13 Awesome Opening Scenes In Otherwise Terrible Movies
2. Super Troopers
The Opening Scene: In Vermont, three stoned college students are shooting the s*** in their car, when a state trooper car drives up alongside them. They panic and one of the gang eats all their drugs (including a whole bag of shrooms), but the cop car passes them, providing them temporary relief before another cop car shows up behind them. The two troopers mess with the stoned students some more before driving off, and just when they think they're in the clear, the cop car reverses back to them and starts the whole thing over again, before finally bundling them into the cop car for the weed bag they threw out the window, and start pursuing a speeding motorist. They eventually catch the motorist when he flees into a bar, only to find out that it's one of their own troopers in disguise, who then fires off a few shots (to make the college stoners think the troopers are all dead) and "steals" the unattended cop car with the stoners still inside, before the movie's title appears.
The Rest Of The Movie: Though it remains loved in some quarters as a cult classic, Super Troopers really isn't a particularly good film, even if the first 10 minutes do suggest a much more entertaining and wild effort. The humour is all over the place and while it'll almost certainly benefit from viewers having a few tokes of the green stuff themselves, to the sober mind it's a decidedly scattershot affair which doesn't really do enough to satisfy. Even so, a crowd-funding campaign has just started to get a sequel made...
1. The Way Of The Gun
The Opening Scene: Here's one that doesn't waste any time. Parker (Ryan Phillippe) and Longbaugh (Benicio del Toro) are talking while Longbaugh is sat on a car, setting off the alarm. The owner, who happens to be queuing outside the club across the street, calls him on it, along with his loud-mouthed girlfriend, literally credited as Raving B**** (a young, and very attractive Sarah Silverman). Parker turns around and gives one of the greatest comebacks in cinema history, "Shut that c***t's mouth or I'll come over there and f***-start her head", to the amusement of not just the audience but many people in the queue. Raving B**** and her boyfriend walk over as she continues to berate the pair, and when the boyfriend is about to start a fight with Parker, he instead punches out Raving B****, starting an epic brawl as seemingly everyone in the vicinity starts getting involved. The police arrive on the scene and everyone flees, leaving behind a bloodied and battered Parker and Longbaugh.
The Rest Of The Movie: Despite the extremely memorable and entertaining first three minutes, there's not much else in the rest of this movie worth writing home about. Many critics dismissed it as yet another needless post-Tarantino knockoff, wearing fashionable nihilism on its sleeve while actually failing to serve up a particularly compelling plot or likeable characters. Which other awesome opening scenes are followed by terrible movies? Shout it out in the comments!