Cliche Storm / Film

Films — Animation

• Alpha and Omega. Entire movie in a nutshell: Male falls in love with female. Male realizes he can't be with female because their love is forbidden due to them being different. Male and female get captured, wake up in a new location, and have to find their way home. Then throw in a bunch of kiddie humor during their adventure. Male and female finally arrive home, but the female dies. Oh, she didn't actually die. Male and female, despite their differences, fall in love, and live Happily Ever After. The end. AND there's a direct-to-video series where they have 3 children.
• While it was largely well-received, a number of critics have noted that The Bad Guys (2022) is pretty by-the-book in regards to both animated family film tropes and heist movie tropes; there's a Villain Protagonist who undergoes a Heel–Face Turn after discovering that Good Feels Good, his idealist mentor turns out to have been Evil All Along and frames him for a heist, forcing the protagonist and his friends to Clear Their Name, and the climactic heist involves using the old switcheroo.
• Brave is often regarded as this, considering it stars a Rebellious Princess (all too common in Disney films) and struggled a bit to distinguish itself from previous movies such as Tangled and How to Train Your Dragon. To its credit, though, it did take a more subversive take on the worn formula it operated on.
• Cars is considered to be the first of these from Pixar. It's easy to imagine a little counter in the corner dinging whenever you see a Pixar cliché. Stranger in a community or group; brooding moment from a side character; wacky sidekick who forms a comedic duo with the main character; said group full of wacky members with their own quirks; all of the development threatens to go downhill when something happens to separate or alienate the stranger, until they all decide they like this new stranger and want him back in the group; The stranger decides that s/he really is a member of the group. It doesn't help it's a beat-for-beat Recycled Script of Doc Hollywood.
  • One of the major complaints about the sequel is the fact that the Cliché Storm element is taken to nigh painful extremes. The clichés were even more evident in Cars 2 because they were using action-movie clichés too, more notable than simple Pixar clichés.
  • The Spin-Off Planes, which is not made by Pixar, is just the typical "underdog overcomes the odds and wins in the end" story, except the characters are planes and cars. It even includes one of the worst rival clichés ever - the "the rival is actually a dirty cheater behind the scenes" cliché.
• Charming: A prince is cursed and must go on a standard fantasy quest to lift the curse before the arbitrary time limit. He's joined by a thief who's presented as being Not Like Other Girls, and while they bicker at first they eventually fall in love and hook up (after the obligatory Not What It Looks Like moment where they believe the other doesn't return their feelings). Several fairy tales get lampooned along the way, in manners that have already been done to death by other Fractured Fairy Tale stories (e.g. Sleeping Beauty having narcolepsy).
• Coco: You've seen this movie before. Kid with dreams that his family doesn't approve of, Parental Abandonment, talent show the protagonist wants to enter, revered hero revealed as Jerkass Broken Pedestal, etc. Not that it's a bad thing.
• Delgo: a beautiful princess falls in love with The Hero, who has to unite their Feuding Families and fight the Evil Chancellor. All that, just gleaned from the trailer. Add in the annoying sidekick, who is just so useless until the end when he "saves" the hero, except he gets attacked by some flying frog things as a result... Considering how it had the worst opening weekend for a wide-release movie in history...
  • One comment on a Mogulus stream channel chat summed it up thusly: "It's like they got their script from TV Tropes!"
• Every Disney Animated Canon Direct to Video sequel by Disneytoon Studios.
  • Although, some have thought that Cinderella III: A Twist in Time was somewhat deconstructive, and it also lampshaded several tropes played in the original fairy tale (e.g., the king asking why the prince is so in love with someone over their choice in footwear, characters seemingly being very suspicious about choice of love).
  • Bambi II also plays around with several parts of the first film, even if its "Well Done, Son" Guy plot is still relatively much more formulaic, given the first Bambi had one of the most nuanced and original forms of storytelling in the entire Disney filmography.
• The Emoji Movie is infamous for this. One of the film's biggest criticisms is that it is an unashamed mishmash of animated movie clichés from its era, as highlighted in this video comparing it (or more, merely its trailer) to the many, many works that it is derivative of. People had even begun (correctly) predicting the plot beats, characters, and the ending for this film since before the posters were even released: The generic protagonist who doesn't fit in and goes on an adventure seeking to conform. Along the way, he meets an obnoxious comic relief and a generic tough girl who happens to be a princess dreaming of more while being hunted down by an order obsessed villain. She is defeated, which results in a giant dance party. We also get a message about being yourself when the movie itself lacks an identity.
• Epic (2013): In the words of reviewer Matt Zoller Seitz:
  "There's a protagonist grieving over her mother's recent death, and a brilliant but scatterbrained father who loves his child but isn't the strong parental figure she desperately needs. There's a hidden world akin to Alice's Wonderland that the inquisitive heroine explores. There are beleaguered good guys that she joins in a war against bad guys that represent chaos and decay; their leader is a funny despot with a European accent. There's a mythology that will be fulfilled when good guys take a fragile pod on a journey toward a prophesied end. There's a young warrior with whom the heroine forms a flirtatious friendship. There's a tough older warrior who mentors the younger warrior. There are comic sidekicks, and a beautiful forest queen who utters platitudes about the cycles of life and then dies."
• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within uses many of the tropes from the game series (monsters appearing out of nowhere, romance side-plot, adventure to discover the truth behind supernatural events etc.) and there have been a dozen games. Naturally, this is the result.
• The animated The King and I falls into this trap hard. While its source material was a standard Disneyesque boy-meets-girl Period Piece, the animated version takes this a step further by adding an Evil Chancellor, some Gratuitous Animal Sidekicks, an action-packed climax and an Everybody Lives/Disney Death ending.
• The LEGO Movie has a lot of clichés par the course for your standard action blockbuster, including The Everyman who rises to become The Hero; the villain who wants to destroy the world; the Action Girlfriend with a Jerkass Romantic False Lead who's also Batman; the old Mentor Archetype who's the only one with any faith in The Hero; etc. Of course, this being a self-aware LEGO film, it's relentlessly parodied. In a clever Plot Twist, the third act justifies the clichéd storyline by revealing it's all being played out in the imagination of an eight-year-old boy trying to cope with his Control Freak father who won't let him play with LEGO the way he wants.
• One of major criticisms put towards My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) was that the story just rehashes the basic plot formula seen in the show's adventure arcs with more typical fantasy adventure cliches. A villain appears in Equestria who easily defeats the ruling princesses and forces Twilight and her friends to search for a way to defeat them while meeting stock character archetypes in standard fantasy settings, like a cynical rogue with a hidden heart of gold in Wretched Hive, a sheltered princess in a Hidden Elf Village, Twilight's friends abandon her after she snaps at them, and a villainous second-in-command with a tragic past.
• One of the most common criticisms of Pocahontas is that it played out like a laundry list of Disney Renaissance clichés (a Rebellious Princess who wants "something more" out of life, a disapproving parent who wants her to marry someone she doesn't love, Non Human Sidekicks who serve no real purpose to the plot other than to sell toys...) at a time when the Disney formula was starting to feel a bit stale.
  • The other theatrical films get accused of this also, especially around the Turn of the Millennium when it was becoming clear that Disney's Animated Musical formula was becoming overused, repetitive, and increasingly copied: sappy "I Want" songs, wisecracking sidekicks, charismatic villains who may or may not suffer a Disney Villain Death, rebellious princesses. Pocahontas got hit with this more than the others, since it not only exhibited just about every 1990s animated movie cliché, but did so in a movie Very Loosely Based on a Dubious Historical Account.
  • Wish (2023), being made for the company’s 100th anniversary, invokes this trope, deliberately pulling many cliches found in previous Disney animated movies. However, a number of critics consider this to be to its detriment; that it spends so much time paying homage to the Disney films of the past that it doesn't do much to forge its own identity.
• Planet 51 deliberately uses a lot of cliches from 1950s alien invasion movies. However, some found this palette swap a little boring.
• The two animated Pelle Politibil movies; from a baby bird seperated from his mother the heroes decide to take care of to bad guys trying to destroy a dam the heroes are later framed for 'helping'. See also the Live-Action Film entry below.
• Quest for Camelot was also widely criticized for being essentially a laundry-list of contemporary animated movie cliches. David Kronke of the Los Angeles Times even called it out as such in his review, saying it was "A nearly perfect reflection of troubling trends in animated features.''
• The Ratchet & Clank film revolves around an orphan who lives on a quiet backwater planet and is also The Last of His Kind. Said orphan idolizes a hero and dreams of becoming one, gains a small sidekick, and undergoes training. The hero grows jealous of the protagonist for stealing his spotlight and later betrays his team because of it. The protagonist gives up on his dream after a failed mission, but later comes back and convinces the hero who betrayed him to realize what he did was wrong, then they both team up and save the galaxy. Also, the villain has a planet-destroying weapon, is later usurped by a lesser antagonist who suffers a Disney Villain Death, but is revealed to have survived in The Stinger and became roboticized. It even got to a point where the Sequel Hook stated "Oh, like you didn't see this coming."
• The movie Rio is a compilation of every trope common to kids movies in the 2000s, especially Dreamworks movies. Jesse Eisenberg (whose acting and voice makes him qualify as a sort-of Michael Cera clone) plays a Last of His Kind Blue Bird who doesn't know how to fly and tries to woo another just-discovered bird of his species, this one a Hot-Blooded action girl played by Anne Hathaway. Rounding out the cast are a vain, egocentric, and Faux Affably Evil villain bird played by a Tim Curry soundalike (in this case, Jemaine Clement), a goofy comic relief duo in the form of a cardinal voiced by Will.I.Am and a canary voiced by Jamie Foxx, and a happily married Henpecked Husband Mentor Toucan played by George Lopez. An quirky odd couple type romance followed by learning how to fly Just in Time (with the help of The Power of Love) scene are both bound to happen. The sequel takes it a step further, with sequel offspring, Villain Decay, and a plot that's very predictable.
• The protagonist of Shark Tale dreams of fame, lies to everyone about being the hero, get involved in a romantic subplot borne of poor communication and because this is a kids movie, everyone just lets him off the hook.
• The infamous Titanic: The Legend Goes On has an insane list of clichés found in kids' movies (especially Disney ones). Talking animal characters, a bad character with incompetent henchmen, a girl with an evil stepfamily, Love at First Sight, Disneyfication gone mad, and more clichés are there to show its notoriety. Go to the article to see the full list of clichés.

Films — Live-Action

• 911 Nightmare, a 2016 Lifetime Movie of the Week starring Fiona Gubelmann as 911 operator Christine McCullers was in part, a parody of cliched Lifetime movies, although it was definitely dark and edgy, with none of the usual comedic parody elements. It didn't do anything particularly original as a Police Procedural but it was apparently intended as a parody, according to Word of Saint Paul.
• Two of James Cameron's films, Avatar and Titanic (1997), show that this trope isn't always bad. Avatar is even self-aware of its clichés (calling the Mineral MacGuffin "Unobtanium") and Cameron has said "It's just Dances with Wolves In Space". They became very high-grossing films and were well-liked by critics, even despite how many people only saw it to see the pretty technical aspects and Scenery Porn.
• Battle: Los Angeles: A group of Marines, one about to get married, one trying to gain citizenship, one two days from retirement, one with a baby on the way, one a fresh faced rookie, one struggling to cope, and one who lost his brother, use the power of teamwork and More Dakka to defend the United States from an Alien Invasion.
• Big Ass Spider!: A secret government experiment accidentally creates a really big alien-hybrid spider, which proceeds to go on a rampage in Los Angeles. Fortunately, the film is intentionally humorous.
• Critics dismissed Bohemian Rhapsody as this because it hits all of the typical beats of a story about a rock band's climb to the top. While this is technically true, it may have ended up this way because the plot takes place over a period of fifteen years and had to be greatly condensed in order to fit into a two-hour film. In the end, it made its budget back three times over in four days because it turns out that with a Queen biopic, plot probably matters less than an actor's ability to transform into Freddie Mercury (which Rami Malek did exceptionally well), Awesome Music, and Costume Porn.
• One of the biggest criticisms of The Bye Bye Man is that it borrows heavily from other horror films, but fails to do anything particularly original on its own.
• Intentionally invoked in The Cabin in the Woods, which throws in nearly every horror-movie cliche ever. Justified in that the cliches are a requirement of The Ancient Ones who must be placated by the ritual.
• Chicago: "The Press Conference Rag" is an example, albeit one which is not apparent to the modern viewer. Roxie's Back Story, as given by Billy (Country Mouse, rich family, dead parents, raised in a convent, Vague Age, Shotgun Wedding) was the Back Story of every young woman who wanted to get into showbiz in The Roaring '20s. By 1927 (when the play Chicago is based on was written) it was such an obvious sob story that, had the author attempted to sell it as anything other than an Amoral Attorney's attempt to stir up sympathy for his client, the audience would have rolled their eyes and said "And I'm the Queen of Sheba".
• Referenced in Casino Royale (1967) where retired spy/country gentleman Sir James Bond (David Niven) turns down the entreaties of the secret service heads of the superpowers, telling them "If I may interrupt this flow of cliche, it is now that time of day that I set apart for [playing] Debussy."
• Dante's Peak. Protagonist lost his spouse in the same disaster many years ago and is still hung up about it; jaded superior who insists that they need proof only for him to be, of course, wrong, and subsequently die a Karmic Death; most annoying character who refused to come down from the mountain and thus endangered the lives of the others dies while the dog survives; big final blow-you-out-of-your-seat special effects sequence, and even a Token Romance... And yet, for all that, it still manages to be good.
• In a So Bad, It's Good way, both Darktown Strutters and Order of the Black Eagle. These movies aren't related at all, they just fit together when run matinee style due to using exactly half of all available tropes ever created prior to the 80s. The combination effect induces what can only be described as an effect similar to a caffeine rush without the coffee.

• Deathlands: A cocktail of every sci-fi movie you've ever seen, thrown together on a budget equal to the price of a bus ticket.
• The Disappointments Room uses a lot of horror clichés, including scares involving a person simply standing behind someone else with a Scare Chord playing, and more.
• Cheap Sylvester Stallone vehicle D-Tox. Stallone plays a cop who, after punching a Cymbal-Banging Monkey, finds out his wife has been killed by his nemesis. He develops a drink problem and is sent to a remote, snowy rehab place. People get killed off one by one. And who's doing the killing? Why, the Evil Brit! As you'd expect from a film populated by alcoholics, you get an Anvilicious message:
  "Booze may be a slow-burner, but it's still suicide."
• MAD's Dirty Dancing parody spoofed not just the movie, put pointed out the cliche used in the scene they were spoofing in each panel; a display of Lampshading that would have done TV Tropes proud.
• Dungeons & Dragons (2000), The Movie. It's easy to imagine little "DING!" noises and a counter display ratcheting up as each cliché goes by. The film makes for an impressive drinking game.
• The Expendables, but that's precisely the point.
  • In fact, it hits up more tropes than expected, particularly during the middle section, which unfortunately bores those who knows exactly what the main character's going to decide to do, and just wants him to get on with it.
  • The Expendables 2 was even worse, which admittedly made it even more enjoyable. The best example was when Billy "The Kid" Timmons, the young guy who's hopelessly in love, showed Barney Ross a picture of his girlfriend, and told him he wanted to quit but would finish the month. Every single person watching knew exactly what his fate was. Hell, even the character he was talking to knew what his fate was. And the movie delivers, on time and as expected, with just about the most wonderfully over-the-top death scene possible.
• F the Prom is your typical troperrific high school comedy that tries to pass off as being "relatable to teens".
• Self-aware in A Few Good Men, where Tom Cruise's character has a throwaway conversation with the local newsstand vendor involving each of them trying to wryly out-cliche the other.
• Gemini Man is about an elite but aging assassin being chased by his 23-year-old clone. It is often seen as an inferior use of Looper's premise. Many perceive it as prioritizing special effects (and 4K/3D/120fps) over the plot.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is chock-full of every action movie cliche most people have ever seen. If you want an explanation, look no further than Christopher Orr's review of the movie, in which he decides to just let it speak for itself by providing 40 of the lines that sum up the entire plot and all of the typical one-liners and plot points it has. It's really a shame though, considering it had some great actors who did the best they could with the material they were given. Then again, for fans of the movie, this could be exactly what they liked about it.

• The Hallmark Channel is famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for heavily exploiting this, especially with their Christmas specials. The Christmas Special usually consists of a woman who doesn't have someone to spend the holidays, later bumps into a guy that she later falls in love with, they solve the conflict of the story (usually consisting of giving the Christmas spirit to a holiday-hater), and ends with the main cast celebrating Christmas in the protagonist's house. The writing tends to be cheesy, too. Regardless, many a fan consider these specials to be a Guilty Pleasure.
  • A word of advice: If your TV's tuned in to Hallmark during Christmastime, do not play a drinking game with the commercials for said long string of movies. You will collapse—especially if it involves the narration: "But she soon discovers...that nothing is so/more X...as/than falling in love." (Almost as frequent: "...as/than family.")
• Done on purpose in Hardcore Henry to give the movie some excuses for its Unbroken First-Person Perspective. The movie is a pretty unique example of this trope because it invokes videogame clichés, not film clichés.
• Hollow Man as the film goes on turns into your typical horror film despite the awesome special effects.
• Subverted in almost every possible way throughout Inglourious Basterds, a film in which almost everything you expect in a World War II action film turns out exactly the opposite of what you'd expect.
  • Unlike Saving Private Ryan... aside from the Normandy Beach scene, which broke some serious new ground in that genre.
• Into the Storm (2014): It's a giant-killer-tornado film. A scrappy team of twister-hunters with an Obsessed Jerkass Leader, a slab of New Meat, a Hot Single Mom Scientist, a Black Guy and a Cool Car are thrown together with a strict workaholic widower trying to raise two teenaged boys, and a couple of idiotic thrill-seeking yokels. Amazingly, the black guy survives, and the widower apparently doesn't hook up with the hot scientist, even after saving her life.
• Jupiter Ascending. A Rags to Royalty Plucky Girl meets a Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot Super-Soldier and falls in love with him, while they team up to fight through each member of a sibling villain trio who want to destroy humanity. In the end, the A God Am I Non-Action Big Bad receives a Disney Villain Death, Everybody Lives, and the two protagonists get a Relationship Upgrade.
• Many Quentin Tarantino movies are like this, but Kill Bill is the poster child. And you will love every last second.

• The Amy Adams flick Leap Year is not so much a film as it is the feeding every Rom Com and Oireland cliche imaginable into a blender and making the audience drink the result.
• Renny Harlin's The Legend of Hercules is a perfect storm of Ancient Grome clichés, including scenes blatantly ripping off 300, Gladiator, and Clash of the Titans.
• Parodied in Loaded Weapon 1 with this exchange:
  Gen. Morters: Where's the microfilm, Mike?
  Mike McCracken: I don't know, I gave it to York. I thought she was one of your men.
  Gen. Morters: Act in haste, repent in leisure.
  Mike McCracken: But he who hesitates is lost.
  Gen. Morters: Never judge a book by its cover.
  Mike McCracken: What you see is what you get.
  Gen. Morters: Loose lips, sink ships...
  Mike McCracken: Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing or fighting, my friend.
  [Gen. Morters, cornered, looks to Mr. Jigsaw]
  [Mr. Jigsaw consults Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, shakes his head]
  Gen. Morters: Sorry Mike, no good.
• The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor has Brendan Fraser delivering cliché one-liners every few seconds.
  "I really hate mummies!"
  "Time to go!"
  "Here we go again!"
• It's nearly impossible to find a review of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones that doesn't point out how similar it is to earlier properties. Most commonly cited were Harry Potter, Twilight, and Star Wars.
• National Lampoon's Senior Trip is the bad/lazy version of this as the entire class is just one big checklist of student cliches from the High-School Hustler leader to The Stoner sidekick(s) to the lesbians with special emphasis on Miosky, who's trying everything in his power to be the next John Belushi, plus "date a blonde Jap." The only saving graces to this film is Matt Frewer as their teacher, Kevin McDonald playing an Ax-Crazy Star Trek fan out to kill them and Carla asking guys if they "want to screw."
• A common remark—for good or ill—seems to be that Oblivion (2013) is made up out of other SF movies in general.
  • A notorious sci-fi cliche was aliens coming to Earth to steal our water. Though at least the alien is turning it into energy instead.
• Pacific Rim once again shows us that Tropes Are Tools. The film manages to work with an absolute Cliché Storm of a plot that almost anyone who has seen a Kaiju movie can see coming from a mile away... but manages to make it work because Guillermo del Toro intended it as a Homage.
• The 2002 Pelle Politibil movie. The titular character arriving by a wish from a kid wishing for a miracle, for starters. So is anything written by Arthur Johansen.
• The Princess: Good Lord, where do we start? Pretty much every single Plot Device, Plot Twist, Rebellious Princess story, and even certain lines of dialogue, are either very obvious to the watcher, or based on cliche's that have been heard countless times before in countless other action, medieval, and medieval-action movies. To say the films' story is an Excuse Plot to see some choreographed action is something of an understatement.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000-featured fantasy film Quest of the Delta Knights has the Big Bad saying things like: "I grow weary of your antics, beggar man!" Ironically, and with no explanation whatever, both the Big Bad and the old man were played by David Warner. The movie was a thinly-veiled attempt to do Star Wars in a fantasy setting long before Eragon made it cool, and that's how they linked the Darth Vader and Obi-Wan characters. It's not much of an explanation, but it does seem slightly less random when you realize that.
• The Resident Evil Film Series contains so many cliches from every zombie, sci-fi and buddy action film in the past twenty years before release that it is near impossible to find something original in them. Easy Amnesia, Expendable Clones, Guns Akimbo, Stuff Blowing Up, Bullet Time, and near shot-for-shot copying of scenes from The Matrix. The films were one long-lost relative away from hitting every major cliché in the book... and then the last installment used that one, too.
• Discussed in Serenity as the setup for an action punchline:
  The Operative: "Nothing here is what it seems. He's not the plucky hero; the Alliance isn't some evil Empire; this is not the grand arena —"
  Inara: "— and that's not incense."
  BOOM!
• The biggest criticism of Shut In is that it relies too much on traditional horror clichés, such as Jump Scares and dream sequences, instead of properly building tension to provide scares. Some reviews even stated that the twist where Stephen is revealed to have been faking paralysis the whole time is easy to predict.
• Sleepover. It is a preteen chick flick comedy, but this is ridiculous. It doesn't help that most of the actresses are fresh out of Barbizon and don't even realize how many Dead Horse Tropes they're playing straight.
• Small Soldiers: Everything Hazard says is made of this, from the "roll call" when he activates his troops to his combat banter. The best bit is when he gives a hilariously cliché-ridden speech to his "soldiers", in which he actually contradicts himself by the end.
  "Soldiers, no poor sap ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by being all that he can be. Damn the torpedoes, or give me death! Eternal vigilance is the price of duty. And, to the victors go the spoils. So remember: you are the best of the best of the few and the proud. So ask not what your country can do for you, only regret that you have but one life to live!"

• The three Starship Troopers movies. These movies are all about irony, producers claim. Whether or not that works for you is your call. The first and third movies are intentional satire, the second movie is closer to this, with some heavy-handed satire.
• The portions we hear of the speech the Federation President gives at Khitomer in Star Trek VI are a political/diplomatic speech cliché storm.
• Star Wars:
  • It's somewhat hard to believe nowadays, since the movie itself has been so heavily copied, but the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, was intentionally written as a checklist of High Fantasy clichés given clichéd—although absolutely gorgeous—Space Opera window dressing. In this case, the frisson between the two genres (as well as the Spectacle) is entirely the point.
  • The Force Awakens reuses many of the most memorable plot devices and tropes of A New Hope (an orphaned protagonist on a desert planet, a Planet Destroyer super-weapon, and a villain who is a blatant Expy of Darth Vader, to name only three). However, the next movie in the new trilogy, The Last Jedi, managed to avoid being a Cliche Storm and created an identity of its own. As for whether that was a good thing...
  • One of the common criticisms of The Rise of Skywalker was how formulaic it is (it's been speculated the creators intentionally played it safe due to the controversy over The Last Jedi). By the end of the first act, it's easy to predict how the film will play out, especially since it's similar to Return of the Jedi. The hero is related to a bad guy who wants them to join the dark side. The mentor dies heroically partway through to raise the stakes. The heroes make a last stand against the bad guys who are equipped with planet-destroying weaponry, a bunch of extras/side characters get whacked, but they prevail at the last minute by blowing up the bad guy's main ship and getting an unexpected cavalry arrival.^note  unexpected for the characters, rather than the audience The hero goes to confront the Big Bad alone where they're tempted one last time to join the dark side, and they are saved by the sacrifice of a redeemed villain.
• Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li has a terribly huge number of action movie clichés, even (perhaps especially) ones which contradict the canon and tone of the Street Fighter series.
  • So did the original movie, but unlike Legend of Chun Li, it didn't suck as hard.
• The 2007 hard sci-fi epic Sunshine borrows heavily from both 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact, along with a host of other influences in the serious science fiction family of movies. The movie works though, mostly because you don't see its type very often anymore.
• Limit of Love: Umizaru. Up until the last 10 minutes, you can easily predict not only every single "unexpected twist" but every single line the characters are about to say. Even if we count that last moment where the ship sinks with the protagonist still on board, the ending is still the same. Just goes to prove it, you can only make so many movies about a sinking ship.
• When Time Ran Out.... Most of the Cliches used in that movie were the ones Irwin Allen himself have been credited with creating. (It's eerily similar to the 1972 film adaptation of The Poseidon Adventure, complete with an elderly woman fleeing for an escape dying of a heart attack and the majority of the people who stayed behind dying.)
• The complete filmography of action movie directors Roland Emmerich, Michael Bay, and Stephen Sommers, but that's not to say they aren't entertaining.
  • Sommers in particular lampshades this. In his commentary for The Mummy Returns, he notes that if you have a jungle full of ruins, you have to have Shrunken Heads.
  • He also claims that movie rules require a pointed gun to make sufficient rattling noises—about the level created by a large garbage bag full of cans is a good starting point.
• Maid in Manhattan contains pretty much most Romantic Comedy tropes, since it's a Cinderella retelling set in a Manhattan hotel.
• Status Update has been criticized for basically being a Disney Channel movie that made it to the big screen, due to the trailer including many tired plot beats: an unpopular guy becomes popular through magical means, a Love Triangle between him, the Alpha Bitch and the Nice Girl ensues, he realizes that the popularity isn't what he wanted and resolves to get his old life back.
• Universal Soldier: The Return: SETH's speech, which is both bombastic and awesome and hilarious for sounding like every other speech given by an A.I. Is a Crapshoot villain ever. At the end he even basically declares himself God.

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