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Wrong Genre Savvy: F Ilm
    Animated Films 

    Live Action Films 
  • Lady in the Water
    • The hero, Cleveland Heep, consults the movie critic in order to identify the tenants who fill in the roles of Story's helpers. However, when their plan goes awry and Story is attacked and injured, Cleveland realizes that he incorrectly identified himself. Note that the movie critic was more or less right in his ideas of who the tenants would be, but Cleveland merely interpreted the clues incorrectly.
    • Not to mention the scene where the same movie critic is confronted by the monster, and instead of running away he goes on spiel about how the movie has had no violence, deaths, lewd acts, or nudity and deduces that he is going to live with just a wound because of these factors. He must've forgotten about the female lead being naked for all her screentime.
  • In the Star Wars prequels, Obi-Wan is extremely Genre Savvy when he tells Anakin that Aristocrats Are Evil if they are politicians. Too bad he's applying this trope — and that of God Save Us from the Queen! — to Padme as well as Palpatine, because they aren't anything alike. Padme is in fact an example of The High Queen and debatably the most moral character in the whole Star Wars universe. Obi Wan specifically warns Anakin to be cautious of Padme because she is a politician, and although he specifically includes Palpatine in that general categorization, against Anakin's more naive trust, the point still stands. Her being an aristocrat technically doesn't come into it but it is a variant in a way since aristocrats often are politicians in the Star Wars universe.
    Anakin Skywalker;: ... and besides, you're generalizing. The Chancellor doesn't appear to be corrupt.
    Obi-Wan Kenobi:: Palpatine is a politician. I've observed that he is very clever at following the passions and prejudices of the Senators.
    • Obi-Wan's problem is that he believes he's living in a naturalistic universe rather than a fantastical one. He's a cynic who believes that all politicians are corrupt and self-serving. He doesn't believe that any of them could be effective, let alone really dangerous: the worst they can do is take advantage of a crisis to serve their own ends. It never occurs to him to think that one of these politicians is actually a devious puppet master who is engineering a crisis in a bid to bring the entire political system down. Ironically, his status as the Only Sane Man works against him: if he'd realized he was in a universe where there actually is an Ancient Conspiracy working behind the scenes, he might have spotted Palpatine sooner.
    • The entire Jedi Order during the last days of the Old Republic have this problem too: they see themselves as the stalwart protectors of a noble old order (and perhaps they really were at one point). In reality they're the arrogant and hidebound old masters whose inflexibility and strict adherence to tradition almost directly leads to the fall of their most powerful member and their complete destruction at his hands.
      • In Matt Stover's novelization of Revenge of the Sith, Yoda realizes this the moment he and Palpatine's lightsabers clash. Skill and power were irrelevant — the Sith had already won because they had become something new while the Jedi had remained the same. The Jedi had been preparing for the wrong kind of war.
  • The unease audiences feel toward Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs is heightened by his seemingly unsavvy placement in the structure of the story. Genre conventions would make him the villain. But the story's villain is Buffalo Bill. "Hannibal the Cannibal" is actually the Trickster Mentor. He is Yoda to Clarice's Luke, the shadow counterpart of her FBI academy instructor. Other characters call him a monster, but Clarice addresses him as she would a teacher and he is among those who congratulate her when she graduates. His function in the story places him much closer to the main character than we would expect him to be, and far too close for comfort. With his breakout at the end of the film, this genre-savvy character sheds the mentor role and assumes a more conventional role as villain. In a sense, his act signals a return to "order".
  • Last Action Hero: Child hero Danny rides his bicycle head-on to play chicken with the main villain's car, reasoning that it has to work because he's the hero in a non-R rated movie where the kid would never die. Then it dawns on him that he's the Plucky Comic Relief instead, and is vulnerable. Cue ET visual gag.
    • The second half of the movie deals heavily with how badly Jack Slater's Genre Savvy as an Action Hero fails him in the gritty, real world until he learns the new rules whereas Benedict becomes Dangerously Genre Savvy right out of the gate instead.
  • A positive example: Guy from Galaxy Quest, though for the most part Genre Savvy, goes through the events of the film in a depressed and terrified state, because he is convinced that he is nothing more than a designated Red Shirt among the Show Within a Show's stars (even his name suggests thisnote ). In the end, he is told that he has a promising future as the Plucky Comic Relief.
    • In fact, everyone in that movie who acts like it's a movie is proven wrong, and everyone who acts like it's real is proven just as wrong.
    • For an even bigger payoff, pay attention during the shootout on the bridge. Everybody except Guy gets shot.
  • Jack Burton of Big Trouble in Little China thinks he's a sort of western-style hero who takes charge and beats the bad guys with guts and bravado. However, he doesn't know anything about all the eastern mysticism going on. His best friend Wang has to explain everything to him. It's Wang who is actually the hero, out to rescue his girlfriend. Jack is actually the sidekick, just tagging along and trying to recover his lost truck.
    • Wang may be the hero, but Jack is the one who kills the Big Bad.
  • Near the end of The Madness Of King George, Lord Chancellor Thurlow wastes time announcing the king's return to health by bemoaning the messenger in King Lear who arrives too late to save Cordelia. The whole film is an averted Lear — something the king seems to recognize, even if Thurlow doesn't.
  • Common in Coen Brothers films, especially the comedies. While the characters are actually a part of an Idiot Plot none of them realize it.
    • Everyone in The Big Lebowski, to some extent.
      • The Stranger from is convinced that he is in a western.
      • Maude and the Big Lebowski think they're in a Film Noir.
      • The Kraftwerk-nihilists seem to believe they are the Villain Protagonists in a Quentin Tarantino Black Comedy.
      • Walther seems to think he is in some deep moody drama about damaged Vietnam veterans.
      • The Dude thinks he is the protagonist of a sixties stoner-flick.
      • Bunny apparently thinks her world is a Porn with Plot-adventure of some sort.
      • Donny seems to believe he is living a completely ordinary Real Life.
    • Chad and Lynda from Burn After Reading both start acting like they're in a Spy Drama after they find a disc with the financial records of a former CIA analyst, acting all mysterious around the analyst and refusing to give their real names. However, they're in a Black Comedy, so Hilarity Ensues.
  • The Pirates of the Caribbean movie series has a faint undercurrent of this throughout: nearly every character thinks they're in a different story than they actually are. There's a subtle Deconstructionist aspect as well, as established pirate Tropes are played with and/or dismantled.
    • In The Curse Of The Black Pearl, Elizabeth thinks Barbossa's crew are standard pilfer-and-loot pirates who would hold her for ransom if they found out she's the Governor's daughter. Unfortunately, they're not after something so mundane as money, and the name she chooses to give them - Turner - is actually the very name they're looking for. She also expects pirates to honor the Code of the Brethren as if it were a binding rule of law, not realizing that Barbossa is a Genre Savvy Rules Lawyer who sees the Code more as "guidelines."
    • In Dead Man's Chest, when the Kraken is taking down a ship full of Red Shirts, one of the merchants runs forward, bravely offering what they had previously thought was the dress of a ghost who was haunting their ship. That would have worked out a lot better for him if he had been in a ghost story, and if that ghost story was actually about him.
    • Elizabeth also spends a good deal of the first movie expecting and hoping one of the pirates she runs into would be like the romantic, dashing rouges she reads about in her books, or for them to at least adhere to some honor-among-thieves morality. Over the course of the film she's increasingly disillusioned (Barbossa shirks the code whenever it inconveniences him, the Black Pearl crew want to rape her, Jack Sparrow's a horny, opportunistic drunk, Jack's own crew don't bother to rescue their captain once they get their ship...) until the very end. When Will risks his life to do what's right, she sees he's the kind of heroic ne'er-do-well she'd been hoping to see.
    • This gets a lampshade in the first movie, when Barbossa taunts Elizabeth by telling her she'd best start believing in ghost stories, because she's in one.
  • In The Man Who Knew Too Little, the "hero" thinks he's in a huge role-play featuring acted danger and spying.
  • An exchange from Detroit Rock City, about whether or not some road-tripping stoners should pick up a hitchhiker:
    Jam: It's a teenage girl walking along the side of the highway. They make scary movies that start out like that!
    Trip: But they make porno movies that start out like that too, man!
  • Park Chang-yi in The Good, the Bad and the Weird is basically a melodramatic and serious Shōnen anime villain stuck in a goofy Korean parody of Spaghetti westerns.
  • Stranger Than Fiction is a unique case, where the main character realizes he's in a story after he starts hearing his own narration. He seeks out help to try to become Genre Savvy, and correctly deduces that in the context of his narrator's story, he's in a tragedy, which is ironically Wrong Genre Savvy as the meta-story (the movie about the story about a man who hears his own narrator, i.e., the movie you're watching) is actually a comedy.
  • The hostages in From Dusk Till Dawn, particularly Scott Fuller, have all the Genre Savvy needed to survive in a heist film or hostage-taking film. Scott even lampshades this by telling his father, "I've seen this on TV, Dad!" Pity for them the bar the Gecko Brothers choose to stop at is full of Fricking Vampire Strippers!
  • Return of the Living Dead: When confronted with a reanimated cadaver, a group of characters put a pick axe through its brain based on what they know about zombies from seeing Night of the Living Dead. It has no effect.
    Burt: I thought you said if we destroyed the brain, it'd die!
    Frank: It worked in the movie!
    Burt: Well, it ain't workin' now, Frank!
    Fred: You mean the movie lied?
    • Ironically, the idea of zombies who are smart enough to repeatedly moan "Brains" and/or who explicitly feel overpowering hunger instead of mindlessly eating, comes from this trilogy, not the original series.
      • Or even care about brains; the originals seemed to show a distinct preference for liver.
  • The college kids from Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil believe they are in a typical Hillbilly Horrors-style horror film after two rednecks announce that they "have" one of their friends and they start dying one by one. In actuality, they're in a comedy and the two hillbillies saved the girl from drowning. All the deaths are a result of the "victims" being Too Dumb to Live. On the flip side, Chad believes he is The Hero who is going to defeat the evil hillbillies and get the girl. He's actually the villain.
  • In the little-known Alien ripoff Creature, someone says they remember seeing an old movie (specifically, The Thing from Another World) where they tried to stop the monster from killing everyone with an electrified forcefield. Not too effective against this monster.
  • The camp Disney flick Condorman features a comic book artist as its protagonist, who dreams of being a comic book action hero. He gets his chance when he persuades his CIA buddy to let him take a courier mission, but then proceeds to ham it up as the most ludicrously obvious Cloak & Dagger spy ever — which causes the Soviet agent he's meeting with to fall in love with him and defect. In a weird way, his Wrong Genre Savviness actually twists the story until he is a superhero in a spy movie.
  • The knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail tend to act like they are in a standard Arthurian romance, without realising they are in anything from 1) A very low budget Arthurian Romance, 2) A realistic depiction of the dark ages, 3) A musical, or 4) A modern day Police Procedural.
    • Lancelot's Tale has a very obvious example of this. He keeps talking about how he's going to fulfill this quest of saving a Damselin Distress in his own "idiom" only for everything to go wrong for him since the movie's a parody. The script actually uses the word "genre" outright, but John Cleese forgot the correct word while filming resulting in a much funnier scene.
  • In the 2009 Star Trek, the "new" Kirk assumes that a Romulan from The Future would know what the Enterprise crew will do, so they should be unpredictable. His Vulcan shipmate more accurately recognizes that the Romulan and his ship are a Timeline-Altering MacGuffin, causing a new chain of events (though nonetheless failing to prevent the assemblage of the same Enterprise crew). Later, old-Spock takes advantage of Kirk's ignorance to falsely "imply" that Never the Selves Shall Meet is a rule of this particular Timey-Wimey Ball.
  • My Name is Bruce has this from two angles: Jeff kidnaps Bruce Campbell, expecting him to be a real-life Bad Ass like Ash, and hoping that he can cure Gold Lick's monster problem. Bruce, on the other hand, is oblivious to the horror because he thinks that the whole thing's a prank.
  • Sam in TRON Legacy holds the lightcycle baton like a lightsaber.
    Sam: What's this? What do I do with this?
    Jarvis: I'll give you a hint ... Not that.
  • Tom in (500) Days of Summer thinks that he's in a romantic comedy where everyone gets their happy endings, you can stand up to people hitting on your girlfriend and knock them out with one punch (when he tries this, the guy gets up right away and kicks his ass), etc. Justified because he's grown up on romantic comedies and confused them with reality (and missed the point of The Graduate). He's in a Deconstruction of a love story.
  • Queen Narissa, the antagonist of Enchanted, singlehandedly puts the "decon" in the film's Decon-Recon Switch of fairy-tale movies, but fails to recognize the "recon". The one character she can easily handle is Edward, who besides Pip is the only one who lacks Hidden Depths beyond what would be expected of the genre.
    • In one scene Giselle talks with her young friend Morgan, who is nervous about her father marrying Nancy, having read plenty of stories involving a Wicked Stepmother. Giselle assures her that most stepmothers are actually very nice people, a true lesson that proves its worth when Giselle becomes Morgan's stepmother. Unfortunately, Giselle uses her own stepmother-to-be Narissa as an example, unaware that Narissa actually is a wicked stepmother who is trying to kill her.
  • The priest from Outlander mistakes the moorwen for a demon and tries to exorcise it. The moorwren mauls him in the middle of his chant.
  • In The Cabin in the Woods, Marty thinks he's in a Reality TV show after discovering a hidden camera in his room. What he doesn't realise is that he's about to sabotage a ritual sacrifice that's needed to prevent the end of the world.
  • The Fugitive: When Kimble escapes through the storm drains and comes to a point where they bisect, he tosses his jacket down one tunnel and goes down the other one. The pursuing US Marshals aren't fooled for a second, they simply split up in order to check both passages. Later, when calling his lawyer, Kimble lies and says he's in St. Louis, correctly suspecting that the cops might be eavesdropping—but not that their equipment would determine that Kimble's in Chicago.
  • X-Men: First Class:
    • Bob Hendry assumes that Shaw will kill him once he gets what he wants, and prepares for it. But he didn't bet on Shaw being an extremely powerful mutant, not just a man with mutants working for him.
    • Charles Xavier seems to think he's in a Silver Age Science Fiction story that will easily be resolved once he and his friends defeat Shaw. Actually, he's part of a larger conflict between humans and mutants, and he and his best friend are destined to become reluctant arch-enemies in the oncoming war.
  • Wayne seems to think the problems in the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids movies are because the kids keep coming into contact with his machine. As a result, when he needs to use it in the final film he makes sure the kids are out of the house, so nothing can possibly go wrong and shrink them. While they do manage to stay out of trouble (or at least shrunken trouble, as the get in over their heads since they are "Alone" for the weekend) because of this the problem is actually the machine itself as Wayne and his brother rather stupidly stand in range of the machine while checking something and figure its fine because "nobody is in the house to hit the button". Sure enough a random object hits the button, and they get shrunk.
  • In Troy, Paris thought the world works like a romantic poem. Hector angrily informs him about how War Is Hell. Later, Paris thinks The Power of Love can motivate him to defeat Menelaus in a duel. The old but incredibly strong and experienced warrior beats the shit out of him.
  • Lampshaded in Santa's Slay when Nicholas shines a light in the evil Santa's face, and it doesn't do anything.
    Santa: I'm Santa Claus, not fucking Dracula!
  • The police in The Terminator believe themselves to be in a standard slasher movie. To their credit, they would have done very well against, say, Jason Voorhees. As soon as they receive the death certificates of the first two ladies named Sarah Connor, they send out a news bulletin to warn any other Sarah Connors that might be out there as well as their friends and family, and they keep officers on the 911 lines just in case one of the Sarahs calls in. Then they bust open a crate of M16s and hide Sarah behind a wall of guns. If the titular Terminator wasn't Immune to Bullets, the movie would have been over in about 25 minutes.
  • In This Is the End, the reason why Emma Watson steals the drinks from the protagonists is because she thought she was in a zombie movie and that they were about to rape her.
  • In Fresh, the titular character has a friend named Chucky who he brings into the business of running drugs. Unlike Fresh who is a smart teen, Chucky is a Leeroy Jenkins who's obsessed with the gangster movies, gangsta rap music, and comic books like The Punisher. When the two go on their first delivery job at night, they get jacked by rival drug dealers. Fresh warned Chucky beforehand that if they get jacked to drop the book bags filled with drugs and run. However, Chucky, thinking he's in a gangster film, takes out his gun and starts shooting at the adult dealers - missing with every shot. They kill him and Fresh gets away. In fact, the whole film is about a young man being Genre Savvy.
  • Shuttle
    • Andy, one of the passengers, keeps insisting that The Driver just wants their money and goods and they're only getting hurt because they keep resisting. Ultimately, Andy turns out to be The Mole, part of the kidnapping group.
    • Mel becomes convinced that their kidnappers dare not hurt her or Jules because it would hurt their value as merchandise. Jules promptly gets gassed for having a yeast infection.
  • Played for laughs in Pay It Forward. Early on a reporter is offered a Jaguar (car) for free by a stranger. He is baffled and asks if he perhaps was expected to kill the stranger's wife in return and when this is denied he suspects the Jag to be rigged and blow up in an External Combustion (which of course was not the case).
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