The heroes are being held up at gunpoint by enemy goons - things are looking really grim. So, they start hurling insults at each other, blaming their friends for getting them into this mess that's now liable to be the end of them. Their friend launches into a tirade about how it was not their fault at all, but their own. Wagging of fingers in faces or punches ensue between the arguing parties.
The heated argument usually escalates in seconds to punches, much to the confusion of the onlooking goons - who are suddenly at the receiving end of the pummeling, usually resulting in their disarmament as the heroes suddenly turn their punches towards their captor, which was their ploy all along.
Sub-Trope of Fake a Fight and We Need a Distraction. See also Refuge in Audacity and Distract and Disarm.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- In One Piece, Luffy and Law perform a fake fight in front of Doflamingo, with Luffy launching forward seemingly in an attempt to attack Law. At the last second before getting hit, Law uses his spatial manipulation powers to swap himself with Doflamingo, and Doflamingo takes Luffy's powerful hit instead.
- One episode of The Seven Deadly Sins sees Meliodas and Ban forced to fight two-on-two with a pair of demons. Naturally, they blow off the fight and instead get into a physical argument about which of them has the hotter girlfriend. Their demon opponents die after trying to attack them while they are still arguing and get torn apart by the force of Ban and Meliodas' attacks on each other.
Films—Animated
- In Toy Story 3, Woody and his friends plan to escape from Sunnyside Daycare. As part of the plan, they need to deal with Buzz, who has been forcibly reset and then tricked onto Lotso's side. On Slinky and Jessie's signal, Rex and Hamm stage a fight with each other, causing Buzz to try to break them up while saying "You can't hit each other, that's my job!" And then suddenly they slam a plastic container over Buzz and sit on it so he can't go anywhere or sound the alarm.
- Main characters Miguel and Tulio from DreamWorks Animation's The Road to El Dorado pretend to escalate into a swordfight over loaded dice to escape from the gamblers they'd swindled. Showboats that they are, the pair take a bow at the end of the performance. The pair would use this device again on the sinister Tzekel-kan, by pretending to come to blows over posing as gods. Instead, they double-whammy the villain; however, this has no effect on the Elite Mook that cornered them.
Films—Live-Action
- In Galaxy Quest, when the crew is about to be Thrown Out the Airlock, Jason picks a fight with Alex (as in episode 17) before they both launch themselves at the enemy guards and lock them into the airlock. The Power of Acting prevails.
- In Jackie Chan's Project A, Dragon and Fats seemingly start to argue while being held at gunpoint by gangsters, and manage to disarm the Mauser-wielding goon.
- At the start of 48 Hours, Billy stops his truck to ask the guards supervising a prison gang doing roadwork if he can borrow water for his truck. One of the inmates, Ganz, hurls racial slurs at him. The two soon start fighting and are soon rolling on the ground wrestling with each other. When the guards go to break them up, Billy and Ganz produce guns that Billy had hidden under his shirt and shoot the guards, jump in Billy's truck and race off.
- In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy and his father are held at gunpoint by a group of Nazis at Castle Brunwald. They then start an altercation with each other over the Grail Manuscript which they are now about to lose to the Germans. Indy uses this moment of turmoil to grab the machine gun from one of the baddies and guns down the entire group of them. Watch the scene here
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Literature
- Averted in Harry Harrison's Starworld. Jan Kulozik tells the other prisoners to provide a distraction while he hacks the door lock, in case their cell has hidden surveillance cameras. They reply that their culture is actually very pacifistic, so fighting doesn't come naturally to them, so one of them puts on a gymnastic display instead.
Live-Action TV
- In Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Jake and Holt try to escape from a prison in one episode by staging a fight between them in the hopes that the guard will open the door to break it up. When the guard just sits back to watch the show, they switch tactics and kiss instead. This immediately has the guard stepping in to separate them, which allows them to escape but leaves Jake disapproving of his homophobia that he'd be more comfortable seeing them fight than kiss.
- In Burn Notice episode "Best Laid Plans", Micheal and Jessie try to infiltrate an office pretending to be executives, using the reserved parking spaces to know who to impersonate. When the guards don't let them in, they argue and start to fight, and hold the guards at gunpoint when they rush out to break them up.
- In Criminal Minds, at one point a serial killer has Hotch and Reid hostage, and Hotch says he's been hoping to kick the crap out of "this kid" since forever so could he do that? Serial killer says okay, Hotch kicks Reid a bunch while hurling insults at him (which include reminders of how to properly fire a gun), then gets out of the way... and just when the killer barely catches on, Reid shoots him in the forehead with the little gun he pulled out of Hotch's leg harness.
- Star Trek: Voyager. In "Waking Moments" to cover the others breaking out of the cargo bay where the Hostile Aliens of the Week have them imprisoned, Seven of Nine starts a fight with Harry Kim without bothering to discuss it with Harry first.
- In Stranger Things episode "The Dive", Hopper strikes up a fight with Dmitri at the gulag which confuses the guards and allows Hopper to steal a lighter from one of them in the ensuing commotion.
Video Games
- In the Mothership Zeta DLC for Fallout 3, Somah, one of the companion characters, and the Lone Wanderer get into a brief fistfight to get the attention of their alien captors and then gang up on them when they arrive to stop it.
