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Refuge In Audacity / Film

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Films taking Refuge in Audacity.


  • In 48 Hrs., criminal Reggie Hammond intimidates an entire redneck bar with nothing but his own bravado and Nick Nolte's borrowed police ID, which he flashes while covering the photo.
  • American Gangster: Lucas shoots a man who owes him money in broad daylight, then resumes eating dinner on the same block.
  • In Arthur (1981), Linda Marolla steals a necktie at Bergdorf-Goodman's. The store detective witnesses the theft and follows her out into the street, where he confronts her. After making a snarky comment, she goes on the defensive, pretending she is some kind of official, pulling out a pad and pencil and demanding the detective's name and address. When this fails to intimidate the detective, she yells for someone to find her a cop, at which point Arthur steps in and saves her bacon.
  • In Ask a Policeman, the smugglers place their guide light on top of the police station. And use the station cellar as a storehouse for their contraband.
  • In Avengers: Endgame, Captain America uses this to brilliant effect: when he needs to get Loki's Scepter from sleeper HYDRA agents in 2012, he uses his knowledge of the events from Winter Soldier and whispers "Hail Hydra" to convince them of a sudden change of plan. Everyone in the elevator is so flabbergasted that it totally works. Hydra's total secrecy at this point in time means that if Cap knows about their continued existence, somebody higher up the chain of command having somehow subverted him into joining is actually the most plausible explanation for him using that password. He does it again minutes later when he ends up in a confrontation with his past self, and ends the fight by saying "Bucky is alive!" and knocking out 2012!Cap, who's trying to process what he just heard.
  • Back to the Future:
    • When Biff and his sidekicks chase Marty on the impromptu skateboard, and they approach the manure truck, Marty climbs over their top-down car, through the sidekicks, and lands back on the skateboard.
    • Part III: Marty tells Buford that Marty will have to forfeit, as he's not feeling up to it. Buford doesn't take it.
  • Batman (1989): The parade. Joker preempts the Mayor's television address to the city with his own broadcast, and then - after having shamelessly killed dozens of people in the cruelest way imaginable - announces that he is going to hold a parade in the center of town and toss 20 million dollars down to the spectators if they will show up - and they do.
  • Batman Forever: The Riddler uses his technologically enhanced intelligence to locate Two-Face's hideout and then storms in there without invitation. He proposes that he and Two-Face join forces in a scheme to unmask Batman. Two-Face points out that "violating the sanctity of our lair" is an abomination and to attempt it is foolhardy, but he's intrigued enough by the idea to toss the coin on it. If it came up "bad heads", he'd kill Riddler. It didn't.
  • Be Kind Rewind: When every tape in a video rental place is erased, the leads decide to do 20-minute no-budget versions of the films themselves and hope nobody notices. It didn't work, but customers found the remade films had their own odd charm, and the store was more successful than it was before the accident.
  • As Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop, repeatedly flashes his Detroit cop badge rapidly while pretending to be a customs officer, a foreman, etc.
    • He also manages to get himself a luxury suite in a posh Beverly Hills hotel by claiming to be a Rolling Stone reporter and threatening to write an article claiming the hotel was racist because they "lost" his non-existent reservation.
    • And he gets into a private country club to confront the Big Bad by putting on an over-the-top Camp Gay act and asking the maitre d' to relay to Victor Maitland that he has herpes. The maitre d' decides it would be better if Axel tells Victor himself.
  • Big Fat Liar. Like any director would steal a creative writing assignment from some kid's backpack and turn it into his next big movie... note 
  • Several of the Morally Bankrupt Bankers in The Big Short flaunt this attitude, proud of how much money they're making for essentially selling shoddy goods.
    Mark Baum: I don't get it. Why are they confessing?
    Danny Moses: They're not confessing.
    Porter Collins: They're bragging.
  • The Birdcage: Who expected the co-founder of the Coalition of Moral Order to be having an affair with an underage black girl?
  • Blazing Saddles sees black Sheriff Bart escape a potential lynching by taking himself hostage. Somehow, it works.
  • Cabin Fever: After very insistently bedding a reluctant partner, and assuring him that she was healthy to ease his angst about there being no condoms available, the girl discovers a set of rashes on her back. These not only mean that she has the sickness that's going around, but also that she probably infected the poor fool she just slept with, too. So to shift the guilt over who did the worst thing to who, she lashes out at the guy for being too rough with her in bed, despite the fact that she was the one who was playing rough.
  • In The Cabin in the Woods, Marty's Establishing Character Moment has him parking his car while smoking an enormous bong. When asked about it, he replies:
    "Statistical fact: Cops will never pull over a man with a huge bong in his car. Why? They fear this man. They know he sees further than they and he will bind them with ancient logics."
  • Catch Me If You Can lives on this. The Villain Protagonist Con Man, Frank makes a million from writing fraud checks and has to repeatedly pretend to be working professionally in a new job throughout the film such as a pilot, doctor and lawyer. What does Frank do when an FBI agent catches him in his hotel? Pretends to be a federal agent himself who's already caught the culprit and is organizing evidence, then simply walks away.
    • This one has an extra angle, as time and further investigations revealed that the overwhelming majority of Frank's stories turned out to be fake, including many told in the movie.
  • In Deewaar, Vijay is put in charge of protecting a gold shipment from crime boss Samant's men. How does he do this? Why, he goes to Samant and tells him where the shipment will arrive, of course. And after Samant has received the gold and paid him handsomely, Vijay simply steals the gold back.
  • Die Hard with a Vengeance features John McClane walking around Harlem wearing a sign that proclaims "I Hate Niggers" (the Big Bad made him do it). The street corner at which John is forced to stand is less than twenty yards away from the favorite hangout of a street gang armed with knives. Zeus Carver ominously lampshades this— not five seconds before said gang members spot the sign and come over looking for trouble, and one of them hurls a switchblade that lodges in the sign. John quickly tries to save himself by pretending to be a religious fanatic... which doesn't work. What's most outrageous is that John and Zeus both survive this harrowing encounter with little more than a beer bottle broken over John's head and minor knife wound for Zeus.
  • The 1987 Dragnet movie has the Turn in Your Badge moment as the result of the arrest of a reverend, like anyone would believe that he was organizing a drug rave and trying to offer a woman as a human sacrifice.
  • The crazier and more over-the-top the actions of the main characters in the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas became, the more likely they were to get away with them. These actions included doing enough drugs to kill a herd of elephants, destroying their hotel rooms, trashing a couple of expensive rental cars, feeding a young girl with acid for a few days, waving around a gun and a knife while twisted, and showing up stoned out of their minds at a police anti-drug convention. The trope was invoked by Raoul Duke at one point, after a truly astonishing sequence wherein he and his attorney chase a pair of cops and their wives down a highway, demanding that they be allowed to sell the cops drugs; the attorney wonders if they'll be arrested, to which Duke points out that nobody would believe the victims if they tried to report it. The scary part is that this is based, however lightly, on actual occurrence.
    "It was all over now. We'd abused everything that Vegas lived by; Burning the locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help. The only chance now, I felt, was the possibility that we'd gone to such excess that nobody in the position to bring the hammer down on us could possibly believe it."
    • The author Hunter S. Thompson's reputation is based on Refuge in Audacity. Stories circulate of him intentionally invoking this trope; when his house was found to contain over thirty firearms from handguns up to machine guns, and several sticks of dynamite, Hunter told the police that they were "for home defense."
  • Ferris Bueller's Day Off: When you get right down to it, this is Ferris Bueller's modus operandi. What kind of parade lets you waltz out from behind the security fence and start changing the music tracks? The crowd absolutely loved it. Also, Ferris almost gets found out at the restaurant when the waiter calls his bluff, but through liberal use of the Indy Ploy he manages to skate through with an even larger, riskier bluff.
  • The climactic battle of Fifty/Fifty (1992) has Jake Wyer and Sam French pinned down by the Tengaran army. Then Jake says he has a plan:
    Sam: Alright, what is it?
    Jake: Full frontal assault.
    Sam: That's your plan? A full frontal assault is your plan?
    Jake: It's got the element of surprise.
    Sam: Suicide is always surprising.
    • Their full frontal assault, of two men against a hundred, works.
  • The Fugitive: Mere hours after escaping from the prison bus that was taking him to death row, Kimble has managed to sneak into a hospital to steal a doctor's uniform and shave off his distinctive beard. On his way out, he crosses paths with a cop following up on the APB about his escape. Luckily, the cop doesn't recognize Kimble without his beard and proceeds to ask Kimble if he's spotted anyone matching Kimble's description. As if he wasn't already lucky enough to not be recognized instantly, Kimble pushes his luck to the limit by sarcastically pointing out to the cop that the description matches him to a tee - except for the beard!
  • Game-Over Man: Aware that two Mooks are about to discover them, the trio opt to hide in a suite. Alex immediately pulls off this belt, declaring "I haven't done this in a long time". The camera then cuts to the two Mooks entering the hotel suite, who discover that Alex has staged his own death scene, made to appear as a botched attempt at autoerotic asphyxiation, with his erect penis still in hand. The Mooks then proceed to try and have sex on the bed in front of a still hanging Alex, who is Forced to Watch.
  • Ghost (1990): When Whoopi Goldberg's character signs the million-dollar check, she goofs and apologizes, "I signed the wrong name." note 
  • G.I. Joe: Retaliation: How do you push for full denuclearization? Launch all your missiles, get the other guys to launch theirs, then abort the launch to get the others to do the same. Bam! Nukes gone.
  • Gleahan and the Knaves of Industry: In one scene, Mark and Gleahan dramatically enter a bar and proceed to act out a "robbery" situation, all to provide a distraction so Madison and Penelope can get to the upstairs office.
  • In The Golden Child, there's a scene where Private Detective Chandler Jarrell pretends to be some kind of Federal Agent, and flashes what should be his badge around...if he actually had one on the part of his wallet that his hand is covering.
  • Grosse Pointe Blank takes this to the level of a Running Gag.
    Mr. Newberry: What have you been doing with your life?
    Marty: Uh... professional killer.
    Mr. Newberry: Oh! (Beat) Good for you, it's a... growth industry.
  • At the climax of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Big Bad Omnicidal Maniac Ronan the Accuser launches into his hammy, bombastic speech, and prepares to destroy everything with a single swing of his weapon.... and then has to stop when Star Lord starts dancing and singing "Ooh Child" and then challenges him to a Dance-Off. The sheer, absolute absurdity of the situation puts a halt to the final ambitions of a mad fanatical killing machine, leaving him standing there flabbergasted and asking "What are you doing." Peter's answer? "I'm distracting you, ya big turdblossom", buying time for Drax and Rocket to destroy Ronan's weapon with their ship-killing cannon.
  • Similar to the Real Life examples of hackers and scammers, Dade does this in Hackers by calling a clueless security guard and rattling off a bunch of technobabble, including such glaring terms as a "BLT drive". Naturally, the guard believes him and tells Dade all the required information.
  • Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:
    • Indy's encounter with Adolf Hitler. When you're carrying a diary about the Holy Grail, which Hitler seems to want for some reason, and you come face to face with the man himself, do you hide it? No. You take advantage of the book signing you're at and get Hitler's autograph.
    • While escaping from Berlin in a Zeppelin which hasn't taken off yet, Indy notices an SS officer searching for him and his father. With no place to run or hide, Indy decides the best course of action is to disguise himself as a steward on the Zeppelin, follow the officer around, then hit the officer with a sucker punch when the officer finds Jones Sr and throw the officer out a window. The real audacity comes when Indy explains "No ticket" to the shocked German passengers in clear American English. The other passengers immediately present theirs.
    • In the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade adventure game, you also can encounter Hitler. However, you are then given control of Indy and can give him a few different things to sign: the diary, a copy of Mein Kampf (you can give it to a guard at a security checkpoint), or a pass (which lets you go through any security checkpoint without problems). You can also punch Hitler but his bodyguard will make sure you don't live to enjoy it.
  • James Bond:
    • This is the modus operandi of most Bond villains. In Goldfinger, the title Big Bad convinces multiple crime syndicates to help him rob Fort Knox with the argument that no one will be expecting it.
    • In Octopussy, Bond manages to abscond with a genuine Faberge egg by swapping it with a fake, right in the middle of a Sotheby's auction.
    • In Die Another Day, Bond has just escaped captivity and is barefoot, in tattered clothing, has a massive shaggy beard and hair, and has no money or other possessions, making him look like a hobo or a shipwreck survivor. He just walks into a posh hotel and demands a room, ignoring the gasps and disapproving looks of the staff and guests. It works because the hotel's owner knows Bond. The owner shows up and immediately recognizes Bond despite his disheveled appearance, ordering the staff to give him the best room to their confusion. The hotel is actually run by the Chinese intelligence service, and they're going along with it to spy on Bond. Which he knows.
  • Jingle All the Way: When Arnold is caught in the bootleg toy warehouse by the cops he grabs a toy police badge from an open box and bullshits like his life depends on it to convince the cops he's an undercover detective. This moment seems more audacious when you remember that impersonating a law enforcement officer is a serious crime in the United States. Had his bluff not worked he would have gone to prison for a long time.
  • In Just One of the Guys, a teenager pulls a Sweet Polly Oliver so she can write an article about life as a guy. When her vacationing parents phone home, her brother informs them that his sister has become a transvestite, and is assumed to be kidding.
  • The Kentucky Fried Movie has "Rex Kramer: Danger Seeker!" who, after dressing up in typical daredevil attire, goes into the middle of a group of black men in an alleyway, shouts "NIGGERS!" and runs off. The sheer ridiculousness of it makes the men stand around looking at each other, giving Rex a 2 second head-start.
  • In The Lady Eve, a millionaire throws over his fiancee when he learns that she's a notorious con artist. Her revenge involves showing up at his mansion under a different persona and re-seducing him - which works despite her not putting on any kind of disguise whatsoever. She has correctly predicted that he would conclude that, had it really been her trying to fool him, she surely would have changed her appearance in some way; in other words, she looks too much like herself to be her. (It helps that she knows this particular man to be the most gullible chump on the face of the planet.)
  • In Leap of Faith The Protagonist gets out of a speeding ticket by cold reading the police officer and taunting him about his divorce until he gets arrested. He then talks the cop into reconciling with his estranged daughter, and walks away a free man.
  • Most of what Fletcher gets away with in Liar Liar is this (it is Jim Carrey, after all), but roasting the committee is when he cranks it up the most. Fletcher who's being forced to tell nothing but the truth (he apparently can't even keep quiet as an alternative to lying if he's asked a direct question) is made to tell his boss what he thinks of him and gets away with brutally insulting the man, to his face, because the insult is so flowery and over the top that the boss believes it's a roast and laughs his ass off. Fletcher then systematically roasts the entire room, one after the other, tauntingly laughs in the face of the woman who dragged him there in the first place (trying to get him fired), rips off a hairpiece and sticks it to the wall, whoops like a Native American, and promptly passes out as soon as he leaves the room.
  • In the made-for-TV film “Love Strikes Twice”, Maggie Turner is able to find evidence to stop a plan to demolish the town’s old library by temporarily borrowing the briefcase of one of the people involved in the demolition and making copies of the relevant paperwork. When the opposing party’s lawyer attempts to claim that the documents are stolen, Maggie argues that they can’t prove the documents were stolen as the originals aren’t missing, and without proof of theft such accusations are slander at best (and the closest thing the opposing counsel has as proof is the fact that a couple of pages are wrinkled from where they were jammed in a photocopier, which the judge isn’t willing to consider evidence of anything).
  • In Manhattan Murder Mystery, Woody Allen plays a married book editor who has a bit of sexual chemistry with one of his female authors. When he introduces the author to his wife, she points out his arousal and he strikes back with this:
    Carol: You know, your pupils are dilating.
    Larry:' She's dangerously sexual.
  • Mary Poppins:
    • She blew away the competition with a wind spell against the old ladies assembled in a long line to apply for the advertised position of the children's nanny.
    • She landed her job by acting as if she already had it, and subjected her prospective employer to a quasi-job interview in turn.
    • She flatly dismissed the children's recounting of their adventures with her right to their faces, knowing full well just how ridiculous it sounded
    • After the children excitedly tell their father about their adventures, Mr. Banks confronted her:
      Mr. Banks: Will you be good enough to explain all this?
      Mary Poppins: First of all, I would like to make one thing quite clear.
      Mr. Banks: Yes?
      Mary Poppins: (slight pause as if tongue-tied, then wavering, slightly tearful, fast tone) I never explain anything.
Julie Andrews's delivery of that line may have subverted the trope. She doesn't say it in quite her usual firm, no-nonsense statement of absurdity.
  • Matilda gives a villainous example with The Trunchbull, whose abuse of the children includes throwing them from windows, whipping them, and putting them in a near literal iron maiden called The Chokey where they must stand up perfectly still or be cut on nails and broken glass. When Matilda says they should tell their parents the other children say they've all tried and the parents didn't believe such over-the-top villainy could be anything other than the product of the kid's overactive imaginations.
  • Could arguably be the reason why Neo took so long to realise that Bane was possessed by Smith in The Matrix Revolutions; Neo was so used to thinking of Smith as being 'confined' to the Matrix that the idea that Smith might be able to manifest in the real world took a while to fully register as a possibility.
  • In Mean Girls, Janis tries to embarrass Regina by cutting holes in her undershirt over where the nipples should be. Regina shrugs, pulls the shirt on anyway, walks around like they're supposed to be there, and ends up setting a new trend.
  • In Men in Black, it turns out tabloids like Weekly World News are 100% true, which K describes as "the best investigative reporting on the planet". The titular organization allows them to operate and publicly report on normally clandestine extraterrestrial events because agents can put the facts in them to good use while knowing only conspiracy-theory nutballs like Norman believe they are even remotely true.
  • In The Men Who Stare at Goats the covert psychic organization is so outrageous, (has pseudo-hippie philosophy and refers to its members as Jedi) that the film can get away with harsh social commentary on the Iraq War that would otherwise make it controversial. The fact that the movie's based on real research the military actually engaged in makes it even more awesome.
  • The titular character of NIMONA (2023) relies on this trope, which is made easy due to their inherently chaotic nature:
    • Nimona's abilities as a shapeshifter are mostly kept secret for part of them movie... because no one will readily believe that Ballister was broken out of jail by a rhino, a gorilla, and a whale.
    • The people in the market place clearly have no idea what's going on when the Squire is abducted by a little boy and a wanted terrorist.
  • In Now You See Me, for their first show, the Four Horsemen rob a foreign bank from Las Vegas. When they're arrested, Daniel rightfully points out that they can't very well make the charges stick unless they're willing to admit magic is real. By the time they have an idea of how the Horsemen pulled it off, they've already been forced to release them and still can't actually prove their theory.
  • In Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Sands walks around wearing a CIA t-shirt (which reads "Cleavage Inspection Agent" in smaller letters underneath). This in itself isn't weird, but then you remember that he's a real CIA agent.
  • Outbreak: in order to get to Cedar Falls, Dustin Hoffman's character — a Colonel — comes stamping into the aircraft dispatcher's office demanding to know why he isn't on the passenger list for the next flight to the town. (He's been ordered not to attend.) Variously demanding the dispatcher call his superior officer and then not call his superior, Hoffman gets onto the passenger list and flies because he's intimidated the dispatcher into authorising him.
  • Pain & Gain: The other reason the police don't believe Kershaw at first. As Ed says near the end during the trial, "sometimes truth is stranger than fiction".
  • Discussed in The Pianist. The family argues over where they can hide their money when the Germans inevitably come and take their money. Henryk suggests putting their money under a cloth, and placing it in front of the Germans, thinking they would never look somewhere so obvious.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean:
    • Most of what Jack Sparrow does. He escaped from being marooned by making a raft of sea turtles? Tied together with his own hair? It has to be true - he's done crazier things!
    • In Curse of the Black Pearl, after Jack strolls onto a private dock in Port Royal.
      Mullroy: What's your purpose in Port Royal?
      Murtogg: Yeah, and no lies!
      Jack: Well, then, I confess. It is my intention to commandeer one of these ships, pick up a crew in Tortuga, raid, pillage, plunder, and otherwise pilfer my weaselly black guts out.
      Murtogg: I said 'no lies'!
      Mullroy: I think he's telling the truth...
      Murtogg: If he was telling the truth, he wouldn't have told us.
      Jack: Unless, of course, he knew you wouldn't believe the truth, even if he told it to you.
    • Most of the humor derived from the Pirate Court scene in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.
      Elizabeth: This is madness!
      Jack: This is politics.
  • Point Break (1991): The idea of surfers being bank robbers wearing Ex-President masks is so utterly insane that when Angelo Pappas, who’s been with robbery at the FBI for 22 years, comes up with the realization, everyone dismisses it as a crackpot theory with no basis in truth.
  • The Producers. Both "Springtime for Hitler" within the film and Mel Brooks making the film itself.
    • In his review, Roger Ebert argued that Springtime For Hitler backfired because Leo and Max didn't do this. If they had gone all-out (i.e., included the Holocaust or Operation Barbarossa in their pro-Nazi musical), then their plan would actually have worked, as nobody would want to see satire that distasteful.
  • Invoked in Snakes on a Plane; the idea of unleashing a mass of poisonous snakes on a passenger plane to eliminate one witness against a notorious mobster is explicitly acknowledged in-narrative as being extremely over-the-top, but the mobster himself acknowledges that he had already ruled out other options of dealing with the witness, and the agent protecting the witness concedes that this is a worst-case-scenario they never considered.
  • Susan in The Spanish Prisoner manages to get her car unchecked through a road block by creating a big scene with the protagonist in front of a cop, who loses his nerves and lets them pass.
  • Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: How does the anarchist Hobie Brown infiltrate the Spider-Society, a multiversal hero group teetering on the edge of being totalitarian themselves? Tell them right to their faces that he hates everything they stand for and isn't loyal... but playing it as part of his goofy Cool People Rebel Against Authority Spider-Punk persona (among other things, he doesn't believe in teams despite being part of one, because he also doesn't believe in consistency) to the point where everyone thinks he's just a Commander Contrarian, instead of quite honestly telling them that the only reason he's working with them is so that when he finally does betray them, he can make it count. His moment comes at the end of the movie, when it turns out that he's made his own dimensional travel watches from tech he stole, allowing Gwen to form her own Spider-team.
  • The villain's plan in Spider-Man: Far From Home relies on this. With the aid of a tech crew and special effects, ex-Stark Industries employee Quentin Beck concocts an absurd fake backstory about being an extra-dimensional warrior wizard, which completely fools S.H.I.E.L.D. and Spider-Man because it's seemingly no more strange than any of the other bizarre encounters they've had in the last few years. And, to be fair, the plot of the next movie.
  • Star Trek:
    • Both in and out of universe in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The film crew tested the plausibility of Kirk and company walking around San Francisco dressed like people from the 23rd century by dressing staff in the characters' costumes and having them walk around San Francisco. Nobody gave them a second glance and in fact a longstanding legend is that the hilarious scene where Uhura and Chekov try to ask directions featured genuine response from passersby (including the one woman who provides redundant directions). In the movie itself—with the exception of Chekov—the former Enterprise crew got away with being profoundly weird, with no consequences.
    • Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: "What does God want with a starship?" Consider that Kirk is challenging either a) The Real McCoy (no pun intended) or b) an alien who holds the fate of Kirk and his crew in the palm of his hand. The potential for that not ending well was immense.
    • Star Trek: Generations: After Soran is beamed up by his Klingon allies, he punches one of the Duras sisters in the face on her own bridge. For the Klingons this could amount to a challenge to a Duel to the Death, but since they need him for their own plan, he gets away with it. She just snarks that he better have intended that as part of a mating ritual.
  • Star Wars:
    • The Rebel Alliance built their entire campaign out of this trope, and it's what allowed them to survive when other rebellious organizations didn't. They attacked the heavily-defended Scarif archive installation head-on in what amounted to a near-total suicide mission. The Death Star was built to counter large-scale assaults between capital ships, so the rebels sent in a bunch of snub fighters. When the second Death Star was being built, the Rebels decided to attack it while the Emperor himself was on board (and thus it would be at its peak defensively, but this turned out to be a setup). They also amassed their fleet at Sullust, which not only is right in the territory previously ruled by Death Star commander's Wilhuff Tarkin (in the Sullust sector, next to his native Seswenna sector), but is also the entry point of the only hyperlane to Endor, and started making a mess to try and bait the Death Star's defense fleet away.
      • In the Star Wars Legends timeline, Grand Admiral Thrawn seemed to be the only one who noticed how the Rebels/New Republic always seemed to go for the assaults that would be tantamount to suicide but always seemed to succeed, and thus turned it against them, making him the only one across the entirety of the old Expanded Universe to avert the trope.
    • As part of the set-up to bait the Rebel Alliance at Endor, the Empire needed a believable guard force for the Death Star. Said guard force was composed by two Imperial-II Star Destroyers (with the Battle of Scarif making very clear how devastating a single one of the previous model was)... and the dreadnought Executor, at that point the largest and most powerful warship in the entire galaxy, apparently put there just to make sure the Rebels would bring as much of their fleet as possible to be destroyed by the Death Star.
      • In the Legends continuity, the way Palpatine leaked the information: First he simulated a normal and necessary data transfer where a supercomputer with the data was put on the Suprosa, a bog standard merchant ship pretending to be carrying fertilizer (thus giving the impression the Imperial Navy tried to use the trope themselves to safely carry the data) reinforced with heavy shielding and extremely powerful and expensive diamond-boron missiles (in Return of the Jedi, Mon Mothma said that "Many Bothans died to bring us this information"; the first twelve were nailed by a missile from the Suprosa). Then, once the Rebels captured the plans, he mounted a "recovery operation" involving Darth Vader and culminating in the Star Destroyer Motivator blowing itself up to make it appear that the Empire thought the plans had been destroyed and the Rebels hadn't found out anything. It was effective enough that the Executor at Endor was chalked up simply to Darth Vader being on the Death Star with the Emperor and the dreadnought simply being Vader's personal ship, rather than acting as the flagship of the massive hidden fleet lying in ambush.
    • An infamous deleted scene from the first movie A New Hope shows Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca, and Princess Leia strolling through the corridors of the Death Star, their faces uncovered and their street clothes clearly visible, but also conspicuously sporting some stark white utility belts stolen from Imperial stormtroopers they've knocked out and/or killed, all in full view of the Imperial personnel! Apparently, the only explanation is that Han, Luke, Chewie, and Leia figured that the enemy would find this sight so funny or brazen or unbelievable that they'd dismiss it. (One theory is that George Lucas shot this scene for no other reason than to add to his personal blooper reel.)
    • Thanks to the events depicted in Rogue One, where Darth Vader clearly sees Leia's ship flying away with the Death Star plans, Leia's statement in the original film that she's out on a diplomatic mission becomes one.
    • There's a scene in The Phantom Menace where Qui-Gon, who has a death order against him, has to save some pilots that have been captured by battle droids. He simply walks up to the droid commander and asks for them to be released so he can take them to Coruscant. It almost works, too; it takes the confused droid several seconds to comprehend what's going on, and by then he's in lightsaber range.
    • The Contingency Orders for the Grand Army of the Republic. Order 66, the one that Supreme Chancellor and future Emperor Palpatine used to destroy the Jedi Order, states that the clone troopers are to kill every single Jedi in the event they receive an authenticated transmission from the Supreme Chancellor stating that the Jedi have rebelled. Order 65, on the other hand, is to arrest the Supreme Chancellor if he's declared unfit, and use lethal force if necessary. Order 66 is also enforced by a biochip, but the fact Palpatine had the sheer gall to put his legal justification to destroy the Jedi right beside the order that could have got him executed puts it here.
    • Jedi Mind Tricks in general utilize this, such as in A New Hope, when Obi-Wan straight-up tells a Stormtrooper "These aren't the droids you're looking for..." on Tatooine. After offering to sell the droids to the stormtrooper seconds earlier!
      • Speaking of which, former Jedi Padawan Ferren Barr pulled the most outrageous one: cornered by three Imperial Inquisitors, all of whom are former Jedi, and a platoon of Purge Troopers, all Clone Troopers, he first proclaims both facts... and then used the Mind Trick to trigger Order 66. One Inquisitor was executed on the spot and the other two were forced to run, with the surviving one doing so only by crippling the other so the Purge Troopers would stop to kill him.
    • In Return of the Jedi, Jabba is initially outraged when bounty hunter Boushh (actually Leia in disguise) demands double the promised bounty. However, when Boushh declares that the reason Jabba should pay this outrageously high sum is "because I'm holding a thermal detonator" (essentially the Star Wars equivalent of an incredibly powerful grenade), Jabba laughs it off and declares that Boushh is "my kind of scum", agreeing to up the price, if not to the extreme that Boushh asked for.
    • In The Force Awakens, General Hux gives a speech condemning the New Republic for supporting the Resistance against the First Order. Never mind that Hux and pals have been cruising around in Star Destroyers that are totally illegal for them to have under their treaties with the New Republic, or that he is giving this speech right before firing a hyperspace Planet Killer at the New Republic's capital.
    • The Last Jedi begins with Poe claiming to be relaying a message from Leia to General Hux, then claiming that he can't hear Hux's grandiose response and that he's willing to hold for "General Hugs", and continuing to pretend he can't hear them as the extremely confused First Order officers try to respond, only starting to figure out the ruse when Poe refers to Hux as skinny and kind of pasty. When his engines finish charging up for his attack plan and he no longer has to stall them, Poe finishes with a Your Mom joke just because.
    I believe he's tooling with you, sir.
  • In Stripes:
    • Our heroes show up late to their graduation with their uniforms looking like shit, but put on a performance which impresses everybody, even General Barnicke, who refers to them as "go-getters" and assigns them to the top secret EM-50 project.
    • John, Russell, Stella, and Louise are able to capture the Czechoslovakian guards at the border by pretending to be a group of obnoxious American tourists who've gotten lost on their way to Austria.
  • Tad, the Lost Explorer: As Sara explains to Tad, they shouldn't bother calling the police because the case sounds too absurd to be taken seriously.
  • The ending of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze Splinter's reaction not withstanding. Consider, four mutant ninja sewer-dwellers duking it out with two super-mutants and a squad of ninjas, in a dance hall, to an impromptu rap song by Vanilla Ice, who then proceed to toss high-fives to the crowd, then hop onto the stage, perform dance moves and shout "Give it up for a Turtle!" None of the people there find this weird. Instead, if their reaction was any indication, they thought it was All Part of the Show.
  • Thank You for Smoking: Nick Naylor, from comparing cigarettes to chocolate in front of school children, to giving a cancer ridden teenager a fist bump after accusing the anti-smoking people of using the teenager's illness for publicity.
  • In The Three Musketeers (1993), Cardinal Richelieu tells his Evil Plan to usurp the throne directly to the king, then throws in a few more ludicrous (some of which are also true, or he wishes they were) claims:
    Cardinal Richelieu: Ah, yes. That is usually the first. Let me see if I remember it correctly. While the English attack from without, the wicked Cardinal undermines from within, forging a secret alliance with Buckingham and placing himself on the throne. But really, Your Majesty, why stop there? I have heard much more festive variations. I make oaths with pagan gods, seduce the queen in her own chamber, teach pigs to dance and horses to fly, and keep the moon carefully hidden within the folds of my robe. Have I forgotten anything?
  • The Walls of Malapaga: Pierre, who is a fugitive murderer, needs to get past the gate at the dock to make it back to the ship that will take him out of Genoa. He tries at night but is stopped by a patrolman. Cecchina, a 12-year-old girl of his acquaintance, suggests that if she goes with him, no one will think to challenge what appears to be a father and daughter out walking. It works, as they stroll through the gates in broad daylight.
  • Weekend at Bernie's. Two ambitious young men, hoping to climb the corporate ladder, are invited to a weekend long bash at their boss Bernie's beach house, not knowing that a scam they recently uncovered is Bernie's doing and that he plans to kill them. Then Bernie himself is killed by his own hitmen, and the two protagonists try to extricate themselves from the situation by making the guests believe Bernie is still alive, even when his corpse is in plain view.
    • Exaggerated with the sequel — perhaps because the people who made it couldn't believe that it had got the green light and so decided to take an already-ridiculous scenario to more outrageous heights thanks to an exotic location, a treasure hunt and some Hollywood Voodoo.
  • Wonder Woman (2017): Diana brings her sword into the gala by carrying it down the back of her blue dress, with the hilt and guard very visible. No-one around her hardly bat an eye.
  • X-Men Film Series:
    • X-Men: First Class: Xavier is very confident about his ability to seduce women.
      Charles: Heterochromia was in reference to your eyes, which I have to say are stunning. One green, one blue. It's a mutation, it's a very groovy mutation. I've got news for you, Amy. You are a mutant.
      Amy: First you proposition a girl, and then you call her deformed. How is that seduction technique working for you?
      Charles: I'll tell you in the morning.
    • X-Men: Days of Future Past:
      • Quicksilver blatantly uses his super speed when he first meets Wolverine, Professor X, and Beast because he knows no one would believe what they said about him, even before he learns that they have powers themselves.
      • Mystique impersonating Richard Nixon and then offering "his" life to spare the rest of the American leadership from Magneto.


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