by a handgun generally isn't debilitating - I've seen a news clip where a lawyer was attacked by a gunman outside a court and shot with .38 multiple times. Fortunately the lawyer managed to keep a telegraph pole between him and the gunman, so the rounds didn't hit anything vital, and walked away while the gunman stared in bemusement as he didn't bring a reload.

Again, compare to John Wick or Collateral where opponents are shot multiple times to make sure they're dead or stay down.


Bullets dont travel through water well. You see a lot of action flicks where the hero dives under water and there are bullet trails moving all around him, bullets travel, at best, two feet before either breaking apart into harmless debris or just stopping due to resistance. It was wild to watch mythbusters test this. The stronger the gun, the sooner the bullet shattered. A sniper rifle bullet basically disintegrated on contact with the pool.

The faster the round, the quicker it disintegrates in water. Sub-sonic munitions penetrate just fine into water - the Russians even have a series of rifles that's intended to be used underwater by their frogmen (most recently the ASM-DT amphibious rifle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-DT_amphibious_rifle)).

[Peelee]

Knife fights - both people are getting cut and at least one of them are going to hospital.

The loser of a knife fight dies on the street, the winner of a knife fight dies on the way to the hospital.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jkIDhAEnF0

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Getting shot by a handgun generally isn't debilitating - I've seen a news clip where a lawyer was attacked by a gunman outside a court and shot with .38 multiple times. Fortunately the lawyer managed to keep a telegraph pole between him and the gunman, so the rounds didn't hit anything vital, and walked away while the gunman stared in bemusement as he didn't bring a reload.

Double tapping is a standard military/hitman tactic to ensure you've really killed someone, sure. And there are a bunch of known cases where people initially didn't even notice they got shot. But I wouldn't go as far as saying that getting shot with a handgun is not a big deal in general. Especially not based on one example where the target took cover. It's not getting shot if you don't get shot. That's getting shot at. I don't have any exact statistics handy, but a lot of people who get shot die. At best it's a lottery, 1d10 damage on a hitpoint total of 8.

[Lord Raziere]

Double tapping is a standard military/hitman tactic to ensure you've really killed someone, sure. And there are a bunch of known cases where people initially didn't even notice they got shot. But I wouldn't go as far as saying that getting shot with a handgun is not a big deal in general. Especially not based on one example where the target took cover. It's not getting shot if you don't get shot. That's getting shot at. I don't have any exact statistics handy, but a lot of people who get shot die. At best it's a lottery, 1d10 damage on a hitpoint total of 8.

also people can bleed out even if nothing vital is hit, thats why we bandage people so that they don't bleed from wounds, if he really got shot he would need get his wounds cleaned and bound so people don't lose it over a longer period of time. just because you don't die immediately doesn't you mean you aren't still in danger of it.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Again, compare to John Wick or Collateral where opponents are shot multiple times to make sure they're dead or stay down.

John does have a habit of parking the last round in the brainpan to make sure they're dead. Also, pistols are used at a range of a couple meters for the most part, not halfway across a ballroom.

Also, firearms do not pack rocket ammo that makes your body fly back forever after you get hit.

[Tvtyrant]

John does have a habit of parking the last round in the brainpan to make sure they're dead. Also, pistols are used at a range of a couple meters for the most part, not halfway across a ballroom.

Also, firearms do not pack rocket ammo that makes your body fly back forever after you get hit.

*Unless they are gyrojets.


On the handgun front; larger, slower bullets tend to be more effective than smaller ones. We use small bullets for the ability to fire rapidly in assault rifles, expecting most shots to miss (seriously the relationship between shots fired to hits is hilarious in every war from invention to 1850, and then from 1900 to now. Brief accurate blip in the latter half of the nineteenth century.) With a handgun .45 is better for stopping power (hitting something vital and/or making the target go into shock) but also heavy and slow firing and very noticeable on your belt. So tradeoffs.

[Traab]

The faster the round, the quicker it disintegrates in water. Sub-sonic munitions penetrate just fine into water - the Russians even have a series of rifles that's intended to be used underwater by their frogmen (most recently the ASM-DT amphibious rifle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-DT_amphibious_rifle)).

This is true, however, that takes a very specialized gun to work underwater at all effectively. Regular hand guns might fire bullets into water that dont shatter on impact, but they are inaccurate and lose momentum very quickly. (https://youtu.be/OubvTOHWTms?t=215) Get more than a couple feet underwater and those machine gun toting goons are very unlikely to hit or hurt you without following you in and clubbing you with their guns instead.

[Peelee]

*Unless they are gyrojets.


On the handgun front; larger, slower bullets tend to be more effective than smaller ones. We use small bullets for the ability to fire rapidly in assault rifles, expecting most shots to miss (seriously the relationship between shots fired to hits is hilarious in every war from invention to 1850, and then from 1900 to now. Brief accurate blip in the latter half of the nineteenth century.) With a handgun .45 is better for stopping power (hitting something vital and/or making the target go into shock) but also heavy and slow firing and very noticeable on your belt. So tradeoffs.

There are two schools of thought on this:
Heavy is good, heavy is reliable. If it doesn't work, you can always hit them with it.
I want a normal gun for a normal person!


I think each of those quotes make up 5-10% of the dialogue in each respective movie that can be quoted on here without resulting in a sea of asterisks.

[Tvtyrant]

There are two schools of thought on this:
Heavy is good, heavy is reliable. If it doesn't work, you can always hit them with it.
I want a normal gun for a normal person!


I think each of those quotes make up 5-10% of the dialogue in each respective movie that can be quoted on here without resulting in a sea of asterisks.

I don't know which movies those are from. There is great shame in me now :smallsigh:

[Peelee]

I don't know which movies those are from. There is great shame in me now :smallsigh:

Snatch and In Bruges. Both of which I wholly recommend. Crime comedy is a super fun genre when done well.

[Tvtyrant]

Snatch and In Bruges. Both of which I wholly recommend. Crime comedy is a super fun genre when done well.

I'll have to give those a shot! Hot Fuzz is one of my two favorite comedies (the other is Death of Stalin) so tangential relationship.

[Peelee]

I'll have to give those a shot! Hot Fuzz is one of my two favorite comedies (the other is Death of Stalin) so tangential relationship.

So they're not going to be as well-made as Hot Fuzz (in the sense that nothing made by not-Edgar-Wright is going to be as well made as anything made by Edgar Wright. They could teach entire film classes on him alone), but they're still incredibly strong movies, and In Bruges tops most other crime-comedy movies for me (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the undisputed leader, and a few other Shane Black fiicks also compete with In Bruges for the next four slots, none of which I really have set).

[Gnoman]

On the handgun front; larger, slower bullets tend to be more effective than smaller ones. We use small bullets for the ability to fire rapidly in assault rifles, expecting most shots to miss (seriously the relationship between shots fired to hits is hilarious in every war from invention to 1850, and then from 1900 to now. Brief accurate blip in the latter half of the nineteenth century.) With a handgun .45 is better for stopping power (hitting something vital and/or making the target go into shock) but also heavy and slow firing and very noticeable on your belt. So tradeoffs.

This is obsolete thinking, to a certain extent. The famous (or infamous) tests that lead up to the adoption of the .45 ACP were really, really bad. They were basically just firing bullets at random into animals, and taking that as gospel. More recent statistical analysis is that all of the major handgun calibers have roughly similar effectiveness, and the key factor is shot placement rather than ammunition choice. Any rifle bullet is so far beyond any handgun bullet in effectiveness that they won't really fit on the same chart.

Also, the "most bullets miss" is a consequence of most bullets in combat being fired with no intention of hitting anything. Most are "suppressive fire", which are rounds fired in the vicinity of the enemy to keep him under cover and not shooting at you while you maneuver your own troops to flak him out.




On the thread subject, a lot of movies have the hero being shot, but fine because he was only hit in the leg or shoulder. While there's no really good place to get shot, those are actually among the worst - there's lots of important blood vessels that are very likely to be damaged, and you're virtually guaranteed to destroy a lot of important bones. If you survive, it almost takes a miracle to avoid lasting impairment.

[factotum]

This is obsolete thinking, to a certain extent. The famous (or infamous) tests that lead up to the adoption of the .45 ACP were really, really bad. They were basically just firing bullets at random into animals, and taking that as gospel. More recent statistical analysis is that all of the major handgun calibers have roughly similar effectiveness, and the key factor is shot placement rather than ammunition choice. Any rifle bullet is so far beyond any handgun bullet in effectiveness that they won't really fit on the same chart.

I recall reading an article posted by a doctor after an American mass shooting where he described just how horrible the wounds caused by an assault rifle are. Those rounds may be small, but they're travelling so fast that the shockwave generated as they pass through causes enormous disruption to a person's internal organs. Where a handgun round might cause a lot of damage to whatever it hits, assault rifle rounds can cause damage to organs way off their direct target.

[Gnoman]

A full-rifle round is even more destructive - it is a consequence of total energy. Basically any film where somebody gets shot with little result is extremely unrealistic, unless they were shot with something a .22 or .25 ACP.

[Tvtyrant]

This is obsolete thinking, to a certain extent. The famous (or infamous) tests that lead up to the adoption of the .45 ACP were really, really bad. They were basically just firing bullets at random into animals, and taking that as gospel. More recent statistical analysis is that all of the major handgun calibers have roughly similar effectiveness, and the key factor is shot placement rather than ammunition choice. Any rifle bullet is so far beyond any handgun bullet in effectiveness that they won't really fit on the same chart.

Also, the "most bullets miss" is a consequence of most bullets in combat being fired with no intention of hitting anything. Most are "suppressive fire", which are rounds fired in the vicinity of the enemy to keep him under cover and not shooting at you while you maneuver your own troops to flak him out.




On the thread subject, a lot of movies have the hero being shot, but fine because he was only hit in the leg or shoulder. While there's no really good place to get shot, those are actually among the worst - there's lots of important blood vessels that are very likely to be damaged, and you're virtually guaranteed to destroy a lot of important bones. If you survive, it almost takes a miracle to avoid lasting impairment.

Were these tests assuming anyone on Earth uses shot placement? Because military and police are trained to fire center of mass for maximum chance of hitting something, they aren't picking target points. It also ignores the whole animal defense problem, where we know larger calibers are better at stopping targets because we use them for that with wild animals on the regular. If you are using a pistol you are seeing the elephant, its going to be close range and panicky.

This isn't true either. Yes suppressive fire is important, but even ignoring machine guns humans are really terrible shots. Without professional training they tend not to fire at all at long ranges, then hide behind something and fire wildly and rapidly in the hopes of not getting shot. The movement to automatic small arms was based on the reality of large groups of barely trained soldiers from 1900-1980, and militaries adapting to human psychology.

[AvatarVecna]

It's difficult to really engage with the question, because "basically all of them" is the correct answer. People are fragile blood balloons and it's not that hard for them to get popped, but how hard it is in movies, and how much it matters when they start bleeding everywhere, depends entirely on whether they're special or mooks, good or bad. You know why the first thing they teach you in a self-defense class is how to fall down correctly? Because you're gonna fall down a lot in life, especially if you find yourself in fights a lot, and you don't have to be falling down from any height higher than "standing on your own freaking feet" to accidentally hurt yourself in life-altering/ending ways. Yeah sure there's stories of people surviving an inordinate number of shots or stab wounds, but those are freak accidents - getting shot or stabbed anywhere is going to be bad news long-term, and almost certainly short-term too (at least partially because you're actively getting shot or stabbed and they're probably not gonna stop at just one).

You could roll randomly on a list of action movies, and guaranteed something happens in the first fight that should've killed a participant and didn't. It's a lot the same in superhero movies. I'd be surprised if there's a single Batman movie that doesn't have at least one time a mook should've definitely died because of Bruce's actions.

[Gnoman]

Were these tests assuming anyone on Earth uses shot placement? Because military and police are trained to fire center of mass for maximum chance of hitting something, they aren't picking target points. It also ignores the whole animal defense problem, where we know larger calibers are better at stopping targets because we use them for that with wild animals on the regular. If you are using a pistol you are seeing the elephant, its going to be close range and panicky.


Center of mass is where you want to put the shots for proper effect. That's where the important organs are. A lot of shootings (the most publicized being a few rappers who's names I can't remember who were famous for having a bunch of bullets removed) are "just blaze away in their general direction without even lining up a shot", leading to the bullets impacting at random points and not hitting anything that wasn't treatable. Meanwhile, once you compare center-of-mass shots, there's no statistical evidince that .380 ACP is worse than 9x19 is worse than .45 is worse than 10mm auto is worse than .357 Magnum. All perform almost identically.

The trials leading up to the .45 were basically "tie up an animal, blast away at it randomly, and see how long it takes to die." A few of the test animals had to be dispatched with a hammer because the testers didn't manage to kill them with guns at all. The only animals that died quick were those that got holed in an important organ, regardless of caliber. There's several cases where a "lesser" round was an instant kill and the notes say "we're going to ignore this".

[Tvtyrant]

Center of mass is where you want to put the shots for proper effect. That's where the important organs are. A lot of shootings (the most publicized being a few rappers who's names I can't remember who were famous for having a bunch of bullets removed) are "just blaze away in their general direction without even lining up a shot", leading to the bullets impacting at random points and not hitting anything that wasn't treatable. Meanwhile, once you compare center-of-mass shots, there's no statistical evidince that .380 ACP is worse than 9x19 is worse than .45 is worse than 10mm auto is worse than .357 Magnum. All perform almost identically.

The trials leading up to the .45 were basically "tie up an animal, blast away at it randomly, and see how long it takes to die." A few of the test animals had to be dispatched with a hammer because the testers didn't manage to kill them with guns at all. The only animals that died quick were those that got holed in an important organ, regardless of caliber. There's several cases where a "lesser" round was an instant kill and the notes say "we're going to ignore this".


Edit: I think we are derailing this thread enough as is. I will just agree to disagree here :smallsmile:

[Bohandas]

The faster the round, the quicker it disintegrates in water. Sub-sonic munitions penetrate just fine into water - the Russians even have a series of rifles that's intended to be used underwater by their frogmen (most recently the ASM-DT amphibious rifle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-DT_amphibious_rifle)).

My understanding was always that it was the transition from air to water that messed with the bullets moreso than the water itself and that guns in general would fire fine underwater

[Rogar Demonblud]

Not really. Water is a denser medium and doesn't compress at all, so there's a serious possibility your barrel will burst, especially under full auto like Hollywood likes to show. Beyond that, your power falloff will dramatically cut the effective range.

[Knaight]

But on the other hand, the shockwave will have a harder time moving through the water because of its density, so it won't have as much effect if you're at a distance. When Barnes Wallis was designing his famous bouncing bombs, the whole reason he had to do that was because dropping a bomb even a few yards from the dam wall just wouldn't stand any chance of breaking it--the blast would be dissipated through the water before it reached it. In order to break the dam wall the bomb literally had to be almost touching it, in which case the incompressibility of the water worked to your advantage and ensured most of the blast went into doing damage.
There's a very critical difference between the dam and a person - the person is mostly water, has a lot of material properties similar to water, etc. You don't have the protection of a clean material boundary, and that makes explosions much more dangerous. It's essentially a reflection vs. refraction problem at heart, where the dam is far more reflective to the wave front in question. Plus, they're massive concrete structures, it's not like they're not well positioned to survive bombs going off in nearby air.

[Rogar Demonblud]

The square-cube law still applies.

[Morgaln]

Any scene where someone jumps or falls out of a moving vehicle, especially if the ground is concrete. As so often, Die Hard 4 is a prime offender here.

[Brother Oni]

Double tapping is a standard military/hitman tactic to ensure you've really killed someone, sure. And there are a bunch of known cases where people initially didn't even notice they got shot. But I wouldn't go as far as saying that getting shot with a handgun is not a big deal in general. Especially not based on one example where the target took cover. It's not getting shot if you don't get shot. That's getting shot at. I don't have any exact statistics handy, but a lot of people who get shot die. At best it's a lottery, 1d10 damage on a hitpoint total of 8.

Note that these days, they call it 'a controlled pair' rather than 'double tapping'.

I never meant that getting shot wasn't a big deal, I meant that getting shot isn't the '100% lethal death ray' extreme that actions movies tend to favour for the cannon fodder (versus the 'inconsequential love tap unless dramatically appropriate' other extreme for protagonists/antagonists).

As for the lawyer, he was was shot at from a distance of ~2-3 metres (hard to tell from the perspective, but he couldn't hide behind the pole as the gunman was so close) and I believe had something like 6 gunshot injuries. Unfortunately I can't find the video or the news article to verify this shooting.

[SirKazum]

Any scene where a being strong enough to throw a whole person throws someone into a wall would break their damn back.
Any scene where a being strong enough to lift a whole person up by the throat would crush their throat or break their jaw.
Any scene where a backhand blow strong enough to send someone flying would shatter ribs, crack skulls and pulverise organs.

This, so much this. It caught my attention in the latest Stranger Things season, where a monster slaps Nancy (a rail-thin girl) and throws her into a wall. Maybe it was because I'd recently broken my shoulder from just tripping and falling down, but I really noticed how much that should've wrecked her and didn't (IIRC she just got up and ran away, like TV/movie characters are wont to do in such scenarios). But yeah, if something slaps you and sends you into a wall, there's a considerable chance you die from it (if like your skull breaks or your spine gets wrecked really bad), a very large chance you end up paralyzed for life (from your spine breaking), and on the other hand an astronomically low chance you actually get up without any broken bones or other long-lasting injuries. But you never see any worse consequences than people taking a couple seconds to get up and wincing a bit in pain, and that's only if they're lameass civilians rather than badass heroes.

[KillianHawkeye]

Surprised no-one has mentioned the infamous "Indy in a fridge" scene from Crystal Skull yet--that guy is dead after hitting the ground, regardless of the fridge. In fact, that seems to be something movies often also get wrong--they have someone in super-armour fall off a building and survive hitting the ground, but it's not the impact that kills you in that case, it's the sudden deceleration, which the armour is going to do nothing to mitigate. It might survive the fall, its occupant won't.

I remember the "Indy in a fridge" scene bothering me when I first saw it, but you have to remember that he drank from the Holy Grail at the end of Last Crusade and is immortal now.

[The Glyphstone]

I remember the "Indy in a fridge" scene bothering me when I first saw it, but you have to remember that he drank from the Holy Grail at the end of Last Crusade and is immortal now.

The Grail's power stopped working when you left the temple, though, according to the knight and shown by Indy Sr.'s death prior to Crystal Skull.

[Tyndmyr]

I'm talking things like leaping off buildings, grabbing a ledge while falling, or taking on beatings which should have sent a person to the hospital.

My pet peeve is that cars somehow have become the modern day pile of mattresses for breaking falls. Fell ten stories off a building? Don't worry, that metal and glass object is there to cushion you! I grant that it is maybe slightly, slightly better than landing directly on the concrete, but in many instances, it would absolutely leave the guy dead, or at LEAST so incapacitated that the action sequence wouldn't continue.


I also dislike how bullets are treated. Namely, that they can be blocked by anything. Car doors, couches, tables, bodies. Now, it depends on the kind of bullet to some extent, but bullets are generally a lot more able to blow through things than movies would indicate. A half inch of wood will absolutely not do the job for any bullet ever.


Last but not least, any punch-out in which the bad guy casually kills people in melee, and reacts to getting the hero stuck in melee by...throwing him out of melee range, with minimal harm to the hero. This is just dumb.

All of the above happen CONSTANTLY.



One of the Mission Impossible movies where Tom jumps between buildings and grabs onto the rooftop he actually breaks his foot IRL doing the stunt. Apparently continuing on for abit running on it to finish the scene.

Yeah, that's a thing. I shattered my ankle in basic training, and just kept going. And managed to re-shatter it a couple of times after that. You can absolutely push through pain to keep going, especially in the short term while you still have some shock. Long term, it'll swell and become painful. I don't mind them depicting folks doing fairly intense stuff despite injury...after all, we assume that the protagonist is at least a little badass, things that regular people do are definitely fair game. I do mind when things that ought to hurt are just ignored.


Double tapping is a standard military/hitman tactic to ensure you've really killed someone, sure. And there are a bunch of known cases where people initially didn't even notice they got shot. But I wouldn't go as far as saying that getting shot with a handgun is not a big deal in general. Especially not based on one example where the target took cover. It's not getting shot if you don't get shot. That's getting shot at. I don't have any exact statistics handy, but a lot of people who get shot die. At best it's a lottery, 1d10 damage on a hitpoint total of 8.

In the modern day, if you make it to the hospital with a gunshot wound, you will probably live. This is, in part, due to modern medicine being awesome, but also due to these statistics obviously filtering out folks who died instantly.

However, you will almost certainly not be slapping duct tape on it to continue your action spree, but instead spend a significant amount of time recovering. You may be able to continue moving in the immediate aftermath, what with shock and adrenaline and all, but once that wears off, you're probably out of commission.


I recall reading an article posted by a doctor after an American mass shooting where he described just how horrible the wounds caused by an assault rifle are. Those rounds may be small, but they're travelling so fast that the shockwave generated as they pass through causes enormous disruption to a person's internal organs. Where a handgun round might cause a lot of damage to whatever it hits, assault rifle rounds can cause damage to organs way off their direct target.

Any supersonic round has a shockwave, because that's how supersonic things work. "Assault rifle" is a bad way to categorize this, as it is a property of many rifles and some pistols, and is a function of velocity. Assault rifles are usually, but not always supersonic, and tend to be midrange in velocity, and thus, while they may exhibit this trait, but they certainly are not the most notorious for it. Assault rifles also generally shoot the same rounds as many other rifles, and do not shoot them at higher velocities.

Instead, they usually shoot a given round at a lower velocity than other rifles, because some of the power is bled off into the action, and they tend to have shorter barrels, which usually produce lower velocities from a given round.

Even so, the shock wave from typical rounds is fairly limited, and if it is destructive, something that is medically unproven and controversial, it iss only destructive near the bullet's path. Being hit in, say, the shoulder, will not destroy organs, though it may still be lethal from blood loss, and is certainly very bad for your shoulder.

The medical term for the theory you saw is "hydrostatic shock", and it has approximately similar evidence for it as does the idea that vaccines cause autism. Bluntly, what you saw was a bunch of garbage tossed together, probably for politicial purposes, not a realistic depiction of medicine or ballistics. If it does exist at all, the effect range is a few cm at most, and assault rifles would not be particularly effective at producing it.

So, bringing this back to movies, the idea that bullets make people explode somehow is kind of ludicrous. Corridor Crew occasionally puts out videos about movie special effects that folks in this thread may enjoy, and they do a fair amount of playing with action sequences, with a whole bit on John wick.

[druid91]

The Grail's power stopped working when you left the temple, though, according to the knight and shown by Indy Sr.'s death prior to Crystal Skull.

One thing that always bothered me about that. Wouldn't that mean you could just set up a medical facility in the temple, and just have people bussed in to drink from the holy grail to cure their everything?

[Traab]

The Grail's power stopped working when you left the temple, though, according to the knight and shown by Indy Sr.'s death prior to Crystal Skull.

I dont think its so much that it stopped working as you needed regular doses of it. Maybe im wrong, its been a long time but I got the feeling the problem was duration of effect. Yeah it heals what ails you, but it doesnt stop you from getting sick/hurt/killed afterwards without drinking more. Which would help explain why the knight was so freaking old. Time passes even with the healing effect of regular slugs of holy water so eventually you age. Think Wolverine, not Flamel.

[Wraith]

Any time you see a hero thrown through something. Often it's something like wooden pallets that explode into matchstick-sized pieces, but occasionally it's even sturdier things like walls, but they go through them and get their jacket all dirty, but otherwise it's something to be shrugged off or even completely ignored in the middle of a high-octane fight.

In real life? Not a chance. You ever tried to break apart a wooden pallet bare-handed? They don't want to let you do it to them. Even with heavy boots on, you can seriously mess up your foot by trying to stamp your way through them, and that's assuming you don't step on a 5" iron nail in the process. Throwing someone hard enough to smash them through a wall - not even concrete or bricks, just anything much harder than drywall - it a great way to break their back, shoulder, ribs and liquidise a bunch of internal organs.


Even so, the shock wave from typical rounds is fairly limited, and if it is destructive, something that is medically unproven and controversial, it iss only destructive near the bullet's path. Being hit in, say, the shoulder, will not destroy organs, though it may still be lethal from blood loss, and is certainly very bad for your shoulder.

Gnoman touched upon this one earlier - shooting someone in the shoulder, in a movie, is apparently shorthand for "this really hurts and lets us spray blood around the place, but otherwise has no long lasting consequences". It's amazing how often it happens only to be ignored a few minutes that.

Take the classic scene from Rambo for example - shot in the shoulder, so he pours gunpowder on it, lights it, cauterizes the wound and after a bit of a manly scream he's ready to start throwing punches and carrying around huge machine guns.

The same thing happens to John McLane in Die Hard - someone shoots him in the back as he's running out of the room, and there's a big spray of blood erupting from his shoulder and splattering the wall nearby. 5 minutes later, McLane is pretending to surrender to the Bad Guy by lifting that arm up and putting his hands behind his head.

And don't get me started on The Punisher TV show on Netflix. Frank Castle gets shot in the same place, in the same shoulder, at least twice that I remember (possibly even 3 times, it's been a while) and all it takes is a sterile white medical pad stuck on with duct tape, and he's right back to wrestling... Navy SEALs or something, whatever it is they are supposed to be.

Each one of these injuries would, in real life, be life changing if it didn't cause them to die within minutes from shock and blood loss. Most of them would be lucky to be able to raise their hand in the air even after months of surgery and physical therapy, let alone having a fist-fight with mafia goons the same afternoon.

[Jerrykhor]

I was straight away reminded of the most ridiculous fight scene i can recall - The toilet fight in Ninja Assassin (starring korean star Rain). It was a young Raizo (Rain) vs Kingpin, and the fight started with Raizo stabbing Kingpin's neck with a dagger. Yes, i kid you not. The friggin neck. Kingpin barely felt it at all and reacted by punching Raizo immediately. I swear there was no greater suspension of disbelief from watching movies, as Kingpin continues to get stabbed multiple times during the fight like it was nothing. There was one stab through his arm from underneath near his armpit, but he pulled out the blade like it was nothing.

Its actually quite surprising that a few punch and kicks could daze him long enough for Raizo to bash his head on the urinal multiple times. Maybe his head is his weakness.

[The Glyphstone]

Kingpin's fat clearly functions as natural body armor.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Each one of these injuries would, in real life, be life changing if it didn't cause them to die within minutes from shock and blood loss. Most of them would be lucky to be able to raise their hand in the air even after months of surgery and physical therapy, let alone having a fist-fight with mafia goons the same afternoon.

The human shoulder is a marvel of engineering, but damage resistant it is not. Subclavian artery, infrascapular vein, brachial plexus nerve junction, the topmost part of the upper lobe of the lung...

[factotum]

I dont think its so much that it stopped working as you needed regular doses of it. Maybe im wrong, its been a long time but I got the feeling the problem was duration of effect. Yeah it heals what ails you, but it doesnt stop you from getting sick/hurt/killed afterwards without drinking more.

Yeah, but most diseases and ailments tend to not come back once they're healed, so you could still use the Grail as a handy cure-all. I think the obvious reason that didn't happen is (a) few people knew about the place and (b) it kind of got walled in behind a collapsing cave at the end of the movie, so it's probably no longer easily accessible.

[Rogar Demonblud]

And the Grail itself fell into the crevasse and was probably crushed by falling rocks, because God has had enough of us misusing his stuff.

[snowblizz]

My understanding was always that it was the transition from air to water that messed with the bullets moreso than the water itself and that guns in general would fire fine underwater
That's what Mythbusters test showed in general yes.


Not really. Water is a denser medium and doesn't compress at all, so there's a serious possibility your barrel will burst, especially under full auto like Hollywood likes to show. Beyond that, your power falloff will dramatically cut the effective range.
The test also actually showed more or less that. Well you don't have to worry about automatic fire under water because odds are you won't manage very many rounds.
The 9mm pistol iirc the casing stuck being ejected as it simply didn't have enough energy to push out of the chamber. So you only get the one shot.

They also said something about having airpockets in the gun, and that maybe not being good, and I now forget it firing a shotgun worked or they damaged the barrel. For some reason I got this image of it stuck in my head.

But the long and short was you can fire a gun underwater just fine, at least once. But you do have significantly reduced range. I actually think the conclusion was roughly the same for a 9mm handgun, the range firing down into water and already submerged in water was both like 2m effective range.



And the Grail itself fell into the crevasse and was probably crushed by falling rocks, because God has had enough of us misusing his stuff.There's probably some moral lessons in there we can't discuss here. Also it is kinda convenient such a powerful artefact does not have to be considered "in the wild". So we don't specualte about how to use it miracle curing powers in a real world setting ;P.

[Traab]

Yeah, but most diseases and ailments tend to not come back once they're healed, so you could still use the Grail as a handy cure-all. I think the obvious reason that didn't happen is (a) few people knew about the place and (b) it kind of got walled in behind a collapsing cave at the end of the movie, so it's probably no longer easily accessible.

Yeah but my point was, it cures what you have at the time, it doesnt stop you from getting something else later. At the end of the third movie indy and his dad ride off into the sunset fully healed. They stop off at a local house of ill repute and leave with a permanent sore on their lips. :smallbiggrin: So no immortality, no immunity to harm, it heals your issues at the time you drink it, but thats it. You could possibly be immortal if you had a permanent iv of the water flowing through the grail and into your system so there is never a time when you arent being healed. But just looking at the guardian of the grail it doesnt stop aging entirely if you just take a cup of it every day or so. He lived way longer than he should but he was also very much so elderly by the time indy found him.

[Aeson]

Yeah, but most diseases and ailments tend to not come back once they're healed, so you could still use the Grail as a handy cure-all. I think the obvious reason that didn't happen is (a) few people knew about the place and (b) it kind of got walled in behind a collapsing cave at the end of the movie, so it's probably no longer easily accessible.
Most diseases tend not to come back because developing some degree of immunity to them is part of recovering. Whether or not you'd develop any immunity to a disease that's just magically cured, and if you did develop some degree of immunity then how much, is both unknown and very important to the question of whether or not you could become dangerously ill again with the same disease.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Most diseases tend not to come back because developing some degree of immunity to them is part of recovering. Whether or not you'd develop any immunity to a disease that's just magically cured, and if you did develop some degree of immunity then how much, is both unknown and very important to the question of whether or not you could become dangerously ill again with the same disease.

You'd be more resistant than someone who had never had the disease, and less resistant than someone who had had the disease for longer before recovering. The cells that produce antibodies, B cells specific to that disease, begin multiplying the instant they recognize the disease they're keyed for. Half of those new cells are just factories for the specific antibody, but the other half are called "memory cells", because they stick around and act just like regular B cells keyed to that disease. The longer you have the disease, the more memory cells specific to that pathogen you end up with, and they stick around in the body for quite a while. This is what makes it extremely hard to get a disease twice; those memory cells will recognize the same pathogen and so you've got several times as many antigen producing cells already in your body and ready to go (after a year to a few years depending on the pathogen, though, the disease will have mutated enough that the same memory cells won't be effective).

So basically, anyone that ended a disease early by drinking from the Holy Grail would have more memory cells and thus be more resistant to that disease, but not so much as someone who'd had the disease for a longer period of time. And if it was something like the common cold, by the next year the virus will have mutated enough that those memory cells will be almost useless against it, giving the person who drank from the Holy Grail no advantage.

[Aeson]

You'd be more resistant than someone who had never had the disease, and less resistant than someone who had had the disease for longer before recovering. The cells that produce antibodies, B cells specific to that disease, begin multiplying the instant they recognize the disease they're keyed for. Half of those new cells are just factories for the specific antibody, but the other half are called "memory cells", because they stick around and act just like regular B cells keyed to that disease. The longer you have the disease, the more memory cells specific to that pathogen you end up with, and they stick around in the body for quite a while. This is what makes it extremely hard to get a disease twice; those memory cells will recognize the same pathogen and so you've got several times as many antigen producing cells already in your body and ready to go (after a year to a few years depending on the pathogen, though, the disease will have mutated enough that the same memory cells won't be effective).
There's also a period early in the immune response where your body doesn't know quite what antigen it's looking for and so you won't really have any appropriate B cells.

[Zarrgon]

I'll add just about anything you see with a car jumping or a car crash.

Movie cars always make amazing jumps. But cars and physics don't work that way. Your average street car is not going to jump anything....and if it does not only is the car unlikely to be intact after it (crash) lands....but that impact will likely kill anyone inside the car.

At the very least even a small jump will likely blow out the cars tires, obliterate the shocks, damage or bend or break the whole drive system and damage and twist the body of the car. And it only gets worse if you are going at a high speed. On top of that, anyone inside the car will most likely break some bones at least....and most likely break their back or neck.

You can look at the tons and tons and tons of car jump stunts. Not only is it a stunt with a specifically made stunt car and tons of safety precautions and planned out as carefully as possible, but also has a ton of protection for the stunt driver. And, even then, that driver often gets hurt....or worse.

Car Crashes are worse. Movies have a car get hit at like 60 mph and flip over like 20 times and then fall off a cliff and into a river. And then the people climb out of the car unhurt. Yea....nope.

Another great one is in Captain America Winter Solder: Sam Falcon Wilson gets tossed out of a car at...eh, at least 30 mph, maybe more like 50 or 60. And he happily rolls along the highway for a couple minutes and then gets up with a little bit of road dust on his clothing.

Yea....ever fallen off a bike or such going more then 1 mph on hard pavement? Well...chances are if you did you'd get some scrapped skin...maybe up to "seven layers of skin scrapped off". And it's very likely you'd twisted, bruised or broken something...most likely a foot, ankle or knee. And if you rolled like the Falcon does....well, your head is most likely going to hit the pavement with each roll. It's not impossible to roll along a paved highway and get no injuries what so ever....but it's very unlikely.

[Peelee]

I'll add just about anything you see with a car jumping or a car crash.

Movie cars always make amazing jumps. But cars and physics don't work that way. Your average street car is not going to jump anything....and if it does not only is the car unlikely to be intact after it (crash) lands....but that impact will likely kill anyone inside the car.

At the very least even a small jump will likely blow out the cars tires, obliterate the shocks, damage or bend or break the whole drive system and damage and twist the body of the car. And it only gets worse if you are going at a high speed. On top of that, anyone inside the car will most likely break some bones at least....and most likely break their back or neck.

You can look at the tons and tons and tons of car jump stunts. Not only is it a stunt with a specifically made stunt car and tons of safety precautions and planned out as carefully as possible, but also has a ton of protection for the stunt driver. And, even then, that driver often gets hurt....or worse.

Car Crashes are worse. Movies have a car get hit at like 60 mph and flip over like 20 times and then fall off a cliff and into a river. And then the people climb out of the car unhurt. Yea....nope.

Another great one is in Captain America Winter Solder: Sam Falcon Wilson gets tossed out of a car at...eh, at least 30 mph, maybe more like 50 or 60. And he happily rolls along the highway for a couple minutes and then gets up with a little bit of road dust on his clothing.

Yea....ever fallen off a bike or such going more then 1 mph on hard pavement? Well...chances are if you did you'd get some scrapped skin...maybe up to "seven layers of skin scrapped off". And it's very likely you'd twisted, bruised or broken something...most likely a foot, ankle or knee. And if you rolled like the Falcon does....well, your head is most likely going to hit the pavement with each roll. It's not impossible to roll along a paved highway and get no injuries what so ever....but it's very unlikely.

There's an interesting real-life story related to the car jumping: near the end of the series, the producers of the Dukes of Hazzard were buying any '69 Charger they could find, to the point of seeing one on the street, following it, and offering to buy from the driver whenever they parked. Because, as you said, jumping a car pretty much destroys the car.

[Caledonian]

One thing that always bothered me about that. Wouldn't that mean you could just set up a medical facility in the temple, and just have people bussed in to drink from the holy grail to cure their everything? {scrubbed}

[Monsterpoodle]

take your pick... for me soldiers moving through a rice paddy and a mortar goes off a couple of feet away and they pick themselves up again. I call BS. Mortars don't work like snipers rifles. You aren't required to actually hit the person, close is good enough.
Any die hard movie...
The other one is when people get shot, stabbed or injured in the torso and it has no effect. THERE ARE NO UNIMPORTANT OR PAINLESS ORGANS IN THE TORSO...There is no empty space for a bullet to pass through.

In walking dead when the boy gets shot in the head and just loses an eye!! WHAT?

[Zarrgon]

take your pick... for me soldiers moving through a rice paddy and a mortar goes off a couple of feet away and they pick themselves up again. I call BS. Mortars don't work like snipers rifles. You aren't required to actually hit the person, close is good enough.


This is true in just about all action movies with explosions. It's bad enough when it's something like a stove exploding, but it's worse when it's some type of military weapon. Anything military grade that explodes kills(or very badly wounds) everything in an area. When something explodes right next to you....it does not just knock you down and give you a tiny cut on the forehead.

Even a shotgun sprays a good area, yet many movies treat it like some sort of laser guided targeted weapon that tosses hit people across rooms and through walls.

But then a lot of movies do the ''hit by a bullet and fly backwards several feet" too....

[Rogar Demonblud]

A rice paddy is about the only place you would have a near miss from a mortar do next to no damage. The round sinks into the nice soft mud before going off, so most of the charge is absorbed and dissipated.

[hamishspence]

Even a shotgun sprays a good area, yet many movies treat it like some sort of laser guided targeted weapon that tosses hit people across rooms and through walls.


While Blown Across The Room (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlownAcrossTheRoom) is a common error for guns in general - shotguns are not necessarily supposed to spread out their pellets vast amounts. The Short Ranged Shotgun (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShortRangeShotgun) can be an error too.

Shotguns blasting ridiculously broad holes at ridiculously close ranges, is a common inaccuracy in movies.

[Lvl45DM!]

take your pick... for me soldiers moving through a rice paddy and a mortar goes off a couple of feet away and they pick themselves up again. I call BS. Mortars don't work like snipers rifles. You aren't required to actually hit the person, close is good enough.
Any die hard movie...
The other one is when people get shot, stabbed or injured in the torso and it has no effect. THERE ARE NO UNIMPORTANT OR PAINLESS ORGANS IN THE TORSO...There is no empty space for a bullet to pass through.

In walking dead when the boy gets shot in the head and just loses an eye!! WHAT?

The bullet passed at an oblique angle. destroyed the eye and blew out the socket, but didn't go into the brain. Yeah its still massively downplayed though.

[factotum]

There's an interesting real-life story related to the car jumping: near the end of the series, the producers of the Dukes of Hazzard were buying any '69 Charger they could find, to the point of seeing one on the street, following it, and offering to buy from the driver whenever they parked. Because, as you said, jumping a car pretty much destroys the car.

I remember watching an episode of the Dukes of Hazzard when they did one of their usual slow-motion car jumps, and the front wheel of the car very obviously folded inward as it hit the ground--yet of course, it was driving again just fine a few seconds later. Even ten-year-old me thought that was a bit odd.

[Durkoala]

Note that these days, they call it 'a controlled pair' rather than 'double tapping'.

Is there a reason behind the changing names that you can say on the forum? Techniques for killing people are very much not something I expected to there to be a more sensitive term for and I'm curious as to why the name has been changed.

[The Glyphstone]

Controlled pair seems to imply more precision to me, at least. Double-tap has a connotation of bang-bang, two quick successive shots that might not be as well aimed.

[Thomas Cardew]

A 'double tap' is two shots fired from the same sight picture as fast as possible, the only consideration is pure speed the reasoning being that the recoil won't throw the second round far from the first. A 'controlled pair' fires a shot from the first sight picture, then allows the front sight to settle to a reasonable second sight picture before firing again. In practice, a DT is about .25 to .35s between shots while a controlled pair is about .5 to .9 s between shots.

[Traab]

As an additional note for car jumping. Cars are NOT generally balanced to fly through the air stable. Then tend to VERY quickly tilt forward (or backward) thus making any jump likely to end up nose down on the ground or upside down entirely. You have to balance the heck out of the car to take it over a jump and have it land on all 4 wheels. Thats another big part of the car jump daredevil stunts, not just the excessive roll cage and restraints. Bikes and motorcycles are different due to weight distribution or just outweighing the bike and being able to wrestle it into a straight path. A pickup truck is going to lawn dart itself.

That said, terminator two, the truck chase scene where john is on his little dirtbike trying to outrun a semi tow truck that just plowed off a bridge, probably 20 feet down onto the spillway and somehow has all its tires intact and engine functional. Most hilarious "yeaaah no" moment ever imo. Even as a kid I called bs at that. Here we go (https://youtu.be/6z9qws7M8q8?t=72)

[factotum]

That said, terminator two, the truck chase scene where john is on his little dirtbike trying to outrun a semi tow truck that just plowed off a bridge, probably 20 feet down onto the spillway and somehow has all its tires intact and engine functional. Most hilarious "yeaaah no" moment ever imo. Even as a kid I called bs at that. Here we go (https://youtu.be/6z9qws7M8q8?t=72)

You can actually see something very similar to the Dukes of Hazzard scene I mentioned above there, if you look closely--in the first couple of shots of the truck after it lands, you can clearly see that the front wheels are pointing in different directions, then they suddenly fix themselves as he steers to chase the bike!

[Vinyadan]

I'm always amused when falls from great heights are stopped short of the ground. Like, neither the height nor the ground are really the problem, it's the sudden change in speed that's the problem. Spider-Man catching Mary Jane 30 stories down a 60 story building is like a truck's front fender "catching" Mary Jane a few feet off the ground after she fell off a 30 story building. Not too helpful there, Pete.


Tarzan by comparison had scenes in which he fell from the top of a tree and surived grabbing a liana, and a caption observed that such an action would have broken a common man's shoulder, but he was Tarzan, and no common man!

[Brother Oni]

Is there a reason behind the changing names that you can say on the forum? Techniques for killing people are very much not something I expected to there to be a more sensitive term for and I'm curious as to why the name has been changed.

Further to Thomas Cardew's excellent post, the intention is to make soldiers think more about what they're shooting at, rather than spray the nearest target that even vaguely looks like a hostile. This is important when engaging in CQB, there may be civilians in the area, and the opposing force is not clearly uniformed.

[Rogar Demonblud]

And the walls in most places don't even pretend to claim bullet resistance.

That was one nice bit in Bad Times at the El Royale. The cultist hides behind a couch, and Miles just shoots through the couch.

[Traab]

And the walls in most places don't even pretend to claim bullet resistance.

That was one nice bit in Bad Times at the El Royale. The cultist hides behind a couch, and Miles just shoots through the couch.

Anyone watch the episode of mythbusters where they bulletproofed a car with phone books? It took like 3 phone books thick to stop the heavier calibers and even then a sniper round went right through the engine block.

[Rodin]

I'm a big fan of the moment in Discworld where Vimes is being sniped at by a guy with a gun - something that doesn't usually exist on Discworld. He goes to do the old "hold your helmet up to draw fire" bit, then remembers the bullet penetration he had seen earlier in the story. He grabs a broom and uses THAT to lift his helmet up, and the sniper shoots through the wall to where he would have been sitting if he'd been holding his helmet up with his hand.

Accurate gun physics. People acting sensible and not falling for overused tropes, and our hero proving he's the hero by being even more sensible.

[Kitten Champion]

I was watching Disney's Three Musketeers from all the way back in '93 where they did that trope at the end. Where Charlie Sheen - as Aramis - gets shot by Tim Curry's Richelieu at near point-blank range and Sheen ends up surviving because of a crucifix hidden under his robes blocking the bullet, and you get a "there is a God"-moment kind of played for laughs after it's revealed what saved him.


It's usually a crucifix, bible, or maybe a lucky coin of some kind in these situations.

[Knaight]

Further to Thomas Cardew's excellent post, the intention is to make soldiers think more about what they're shooting at, rather than spray the nearest target that even vaguely looks like a hostile. This is important when engaging in CQB, there may be civilians in the area, and the opposing force is not clearly uniformed.
They're not police, mercenaries, or Air Force pilots; they can't just gun down whoever and never see repercussions.

[Gnoman]

Even a shotgun sprays a good area, yet many movies treat it like some sort of laser guided targeted weapon that tosses hit people across rooms and through walls.

Shotguns are not an area of effect weapon. A shotgun with a wide-open choke firing buckshot spreads about 1 inch for every 36 inches of range. By the time this gets far enough to hit more than one person, or even hit somebody that you weren't aiming properly at, the balls will have lost almost all energy. Birdshot spreads more, but generally doesn't do much damage to human-sized targets.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I was watching Disney's Three Musketeers from all the way back in '93 where they did that trope at the end. Where Charlie Sheen - as Aramis - gets shot by Tim Curry's Richelieu at near point-blank range and Sheen ends up surviving because of a crucifix hidden under his robes blocking the bullet, and you get a "there is a God"-moment kind of played for laughs after it's revealed what saved him.


It's usually a crucifix, bible, or maybe a lucky coin of some kind in these situations.

It's usually a straight on shot too. It might be possible for your metal cigar case or whatever to deflect a bullet, but only really on an angled shot. The object will still be ruined and you'll feel the impact, but there is a chance of the bullet bouncing off to the side in that scenario. A hit straight on? Few objects are going to stop a bullet. If they could we'd make bullet proof vests out of those objects.

A factor that makes this slightly less bad is that at least it's usually done with handguns, which are still more than powerful enough to blow through your pocket office manual, but at least it's not as ridiculous an idea as that thing stopping a military style rifle round.

The slightly less annoying cousin of this is the "sheet of scrap metal under the shirt" method of stopping bullets. It's a little more believable both in that a thick sheet of metal is going to do a bit more to stop a bullet than most random objects and in the sheet being high and wide enough to actually have a decent chance to stop a bullet, plus they often go through the trouble of showing that without any real padding the shot still bloody hurt. But it still works way too reliably in movies. In the real world it's a desperate gamble at best.


take your pick... for me soldiers moving through a rice paddy and a mortar goes off a couple of feet away and they pick themselves up again. I call BS. Mortars don't work like snipers rifles. You aren't required to actually hit the person, close is good enough.

Explosions also look way too flashy in movies. Almost every movie explosion is a gas explosion. They're relatively controllable in use and friggin awesome to look at, but they're not ideal for most weapon systems. In real life an RPG is barely going to produce any flame effects, it's just going to penetrate your armored vehicle and either kill the engine or the unlucky occupant(s) sitting in that spot. Grenades too are usually very loud but visually relatively unimpressive explosions, with both the shockwave and the shrapnel killing people well beyond "where the flames reach" range.

The big exception are air burst munitions, those spread a powdered explosive and then ignite it, and that looks quite a bit like a movie style gas explosion.

[Kitten Champion]

It's usually a straight on shot too. It might be possible for your metal cigar case or whatever to deflect a bullet, but only really on an angled shot. The object will still be ruined and you'll feel the impact, but there is a chance of the bullet bouncing off to the side in that scenario. A hit straight on? Few objects are going to stop a bullet. If they could we'd make bullet proof vests out of those objects.

A factor that makes this slightly less bad is that at least it's usually done with handguns, which are still more than powerful enough to blow through your pocket office manual, but at least it's not as ridiculous an idea as that thing stopping a military style rifle round.

Yeah, probably because the image of seeing the item with the bullet stuck in it is usually the crux of the scene - at least if the item carries thematic weight - or is considered necessary to explain the miraculous recovery of the character in question. I think cinematically it would come off too ambiguously if you merely implied it was deflected.

In the case of The Three Musketeers I was going to make some allowances for it being the 17th century and a small handgun in question... but in retrospect that movie's guns are portrayed as being unreasonably deadly and accurate when convenient to the protagonists.



The slightly less annoying cousin of this is the "sheet of scrap metal under the shirt" method of stopping bullets. It's a little more believable both in that a thick sheet of metal is going to do a bit more to stop a bullet than most random objects and in the sheet being high and wide enough to actually have a decent chance to stop a bullet, plus they often go through the trouble of showing that without any real padding the shot still bloody hurt. But it still works way too reliably in movies. In the real world it's a desperate gamble at best.

That does have the element of "the character is savvy enough to plan for being shot despite original outward appearances" to it so it's easier to accept on a basic movie/television-watching level, even if it's not much more realistic. It just doesn't quite have the bad aftertaste I get when the character survives because twenty scenes ago someone gave him/her a pocket copy of the US constitution or something and that was all set up for the death fake-out at their climax.

[snowblizz]

It's usually a straight on shot too. It might be possible for your metal cigar case or whatever to deflect a bullet, but only really on an angled shot. The object will still be ruined and you'll feel the impact, but there is a chance of the bullet bouncing off to the side in that scenario. A hit straight on? Few objects are going to stop a bullet. If they could we'd make bullet proof vests out of those objects.

Mythbusters has done quite a few "bulletproof" segments and invariably the take home is "it varies". Quite a few objects can stop even a straight on bullet. Provided the weapon isn't particularly powerful. Which usually translates into "the .22 was stopped, everything else went straight through" on the show. And there's the crux, it all depends on how much energy (weight and/or velocity) does the bullet have and how sturdy is the object shot at.

The reason we don't make bullet proof vest out of such things is because it's super inconvenient and will only work in the most favourable circumstances.

Movies of course live on the 1 in a million chance thing. But as Elan notes, it's a sure thing then...

[Traab]

It's usually a straight on shot too. It might be possible for your metal cigar case or whatever to deflect a bullet, but only really on an angled shot. The object will still be ruined and you'll feel the impact, but there is a chance of the bullet bouncing off to the side in that scenario. A hit straight on? Few objects are going to stop a bullet. If they could we'd make bullet proof vests out of those objects.

A factor that makes this slightly less bad is that at least it's usually done with handguns, which are still more than powerful enough to blow through your pocket office manual, but at least it's not as ridiculous an idea as that thing stopping a military style rifle round.

The slightly less annoying cousin of this is the "sheet of scrap metal under the shirt" method of stopping bullets. It's a little more believable both in that a thick sheet of metal is going to do a bit more to stop a bullet than most random objects and in the sheet being high and wide enough to actually have a decent chance to stop a bullet, plus they often go through the trouble of showing that without any real padding the shot still bloody hurt. But it still works way too reliably in movies. In the real world it's a desperate gamble at best.



Explosions also look way too flashy in movies. Almost every movie explosion is a gas explosion. They're relatively controllable in use and friggin awesome to look at, but they're not ideal for most weapon systems. In real life an RPG is barely going to produce any flame effects, it's just going to penetrate your armored vehicle and either kill the engine or the unlucky occupant(s) sitting in that spot. Grenades too are usually very loud but visually relatively unimpressive explosions, with both the shockwave and the shrapnel killing people well beyond "where the flames reach" range.

The big exception are air burst munitions, those spread a powdered explosive and then ignite it, and that looks quite a bit like a movie style gas explosion.


Scrap of metal example that came to mind, v from vendetta. He had some sort of armor under his gear, looked like a breastplate. He took like 2 dozen rounds from automatic weapons and a powerful revolver and lived. At least when he took it off you could see it was riddled with holes and he was pretty seriously wounded. Like slow death instead of dying there wounded.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Spoilers for V for Vendetta:

I'm giving V for Vendetta a bit of a pass because it's never made quite clear how much of an ordinary mortal and/or a superpowered experiment created mutant V really is. As you said, the plate did an at least sort of realistic amount of work, and he still dies eventually. His body holding together until then could be because he's a unique individual.

[Rogar Demonblud]

It makes more sense in the comics, where V uses a combination of hyper-reflexes and his reputation to avoid getting shot. Probably the same for Batman, now that I think about it.

"Don't shoot him, you'll just make him angry."

[tomandtish]

Mythbusters has done quite a few "bulletproof" segments and invariably the take home is "it varies". Quite a few objects can stop even a straight on bullet. Provided the weapon isn't particularly powerful. Which usually translates into "the .22 was stopped, everything else went straight through" on the show. And there's the crux, it all depends on how much energy (weight and/or velocity) does the bullet have and how sturdy is the object shot at.



I believe their final analysis is that technically nothing is bulletproof. It's just bullet resistant.

I also remember that in the Middle East Top Gear special, Jeremy had the idea that putting sand between his door panels would act like a sandbag (they had passed military checkpoints with people on guard inside a ring of sandbags). When they shot the door with a nine mil, it went through the door and out the door opposite it, as well as serving up some nice shrapnel from the door.



The human shoulder is a marvel of engineering, but damage resistant it is not. Subclavian artery, infrascapular vein, brachial plexus nerve junction, the topmost part of the upper lobe of the lung...

This reminds me of something that happened to the older brother of a friend of mine. Note: I CANNOT verify that the story is true, but... well, you'll see. We will call him John.

John (mid 20s at the time) was walking home one night (this is back in early 80s) when someone jumped out nd demanded his wallt. When he said No, the guy pulled out a revolver and fired three times.

First shot: Bang! And it hit him in the shoulder.

Third Shot: Bang! and it hit him in the abdomen.

Second shot: This is the interesting one. He says there was a very soft "Pop".

When he gets hit, he staggers for a step and then drops to his knees. He says he looked down and saw something sticking out of his shirt. (He freely admitted he's in shock at this point). He reaches down, and grabs what turns out to be the second bullet, which is right over his sternum. And then "I looked up and the other guy was running away".

Of course, then he collapses entirely. Neighbors get an ambulance to take him to the hospital (he crashes once in the ER). After a 2 month stay he finally gets to go home with a shiny new colostomy bag and an arm that won't go above 90 degrees from his body.

Consensus was that the second shot was a misfire of some kind, which probably saved his life.* But he took great pleasure in imagining that the guy ran because he saw John pull a bullet out of himself.

* He died about 10 years later from complications with his bag.

Again, is the story true? I have no way of knowing, so I only know what my friend and John told me. But he did have injuries that were consistent with it.

[Kitten Champion]

Oh, I was watching through some of Lindsay Ellis' videos when I got around to returning to her analysis of The Hobbit trilogy.

I had genuinely forgotten how cartoony those movies got. When she repeatedly goes back to the clip of the Dwarves fighting Smaug at the end of the second movie to demonstrate the lack of tension in the series it was an "Oh, right, this BS".

Thorin riding on a metal shield on a river of freshly melted liquid gold - which I believe should be over 1,000 °C - and the cast utterly ignoring dragon fire so long as it didn't technically hit them directly being the two prominent ones.

Also, how could've I forgotten Legolas. He moved from "can move with supernatural grace and dexterity" in LotR to "can ignore gravity on a whim" by the third Hobbit movie.

[factotum]

I watched the first Hobbit movie and frankly had no desire to watch any of the others after that...

[Tyndmyr]

I was watching Disney's Three Musketeers from all the way back in '93 where they did that trope at the end. Where Charlie Sheen - as Aramis - gets shot by Tim Curry's Richelieu at near point-blank range and Sheen ends up surviving because of a crucifix hidden under his robes blocking the bullet, and you get a "there is a God"-moment kind of played for laughs after it's revealed what saved him.


It's usually a crucifix, bible, or maybe a lucky coin of some kind in these situations.

A coin probably wouldn't do it, simply because of physics. If you spread the force out over a large area and/or large weight, it's fine. That's why recoil hurts less than a bullet, despite Newton's guidelines of motion.

A bible...maaaybe. I could see a thick enough book being plausible with a sufficiently old timey gun, as some of the pistols were of quite small caliber. Really depends on the era and model, but certainly within easy handwaving range. The cross as well, I suppose. If it were large, and of very durable composition. Extremely lucky in any case, but at least physically possible. You would still need literally everything to line up perfectly.

But stopping a bullet with a coin would probably result in a coin with a hole in it and the bullet slamming into you. If the coin were constructed of unobtanium, somehow, the bullet would merely slam the coin into you.


Shotguns are not an area of effect weapon. A shotgun with a wide-open choke firing buckshot spreads about 1 inch for every 36 inches of range. By the time this gets far enough to hit more than one person, or even hit somebody that you weren't aiming properly at, the balls will have lost almost all energy. Birdshot spreads more, but generally doesn't do much damage to human-sized targets.

Yeah. Unrealism in movies and games usually is more on the side of the spread being significant. *Most* shotguns do not spread any appreciable amount at room ranges and can be essentially treated as a large-bore rifle for the purposes of portraying what happens.



Explosions also look way too flashy in movies. Almost every movie explosion is a gas explosion. They're relatively controllable in use and friggin awesome to look at, but they're not ideal for most weapon systems. In real life an RPG is barely going to produce any flame effects, it's just going to penetrate your armored vehicle and either kill the engine or the unlucky occupant(s) sitting in that spot.

There is a weird partial exception here for the film T-34, which is a...very Russian movie that is about tanks. There may be a plot, I'm not sure, but mostly the heroes are tanks killing other tanks, and while I would not say everything is realistic in it(at all), the way tank rounds hit other tanks is often surprisingly good, with no fireball at all, merely some liquidification and blowing a small hole through...everything.

This is most definitely not the norm, but maybe interesting to consider if you enjoy watching tanks murder each other in slow-mo.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

There is a weird partial exception here for the film T-34, which is a...very Russian movie that is about tanks. There may be a plot, I'm not sure, but mostly the heroes are tanks killing other tanks, and while I would not say everything is realistic in it(at all), the way tank rounds hit other tanks is often surprisingly good, with no fireball at all, merely some liquidification and blowing a small hole through...everything.

This is most definitely not the norm, but maybe interesting to consider if you enjoy watching tanks murder each other in slow-mo.

Tanks are also a bit of a funny exception in general. While the impact of the round is often very violent, the firing of the gun can be noticeably lackluster, especially in older films, because they're firing blanks and firing blanks is simply not the same as the real thing. I think it was in The Beast (1988) that they pioneered the method of having a bucket (of sorts) of water on top of the blank. The water provided recoil, making the tank shake as if a real round was fired, and turned into steam for a satisfying cloud of smoke coming out of the barrel. Looks pretty real.