We've started to notice a weird trend in our movie antagonists. They keep getting caught, around halfway through the film, but the protagonists. That's another one of those false peaks, but it comes pretty early on, and then it turns out that the bad guy actually wanted to get caught all along - it was part of the plan! Khan did it in Star Trek Into Darkness. Loki did it in Avengers. Javier Bardem's Raoul Silva did it in Skyfall. As we've said in the past, though the plans were enormously entertaining to watch, its a ploy thats not only becomes tiresome in its contrivance, but also woefully predictable. It's something that's actually been around a little longer than the recent examples - bad guys, imprisoned but still screwing with the good guys, dates back to the likes of Hannibal Lecter - but the modern trend is probably rooted in The Dark Knight, where one of The Joker's thousands of possible plans apparently involves getting arrested by the Gotham Police, interrogated by Batman, then break out by using a cell phone bomb sewn into some poor unfortunate's big belly. Oh, and it gets mentioned in Save The Cat! too, of course. Like the false victory, it's supposed to suggest that our heroes are more fallible than they actually are. Every film follows the most basic framework which, inevitably, leads to good triumphing over evil. When you watch a film, you know there's no way the protagonist isn't going to prevail. There will always be a happy ending. Having the villain best the goodies early on, however, introduces some level of doubt and threat - especially when it involves a plan that involves outsmarting and manipulating our heroes. Which might also make them seem totally incompetent, but oh well.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
