10 Giant Lies Told By Movies That Will Definitely Kill You

4. Landing In A Dumpster Is Safe

The Main Offender: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective While escaping secret agents (The Matrix) or attempting to catch a rare albino pigeon (Ace Ventura,) falling from a great height shouldn't be classed as a particularly dangerous thing, provided you have something nice and soft like a dumpster, or at least a pile of garbage to fall on. Because, according to the rules of Hollywood, such things can ignore the rules of gravity and physics, and absorb all of the force your body creates in falling. And of course, that garbage will never include broken glass, or hard, pointy things. Because everyone takes them to the recycling bins like good citizens.

The Reality Firstly, landing on anything from a great height will lead to grave injury, whether it's garbage, sand, water or packets of marshmallows. The human body is not built to be dropped onto anything, and bones become surprisingly and unhelpfully brittle when faced with massive downward force and gravity. So, you can probably expect at least a broken neck there, or death, if you're above the dreaded three storeys height that will kill most people. And then secondly, there's the issue of it being garbage.

People don't tend to throw out old couch stuffing, bubble wrap and other helpfully soft materials, and the chances of landing on broken glass, rotten food debris and other nasty things is a very real one, no matter what the neighbourhood is like. Ethan Hunt knows this, which is why in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, he actually bucks the long-established trend and refuses to jump into trash.