10 Movies That BRILLIANTLY Avoided Huge Cliches

Once you've seen hundreds or even thousands of films, it becomes tough for a movie to surprise you anymore, because it might feel like you've basically seen and experienced it all.

There are only so many things a movie can do to skirt the ordinary, and in the interest of delivering a safely fun time, most films will cling to tried-and-tested tropes and cliches rather than experiment with anything different.

And so, it's great fun when a rare movie dares to break the firmly established mould and nimbly sidestep a massively played-out genre cliche.

Inspired by this recent Reddit thread on the very subject, these 10 movies all seemed primed to deliver the same tired trope we've seen so many times before, only to pull the rug out and subvert it entirely.

It's a risk that doesn't always pay off, and certainly threatens to alienate more casual-minded moviegoers, but when it works, man, it really works.

And that's 100% the case with these films, each of which took a familiar cinematic cliche and totally flipped the script, ensuring viewers didn't know what to expect for the remainder of each movie's runtime...

From fairly early on in Blade Runner 2049, it seems like it's going to do the incredibly boring and obvious "legacy sequel" thing of making the new protagonist, replicant K (Ryan Gosling), the child of prior protagonist Deckard (Harrison Ford) and his lover Rachael (Sean Young).

And if K were indeed the first child of a human and replicant, it would basically make him an extremely important Chosen One-like figure in the resistance movement for replicant freedom.

But in the third act, K learns that Deckard and Rachael's child is female, and more to the point, they're a relatively minor character who appears only briefly earlier in the story - Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri).

This was a fantastic subversion of expectations, leading audiences to expect another generic everything-is-connected hero's journey, only to reveal that K isn't The Special, but can still make a difference and have agency through his own actions - not merely because of who his parents are. 

How refreshing in a Hollywood landscape dominated by belated sequels that are hopelessly obsessed with creating sappy, convoluted familial links between new characters and old.