We Have the Keys

"I don't know why I keep bothering to steal the keys since you always insist on kicking the door down."

— Overheard during a Dungeons & Dragons game

Along the lines of There Was a Door, an Action Hero proves their strength by busting down or through a locked door, or hotwiring a car so they can steal it. After they're proven said strength in this fashion, one of their companions holds up the keys to the door or car in question, which prompts a remark from the Hero.

This includes examples when the hero fails with their tactic, and the companion uses the simpler way, which works (thus being the Subverted Trope to "Open!" Says Me). Another possibility is that the companion unlocks the door (or tries it and finds that it wasn't locked in the first place) just before the hero breaks it down. Having a Key Under the Doormat is a frequent way of doing this.

Contrast Cutting the Knot, where violence is the simple option. Also contrast Interchangeable Antimatter Keys and Door Dumb.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Budget Direct insurance had a parody of the "eccentric genius detective who gets results". In a montage of his investigation the detective Sherlock Scans where the house key has been hidden in the front garden just as the uniformed police use a battering ram to break down the door.

Anime & Manga

• In the Dragon Ball anime, the third episode has Filler where the Pilaf Gang raid Kame House for a Dragon Ball. Pilaf struggles with opening the locked door, prompting Shu and Mai to point out the conspicuously open window next to it by climbing through it.
• In an episode of The Big O, Roger whips out a technologically advanced morphing key to unlock a door—just before Dorothy kicks it down.
• In One Piece, Franky goes to the trouble of finding the keys to Caimie's Explosive Leash, only to discover Rayleigh has already removed it by detonating it and pulling it off before the explosion reaches Caimie.

Comic Books

• During John Byrne's run on Fantastic Four there was a notable Avengers crossover involving the return of Jean Grey. At one point, Hercules and members of the FF accompanied Jean to her parents' home to uncover the reason for her resurrection, but their front door was locked. After Hercules smashed the door down, Jean took him to task, pointing out that her folks kept a spare key in a secret compartment inside a fake rock by the front step. Captain America says they'll write her parents a check for the broken door.

Films — Animation

• In The Last Unicorn, Schmendrick the Magician tries to unlock the unicorn's cage with magic. It doesn't work, so he just pulls out the keys that he stole from Mommy Fortuna.
  Schmendrick: My dear, you deserve the services of a great wizard, but I'm afraid you'll have to be glad of the aid of a second-rate pickpocket.
• At one point in Song of the Sea, Ben and Saoirse have to get beyond a metal gate. Ben starts climbing the gate, while Saoirse... just opens it.

Films — Live-Action

• From 2 Fast 2 Furious: One of the protagonists smashes a car window with his shirt-covered fist. His partner stops him and simply opens the already unlocked door.
• In Bachelor Party the hotel manager instructs the security guys to break down the door, then tells them wait, and unlocks it with his pass key.
• In Black Mask, at one point the Badass Normal police detective manages to handcuff a Super-Soldier who feels no pain to a bar. The super soldier immediately and without hesitation cuts off his own hand. The detective stares at him for a second and then (in the English dub at least) says "Damn. I had the key."
• In The Bourne Identity: Bourne plans out a complex plot to get information from a hotel information desk. When he doesn't get the phone call from Marie, he assumes that she's bailed on the plan. She then appears right behind him. "I just asked them for it."
• In Harper, Allan and Harper have arrived at a house where they think the bad guys are. Allan, who is getting way too enthusiastic about helping in the private detective game, asks if he can knock the door down. He rams the door with one shoulder, and fails. Wincing in pain, he rams the door with his other shoulder, and fails. As he cringes from two hurt shoulders, Harper laughs, and opens the door, which wasn't locked.
• In Home Alone, Marv tries to crowbar open the basement door twice to no avail. Then he just turns the doorknob and finds it's unlocked. (Though this is justified since we just saw Harry burn his own hand on the front door doorknob which Kevin had heated red-hot.)
• In Jumanji, Peter is tasked with retrieving an ax from a woodshed. When he finds that the shed is locked, he picks up a nearby ax and starts hacking the door away for a few seconds before realizing what he's holding.
• In The Matrix Reloaded, Trinity is on a motorcycle with the Keymaker and asks for a download on how to hotwire vehicles, only to have her passenger hand her a key. Both convenient and justified, as the Keymaker is Exactly What It Says on the Tin in addition to his more figurative role.
• In Mirror, Mirror, this ends up happening twice to the dwarves:
  "Why do we keep getting locked in our own house!?"
• A variant in The Muppet Christmas Carol: Rizzo very reluctantly climbs up a gate and jumps off, and then, realizing he's left his jellybeans behind, slips through the bars to get them.
  Gonzo: You can fit between those bars?
  Rizzo: Of course.
  Gonzo: You're an idiot.
  Rizzo: What? Hey, what?
• At the start of Nikita, the gang of junkies Nikita is part of are breaking into a chemist for drugs. Coyote, whose father owns the shop, is fumbling with the keys he's stolen, when Zap gets impatient and whacks the lock with the fire axe he's holding. All this does is alert Coyote's father that someone is breaking in, and things go bad in a hurry.
• ''Once Bitten": The vampires are smashing their way through their countesses' mansion looking for Mark. She finally gets fed up and reminds them that she has to replace every door they break, and have they even tried the doorknob? Sure enough, that door opens normally, because it's her house and not a fortress.
  Sebastian: Jocks.
• In The Pink Panther, Clouseau is about to shoot the lock off of a door, when Tucker says "Don't do that, old man" and casually opens the unlocked door.
• Defied in Ricochet, when a pair of bad guys are preparing to rob a place, one of them starts to unlock the door with a key, before John Lithgow's character smashes a window in and asks if they want to just leave a note saying "Inside Job".
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day:
  • The T-800 punches through a car window then hot-wires the car. John Connor flips down the windshield visor to reveal the keys. The Terminator actually learns from this experience — the second time he's required to steal a car, he gets in and flips down the visor. Boom! Keys.
  • Subverted and invoked when the SWAT teams enter the Cyberdyne building. The first team uses a keycard to enter the building normally. The team immediately following them breaks the door's glass out.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit:
  Eddie Valiant: [Roger managed to slip his arm out of the handcuffs he and Eddie were attached to] You mean you could've taken your hand out of that cuff at any time?
  Roger Rabbit: No, not at any time, only when it was funny.

Literature

• In The Angel Experiment, Max and company steal a van to get to the School. After hotwiring it, taking it for a joyride on the interstate, and proceeding to scare the living crap out of everyone except Iggy, Max slams on the brakes and a compartment pops open. Something falls into her lap. She's afraid it's a bomb... nope, just the keys.
• Animorphs: While in a mansion in battle morphs, Jake tells Marco to open the door. Marco (in gorilla morph) gets ready to smash the door in, when Jake tells him to use the handle. It turns out to be unlocked.
• Star Wars Legends: Played with in Starfighters of Adumar. Wedge Antilles and his fellow pilots are on the run from the citizens of Adumar, and encounter a door. Wedge orders the lock shot out, but fellow pilot Hobbie simply opens the door instead — it was unlocked.
  Hobbie: Worth trying.

Live-Action TV

• In the first season of 24, Jack Bauer and George Mason come upon a fence. Jack immediately hops over it, while George rolls his eyes and strolls through the gate.
• Animorphs: Jake and Marco discuss climbing a fence with barbed wire, then see Cassie standing on the other side of the fence, smugly waving the keys.
• Arrowverse: At the end of the Fight Club promo, Ray Palmer smashes through the ceiling to the Fight Club arena because he didn't know about the secret elevator in his own building.
• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "A New Man", after Buffy has broken down the door to the magic shop:
  Riley: You shouldn't have done that to the door.
  Buffy: I do not have time to play by the rules tonight.
  Riley: I have a master key. It opens every shop on Main Street.
• In the Cobra Kai episode "Head of the Snake", Johnny, Mike, and Chozen are all arguing about who gets to kick down Silver's door. Chozen finally decides to check if it's even locked. It's not.
• Played with in an episode of Criminal Minds. They go to the motel the suspect is staying at and, upon seeing his picture, the clerk wordlessly hands over the appropriate key. Once they get to the room, Elle offers it to resident tough guy Morgan. He declares "I've got my own" and kicks in the door anyway. Badass-status intact, at the expense of the needlessly broken door. Seeing as it wasn't the suspect's property anyway, he's just intentionally inconvenienced a woman who was trying to help him.
• The Crystal Maze: In a series 2 episode, Richard O'Brien waits for the team to scale the gates leading into the Industrial Zone, then he unlocks them with the key to let himself in, saying he doesn't know why they bothered climbing over, as he had the key, if only they'd asked.
• CSI: In "Random Acts of Violence", Gil is searching for evidence in a street when two patrol officers turn up to investigate a possible burglary at an empty and locked house. Discovering the driveway gate is locked, they prepare to climb over it. Gil walks round the corner and finds the side gate is open.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Day of the Doctor" sees three incarnations of our hero shut away in the Tower of London together, trying to work out how to get through a wooden door (it's too primitive to hack with a sonic screwdriver). After some discussion, they work out a way to do it, but it would require hundreds of years to do the calculations. But, since they're all from different timestreams, if the earliest Doctor inputs the calculations into his screwdriver, the newest one will have the result stored away in his! They confirm it, congratulate themselves on their cleverness... and then Clara walks in.
    Eleventh Doctor: ... how did you do that?
    Clara: Wasn't locked.
    Eleventh Doctor: Right...
    Clara: [dumbfounded] Three of you in one cell and none of you thought to try the door?!
    War Doctor: It should have been locked!
  • "In the Forest of the Night": A little girl is being chased by wolves, but runs into a tall fence. Clara urges her to climb the fence and she'll help her over. The girl ignores her, moving several steps to the side and opening a gate.
  • "Praxeus": Jake is trying to break down a heavy metal door to get to Adam when Yaz and Graham arrive with skeleton keys. Subverted soon afterwards when they encounter another door which Jake kicks open.
• Jonathan Creek helpfully whips out a set of lockpicks to take care of the fact that his Watson Maddy has had her car clamped. Maddy is both grateful and impressed, but it turns out that she has the key for it herself and uses it as camouflage.
• London's Burning: Downplayed when Blue Watch are investigating a report of smoke issuing from a factory building and arrive at the address to find the main gates closed and locked. Station Officer Georgiadis is about to order the crew to get the cutting equipment from the truck to force them when Billy notices that the gates are only held shut by a deadbolt, and thus they only need someone to climb over.
• Happens in the Red Dwarf episode "Rimmerworld" when the crew is locked in a dungeon by a lot of clones of Rimmer. While they don't have keys per se, Lister describes laying out a complicated system of traps to escape, while Kryten simply replies, "Or, we could use the teleporter", which they had acquired earlier from a derelict spaceship.
• In Scrubs, Laverne punches and breaks the window of Turk's car to help Carla steal Steven. Carla screams and points out that she has the keys.
• In Wallander, Martinsson and Wallander are trying to enter a colleague's locked apartment, and Martinsson enthusiastically offers to kick down the door. Cut to the apartment building's superintendent coming up the stairs with a master key.
• On Wings. To defend the Hackett house from a prowler lurking outside, roommate Lowell grabs a shotgun and breaks one of the living room windows with it. An exasperated Joe informs him, "Lowell, the window opens!"
• The Worst Year of My Life, Again: In the Halloween episode, Alex and Simon scale the fence of Nicola's house in order to sneak into her party and end up falling off. Maddy then tries the gate and finds it is open.

Magazines

• Around the time that Star Wars: Episode 1 debuted in theaters, MAD Magazine featured a strip which parodied an early scene where Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-gon Jin use their lightsabers to cut open a locked door. In the strip, Qui-gon is the only one doing anything, and is clearly struggling... until he's about half-way through, at which point Obi-wan produces the keys.

Video Games

• In Dragon Quest IV, shortly before joining the hero's party, Alena can be seen kicking down the door to a dungeon. This confuses her current companions greatly, as she was the one carrying a key to that door. After mulling it over for a bit, they conclude that she must just like kicking doors.
• It's nodded at in Knights of the Old Republic, when you take a quiz to determine which class of Jedi your character will be sorted into. One question involves knowing that what you seek is on the other side of a closed door — the Guardian breaks the door down, the Sentinel picks the lock, and the Consular knocks.
• The Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3 has Shepard getting ready to bust down a door, only for his/her companion to knock on a window and ask the civilian hiding inside to unlock it.
• In Master of the Wind, when Morias gets broken out of prison, Shadehorn the minotaur attempts to smash the bars straight down, before Tyranda points out that they took the keys from the guard earlier.
• In Stacking the various challenges all have multiple possible solutions. Often one of them involves you taking control of a doll that has the keys to the locked door.
• Played with but ultimately averted in the first installment of the S.W.A.T. series. In all missions where the player is able to interview the home or building owner beforehand, they will provide the keys needed to get inside and the team will use them during the entry. However, if the player does not report that they have the keys to their superiors, the SWAT team commander will initially suggest using a shotgun to breach the door during the briefing. The player character will then automatically mention the keys, and the mission will proceed normally.
• Tales of Symphonia has the Toize Valley Mine. Regal tries to tell the party he can simply turn the defense mechanism off because he's the president of the company that owns the mine, but the party doesn't listen and instead takes the thing down with brute force.
• In the Goblin starting zone in World of Warcraft, you rescue Goblins locked in cages by strapping rockets to the cages and launching them into orbit. While doing this, some of them will tell you the guards have the keys. Sure enough the guards will occasionally drop a key, but this way is far more fun.

Webcomics

• In Captain SNES: The Game Masta, Alex uses his Super Scope to burst a hole in the door to Nexus, which causes problems down the line. He already had the key to the door in the form of a ring. In this case, the person who points out that he had the key was Ryan, witnessing this via some sort of flashback power from the future, with future Alex sheepishly mentioning that, at the time, he hadn't realized he was carrying the key.
• In Gunnerkrigg Court Annie did this twice. First shows Reynardine/Renard how to use lockpicks she had hidden in the doll he possesses. Later she uses out-of-body projection to open from the inside a door Jack wanted to break.
• A variation in The Order of the Stick: Logann charges through a blade barrier, sucking up the damage it deals. As he delivers a Badass Boast, Durkon dispels the blade barrier and heals his injuries.
• One Pixie and Brutus strip begins with the eponymous characters trying to get over a fence. Pixie climbs up a shovel with her "super ninja cat skills", Brutus just leaps over with his "super ninja dog skills... and then Mr. Wrinkles joins in with his "super ninja gate wasn't latched" (which is actually visible in earlier images of the gate if you know to look for it).
• In Spacetrawler, Emily Taylor decides to fly up after someone who's withholding information, in hopes that she can beat it out of him. Stangor, a strictly B-list villain with a vendetta against Emily, instead decides to be kind enough to show the rest of the cast that sometimes, the smarter way is just to look up the information on an unlocked terminal left behind when the information broker flew off. It later seems that this is her schtick.
• An example from xkcd where they don't have the keys, but there's still an easier solution.

Western Animation

• The Christmas Special of All Grown Up! has the gang attempt to break into Chuckie's house to steal back the Christmas tree that Chuckie had accidentally stolen and found that his father Chas was too enthusiastic about the tree to simply ask about giving it up. The gang break into Chuckie's house through the window. Chuckie tells them all after they do this that he had the keys and could have easily just let them in through the front door.
• The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes: In the episode "Ultron-5", Hulk and Black Panther deliver Red Ghost and his Super Apes to the Avengers' base after defeating them in an off-screen battle. He interrupts a meeting between Iron Man and Thor by kicking the doors open and sliding the villains at their feet, Tony is just exasperated at why Hulk would bother doing this.
  Iron Man: Why would you do that? The doors open automatically.
• Nanny from Count Duckula, although this is more a lethal combination of absent-mindedness and not knowing her own strength.
• Downplayed in Ed, Edd n Eddy. In "Scrambled Ed", Ed and Eddy go to Edd for their daily scam, but Ed tries to open the door by kicking it down, only to get his leg caught in the door instead. It wasn't even locked, and Eddy opens it with Ed still stuck.
  Eddy: There's a knob, Ed.
• The Fairly OddParents!: The episode "Big Wanda" does this when Timmy and Cosmo want to enter Cosmo's mom's house. After Timmy broke the door using Cosmo as a Battering Ram, Cosmo states that he still has the house's keys. To be fair, up until that point in the episode, Timmy has been the victim of Amusing Injuries non-stop while Cosmo went unscathed, so frustration probably plays part of his reasoning on the stunt.
  Timmy: Yes, I knew.
• Invoked in an episode of Generator Rex with an elevator door. The Non-Human Sidekick managed to press the elevator button before any breakage transpired.
• Hurricanes: In "Techno-Team", Stavros Garkos' finance company takes over a laboratory and he decides to break in to mess with a worker's research so she'll have no choice but help him with one of his plans. When he arrives at night, his henchman Genghis is ready to use a crowbar to open the door when he points out that, as the place's owner, he has the keys.
• Kim Possible:
  • In Season Three's "Bonding", Ron befriends Professor Dementor's giant dachshunds and gets them to break down the door of his Supervillain Lair. Dementor protests:
    Professor Dementor: Why did you have to break down the door? It wasn't locked, AND I JUST HAD IT PAINTED!!
  • In Season Four's "Homecoming Upset", Wade temporarily replaces Ron as Kim's sidekick on a mission. When they are confronted by an estate with a high wall, Kim prepares to vault over it, but Wade produces a gizmo and opens the gate.
    Wade: After you.
    Kim: [disappointed] But I like jumping over stuff.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "A Health of Information", a sleep-deprived Fluttershy arrives at Meadowbrook's house and tries to push open the door — to no avail. She declares their only option is to dig their way in! Twilight turns the doorknob.
• A Running Gag on Phineas and Ferb is Perry the Platypus smashing into Dr. Doofenshmirtz's lair, only for the doctor to bemoan the damage done to his home. At one point he specifically states he gave Perry a set of keys for exactly that reason. On a few occasions he wasn't even doing anything evil, so Perry reimburses him for the damage.
• Argost does this to his own door in The Secret Saturdays episode "Once More the Nightmare Factory" even as Munya is approaching with the keys and a long-suffering look on his face. Of course, this might just have been showmanship.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "SpongeBob's House Party", SpongeBob accidentally gets locked out of his own house during said party. When all else fails, he decides to break in only for the police to show up at that exact moment and arrest him. When he gets home the next morning after a night in the cells, and realises he's still locked out, he immediately fetches the spare Key Under the Doormat and then gets extremely annoyed at the realisation that he could have just done that from the beginning.
  • In "SpongeBob vs. The Strangler", SpongeBob arrives home with the Strangler (pretending to be his bodyguard) in tow, only to realise he can't find his key. He decides to try and climb in through the window, using the Strangler to give him a boost, but loses his footing and sticks his cleats right into the Strangler's eye sockets. He's apparently stuck like this for six hours before the Strangler pulls him free... whereupon he remembers he has a spare key under the doormat.
• In the Talespin episode "Citizen Khan", a Smalltown Tyrant sheriff has left the key in the cell door, so he can shoot Baloo trying to escape. Baloo doesn't notice because he's too busy trying to prise the bars off the window.
• X-Men: The Animated Series:
  • In the episode "Night of the Sentinels", Wolverine uses his adamantium claws to slice open a locked door. However, after getting inside:
    Beast: Ahem... the guard's keys?
    Wolverine: So I'll buy him a new door!
  • Justified a few minutes later, when they are trying to destroy the hard copies of the Mutant Registry files:
    Storm: [trying a file drawer] Locked!
    Wolverine: [stabs it] Unlocked.
  • Seven episodes later show why they don't bother with keys. When Rogue and Storm try breaking out Colossus, Rogue has the wrong key and simply rips the door off the hinges.

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