20 Movies Destroyed By Their Plot Holes
With The Village, Shyamalan totally lost the plot.
Since the dawn of cinema, movies have been built on the suspension of disbelief. They offer us heightened and fantastical stories that don't unfold in realistic ways, and few, if any, films are totally devoid of logic gaps, no matter how great they are. For example, Citizen Kane - often touted as the best features ever made - is built around a huge one: journalists try to work out the meaning of the titular character's last word... but no-one was in the room when he said it!
Most stories don't make perfect sense when you look at them in a literal way, and that's OK. Nonetheless, there is a limit. Some plot holes are just too big to ignore and actually destroy the entire movie - just ask the following 20 films.
Some are broken by a poorly-crafted inciting incident, others feature villainous plans that are constructed from one implausibility after another, and a particular one suffers from a story world that is conceptually broken. What they all have in common is that their plot holes completely destroyed them. As they show, disbelief can only be suspended so far.
20. Law Abiding Citizen - Clyde's Ridiculous Scheming
With its gory violence and angry, steely vibe, Law Abiding Citizen is a movie that you can enjoy... if you switch your brain off completely. If you think about anything that occurs in this story for longer than a minute, you're going to give yourself a splitting headache. It's so darn ludicrous.
This vigilante thriller sees Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler), a former government assassin, embark on the most insane campaign of revenge against his family's killers and the justice department, who gave those killers overly short sentences. Around halfway through, Clyde is locked up in jail, yet various murders continue - how can his crimes still be happening?
It eventually turns out that Clyde deliberately got himself locked up in solitary confinement because he actually dug tunnels between the prison and his lair. All along, he's been sneaking in and out of jail and carrying out his killings that way. So, how were these tunnels not discovered? What if he'd been put in a different prison or different section of it? Clyde is meant to be this genius assassin, but he actually left an awful lot to chance.
That's not even addressing the increasing silliness of his acts, which includes somehow sneaking a big-ass rocket launcher into a cemetery. It's a shame, because this flick does have some noteworthy positives, and it is something of a cult classic, but for many, it will be too ridiculous to view as anything more than a guilty pleasure at the most.