Secret Test Of Character / Live-Action Films

Secret Tests of Character in live-action movies.

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• In Batman & Robin, Poison Ivy lures Robin to her lair, under the pretense of her love for him. Robin says he loves Ivy and wants for them to be together, but he wants her to give him a sign of trust to make sure she is serious about "turning over a new leaf" like she says she will by telling him what she and Freeze have planned. Ivy does so but requests Robin kiss her before leaving for luck. Robin uses their kiss as the real test. If it is an innocent kiss, then the two of them are really in love, but if Ivy is trying to kill him, as Batman warned, then he's protected with his rubber lips. Ivy fails when she reveals her true colors after the kiss and mocks Robin's upcoming death.
• The film The Box focuses on a box with a large button. Push the button and get $50 million, tax-free. But, someone you don't know will die. We find out the reason the test is being run. Aliens are looking for altruistic behavior. Otherwise, all humanity will be killed. The father making a Heroic Sacrifice satisfies them.
• Captain America: The First Avenger:
  • During training, Colonel Phillips tosses a (dud) grenade at the trainees. Without thinking, Steve immediately jumps on the grenade as everyone else scatters. This implies that his selflessness is the main contributor to his being chosen for the Super-Soldier program.
    Col. Phillips: When you brought a 90lb asthmatic onto my army base, I thought, what the hell, he may be useful to you, like a gerbil. Look at that, he's making me cry. Hodge passed every test we gave him. He's big, he's fast, he obeys orders, he's a soldier.
    Dr. Erskine: He's a bully.
    Col. Phillips: You don't win wars with niceness, Doctor. You win wars with guts. Grenade!
    [everyone runs for cover, except Steve, who runs for the grenade and cradles it]
    Steve: Get away! Get back!
    Army Personnel: ...It's a dummy grenade.
    Peggy: [smiles]
    Steve: ...Is this a test?
    Phillips: ...He's still skinny.
  • Subverted earlier, when Dr. Erskine asks Steve if he "wants to kill Nazis". Steve asks him if it's a test and Dr. Erskine acknowledges that it is.

• The film Draft Day has Cleveland Browns GM Sonny Weaver, Jr. discover a few of these for the players he considers drafting and/or keeping during the titular NFL Draft:
  • As Sonny considers whether he should draft University of Wisconsin star quarterback Bo Callahan, he has an employee he trusts look into Bo's background to find anything that could hurt the team or bring media criticism. The employee finds a story about Bo's 21st birthday party, which was held in a restaurant near campus, and the town showed up when they found out it was their star QB's birthday party. It got rowdy, and the cops broke everything up and took everyone's names down. The list of names reveals that none of Bo Callahan's teammates attended his birthday party. That means that he's a terrible teammate, and no one on the team wants to spend time with him. Bo Callahan may have the numbers a successful QB should have, but Sonny realizes he could be a toxic present on the team.
  • Then Sonny reviews a game where another player he's considering, Vontae Mack, sacked Bo Callahan four times. The footage shows that Bo's teammates won't block for him. However, it also shows Vontae getting ejected in the third quarter for touching a referee who criticized him for giving a game ball to a fan after a great play. Everyone else in the "War Room" who sees the footage writes Vontae off as a hothead, but Sonny realizes the woman in the head wrap that Vontae gave the ball to was actually his sister, who passed away six months later. This reveals that Vontae is passionate about the people in his life, not just a short fuse or a hothead.
• Escape from New York: At the end of the film, Plissken palms both the vital tape needed for the peace conference and Cabbie's tape of jazz music, and hands the latter over to the government while keeping the former. After being told by the president that he can name his reward, Plissken asks the President that he wants his thoughts concerning his rescue, the situation they were in and the people who died getting him out. The president's standard platitude by way of an answer reveals that ultimately he doesn't care about any of it, so Plissken doesn't correct his 'mistake' and instead walks off while destroying the tape, leaving the president looking like a fool on live teleconference and the negotiations in shambles.
• In Exam, what initially looked like an 80-minute written exam was in actuality a test of conscience, patience, and attention to detail. It didn't help that the exam room itself had exploitable points of interest, and the rules just a little bit obscure. In the end, all those perks just happened to be a complete waste of time.
• In Fight Club, Project Mayhem selects for stubbornness: new applicants who come to Tyler's house are yelled at for being too fat, too old, too young, or too something and told to go away. If they refuse to leave for three days, ignoring the abuse and with no food, shelter or encouragement, they're allowed in. The narrator bends Tyler's rules for Bob, though.
• Full Metal Jacket: After Joker denies believing in the Virgin Mary, Hartman tears into him worse than usual, demanding that he "sound off that [he loves] the Virgin Mary". Joker refuses, correctly guessing that any answer he gives will be wrong, and that Hartman will punish him harder if he changes his answer. Hartman immediately promotes him to squad leader.
• In The Golden Child, Chandler Jarrell (Eddie Murphy) is The Chosen One, fated to rescue the titular child, but he's a Jerkass and skeptic, and must be taught to accept the supernatural world. This is accomplished by the "Old Man", a Trickster Mentor who puts him through quite a few secret tests of character — the first being to see how he responded to a street vendor trying to cheat him. Needless to say, Jarrell fails quite a few times at the start.
• In The Highwaymen, the two Texas Rangers pursuing Bonnie and Clyde track them down to Bienville Parish, Louisiana. Since they're out of their jurisdiction, they have to rely on local law enforcement to apprehend the pair, but the state's Sheriffs are notoriously corrupt. So in order to ensure they're not dealing with a Dirty Cop, one of them pretends to be an acquaintance of Clyde Barrow and slips the Sheriff a wad of bills. When he angrily refuses the bribe, they know they're dealing with an honest lawman.
• Potentially invoked in Horns, when protagonist Ig faces the father of Merrin, the girl he is accused of having killed, after he manifests demonic horns that compel those around him to act on their innermost instincts. While Merrin's father says that he wants to shoot Ig for killing Merrin, by the time they confront each other Ig has gained enough experience of the horns to realise that, if the other man actually did want to shoot Ig, he would have done it already.
• In The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, when Katniss demands that Peeta and the other Victors be rescued and pardoned in exchange for being the Mockingjay, Coin gives a flat no, which prompts Katniss to give an impassioned refusal to be their Icon of Rebellion and say they can go find another Mockingjay. When she's done, Plutarch says "this is the Katniss I told you about". Coin just provoked her to see if Katniss really was fit to be a rebel icon.
• Interstate 60 features an unexpected one. After Neal has finally found and rescued the girl from his visions the first words she says to him are filled with rude and vulgar swear words. When he blanches, she asks if there's anything wrong with the way she talks. Because she's beautiful, he's tempted to let her rude language slide, but instead, he calls her out for it. At that point, she reveals that she doesn't really talk that way; she just wouldn't trust a guy who would put up with rude behavior in order to get in her pants.
• In the opening scene of In the Line of Fire, the undercover Clint Eastwood is told to shoot another agent, who is actually his new partner. He does it and it turns out the gun is empty. Later the partner says he's figured out that Eastwood could tell the gun was empty from its weight. Eastwood replies that there still could have been a bullet in the chamber; that's how far he's willing to go. Though that might be just Eastwood's sense of humor.
• Used hilariously in I Spy, where the civilian partner Kelly Robinson (Eddie Murphy) is "kidnapped" and is taken somewhere, where they attempt to get information from him by threatening to cut off his you-know-what. He panics and gives all the info he can remember on his partner, then the illusion is dropped and he is complimented on giving vague info and acting well.
• In Kingsman: The Secret Service, all of the Kingsman tests are these — the very first one results in the faked death of a recruit. A second one is when the trainees are skydiving and Merlin informs them one of their parachutes has been sabotaged, (which is a lie). The third one has the trainees captured by an "enemy" agent who interrogates them about the Kingsmen under the threat of death. Those that talk fail and those that don't pass. Charlie fails the penultimate one (safeguarding the Kingsmen's existence) and Eggsy the final one.
• Mad Money: Bridget does a version of this seeking bad character when she asks a potential accomplice for her robbery scheme if a bill on the ground is his. To her chagrin, he says it isn't and turns it in to Lost and Found.
• In the German movie Männer ("Men..."), the protagonist tells his "student" to fold a paper hat, put it on his head and climb on a desk. The other guy does it, and is corrected: "You failed, a manager never would do that." (The protagonist, a manager himself, discovered that his wife cheats on him with a drop-out. So he develops the plan to turn The Rival into a copy of himself, as a strange kind of revenge.)
• In the first Men in Black film, the recruits, the future J among them, are given a series of tests. The first is a written exam, but the recruits are stuck in egg-shaped chairs with no suitable writing surface. All the military guys make do, while J is the only one sensible enough to give up and drag the nearby table to his chair, despite the hellacious noise it makes. Next is a standard shooting range. The military guys immediately open up on the aliens, while J carefully analyzes the targets and picks the one he feels was a threat: an 8-year-old girl. By his reasoning, the aliens weren't doing anything wrong (one was sneezing, another doing pull-ups, etc.). The girl, on the other hand, was wandering through an alley full of monsters in the middle of the night and carrying advanced science textbooks (only in the film; in the book, she just had a basket). Whether or not it's meant to be a secret test of character is a little ambiguous in the film itself, but it does show a much better attitude for what the job actually entails than opening fire immediately.
• Miami Blues: Susie suspects that her boyfriend Junior is living a double life as a criminal. To test his honesty, she makes a vinegar pie with way too much vinegar and serves it to him. When he tells her that it's delicious, she stops trusting him.
• A somewhat unfair one in Movie Crazy, facilitated by a Two-Person Love Triangle. Harold first meets Mary the actress when she's in costume and Brownface as a Spaniard. Enchanted, he gives her his class pin. Later, Harold falls in love with Mary when she's out of costume. She asks for his pin. Harold finds Mary in costume as the Spaniard, she demands a kiss for the pin, he gives her one, and she refuses to give him the pin. He gets a substitute. When he gives it to out-of-costume Mary, she breaks up with him.
• A Murder of Crows: Lawson is unaware that the book Christopher Marlowe leaves in his hands was one. Because he'd sought to withdraw from the case he was defending then destroyed his career denouncing his own client in court, this gave the killer targeting him pause, and he tests Lawson to see what he'll do. When he finds that Lawson passes the book off as his own, publishing it and becoming rich doing so, the killer judges that he's failed and frames Lawson for the previous murders that he'd committed.
• In Murder on the Orient Express (2017), after finding out that all the passengers were involved in the murder of Ratchett/Cassetti, Poirot gives one to all of them. He places a gun down and tells all of them to shoot him now to keep him silent from revealing the truth to the police. Linda Arden takes the gun but uses it to commit suicide instead. The gun was empty. And since everyone else cried "No!" when Linda picks up the gun, proving that none of them were willing to shoot an innocent man to save themselves, Poirot lets them all go.
• In Pan's Labyrinth, the final part of a trial needed for Ophelia to get to her magical kingdom is a drop of blood from an innocent (her newborn brother). Ophelia steadfastly refuses, which itself completes the test. This is Writer on Board to some degree, as this one bears quite a bit of influence from the ideas Guillermo del Toro learned at his high school, the Instituto de Ciencias.
• Pitch Black: Debateable if Riddick is giving one to Fry with his offer.
• The Princess Bride: The Man in Black concealed his true identity from Buttercup to find out if she still loved him.
• In Saw III, Jigsaw seems to set up one of his usual traps, involving Lynn Denlon keeping him alive in order for Jeff Reinhold to finish his Unsecret Test of Character. However, Jigsaw was actually testing his apprentice Amanda throughout the film about her will to keep someone alive. Amanda was blind enough to kill Lynn even after her 'test' was over, thus failing and earning her own death at the hands of Lynn's husband Jeff. Nice going Jigsaw.
• 68 Kill: After Monica attempts to blackmail him, Violet tells Chip to go back into the Gas Station of Doom and kill her because she knows what they look like and can go to the cops. After a moment's hesitation, he refuses and she congratulates him. She had been testing if he was willing to stand up for himself, as she had been encouraging him to do.
• In the End of Sons of the Desert, Stan whines to his wife that they didn't go to Hawaii. They went to the convention. Oliver Hardy told a big lie and his wife started attacking him. As Stan's wife gave some candy and a pipe to him.
• In Spider-Man: Homecoming, Peter is finally given the chance to become an Avenger after his adventures. However, Peter comes to realize that this was a test and decides to turn it down and stick to the streets. However, in a subversion, it turns out that Tony was ready to make him an Avenger right then and there in front of a press conference. Since he didn't want to waste the gathering of reporters, he turns it into an impromptu marriage proposal to Pepper Potts.
• In Spies Like Us, a CIA spy tells two American men a joke in Russian. They burst into laughter, saying, "Da! Da!" before realizing that they've just revealed themselves to be undercover Russian spies.
• Spring Fever: Jack, a working-class young man who has gotten a taste of the rich life through temporary membership at a fancy golf club, says that he likes it and that he wants to keep enjoying it. How? "I'm going to marry money!" This is soon followed by Allie, the pretty girl at the golf club that Jack says he's sweet on, telling him that her father just blew the family fortune in business and she is now broke. He marries her anyway. The Reveal is that she was lying, that she's still quite rich but was testing his sincerity.
• In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the Kobayashi Maru simulation is meant to assess how a potential commanding officer would react to a Heads I Win, Tails You Lose situation. This is further elaborated upon in the 2009 reboot, where Spock says to Kirk that "The purpose is to experience fear, fear in the face of certain death, to accept that fear, and maintain control of oneself and one's crew. This is the quality expected in every Starfleet captain."
• Luke Skywalker fails one in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. After being told by Obi-Wan Kenobi to go to Dagobah to find Yoda, a great Jedi Master, Luke heads there after helping the Rebellion evacuate from Hoth. However, the only sentient life he finds is a really small creature who has a habit of searching through his things and speaking in riddles. Luke gets flustered when the creature seems to continue wasting his time in search of Yoda, who then reveals himself to be the Jedi Luke was searching for in the first place.
  Yoda: I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience.
  Obi-Wan: He will learn patience.
  • He fails a second time when, at the Tree of the Dark Side, he takes his weapon with him, not trusting in Yoda.
• In Ten Dead Men, Ryan leaves Axel with a pistol to kill himself. Instead, Axel points the gun at the back of Ryan's head as soon as Ryan turns away. However, the hammer falls on an empty chamber, and Ryan turns around holding a single bullet between his thumb and forefinger.
• 3 Idiots: Suhas fails a secret test of character. Three times! At Mona's wedding, Rancho ruins Suhas's Italian shoes by spilling sauce on them, showing that Suhas cares a lot about money. The second time, Rancho makes Pia pretend she had lost the expensive watch Suhas had just bought her; Suhas responds by nagging Pia. Thanks to this, Pia decides to break off their engagement. On the third occasion, when Pia is going to marry Suhas ten years later, Raju ruins Suhas's wedding clothes with green sauce, showing Pia how he has still not changed. This time Pia decides to leave Suhas at the altar.
• In Tower Heist, Josh Kovaks confronts Arthur Shaw in the latter's penthouse and basically gives him a small test by informing Shaw that the Tower's doorman, Lester, has just attempted suicide due to him losing his pension as a result of Shaw's current criminal charges for making fraudulent investments. Despite Shaw expressing concern upon learning about what has happened to Lester and his insistence that Lester has been an important part of his life for years, Shaw fails this test because he never bothers to ask whether Lester is alive or dead after the suicide attempt.
• Subverted in Training Day. Alonzo puts Hoyt through all manner of situations to test him for suitability as a narcotics officer working on the street. It later turns out that it's all been an elaborate façade to set Hoyt up as an accomplice.
• In The Usual Suspects, Agent Kujan tells Verbal that the best way to catch a criminal is to arrest five guys for the crime and put them in a cell overnight. The next morning, whoever is asleep is your man. An innocent man will stay up all night worrying while a guilty one will realize he's been caught and relax. This is actually relevant in the scene with the suspects in a cell together after their lineup. The one who is lying down turns out to be the one who committed the hijacking.
• In WarGames, an Air Force soldier in a nuclear silo outright refuses to trigger a launch when the command to nuke the USSR comes through, despite his partner drawing a gun on him. This turns out to be a staged test conducted to determine if human operators can be relied upon to carry out such unthinkable orders.
• Willow has the wizard of the village run a test to find an apprentice. He holds out his hand and asks each applicant to choose the finger that holds the power to shape the world. Everybody fails, even Willow, who was going to pick his own finger but backed out at the last moment. The wizard later confides in him that it would have been the right answer, and advises him to have more confidence in himself.
• Used in the film version only of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. All five children to find Golden Tickets are approached by Wonka's sinister rival Slugworth and asked to steal him one of Wonka's Everlasting Gobstoppers to study. Wonka gives them all one during their tour. In the end, Charlie gives it back to him rather than sell it to Slugworth even though Wonka had just chewed him out and revoked his lifetime's supply of chocolate. Turns out that wasn't Slugworth. It was Mr. Wilkinson, who was working for Wonka, and it was a secret test to see who was worthy to run Wonka's factory after him.
  Wonka: I had to test you, Charlie, and you passed the test. You WON!

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