7 Movie Plots That Could Have Been Resolved In Five Minutes

In every movie, there’s normally at least one plot development or character decision that’ll have you scratching your head in disbelief.

As we all know - and no matter how detailed all that Harry Potter fan fiction gets - movies aren’t real. They’re written by human beings who are quite capable of making mistakes, and occasionally, this can result in stories with huge gaps in logic, inconsistencies, or completely dumb decisions only put there to advance the plot.

This happens a lot in horror movies (please don’t go in that dark scary room all by yourself... oh okay you just did), but it's common in lots of other genres too. There are times when a story should realistically end really early on, but because, you know, there wouldn't be a movie if that happened, events have to unfold - often questionable events - just so things can keep moving forward.

Whether it's a character not acting the way they should, or the writer missing a completely obvious solution to a problem, you've probably noticed something like this before, and here are a few of the most notable offenders.

The Plot: In Iron Man 2, Tony Stark's arc reactor - the very thing stopping several pieces of shrapnel from penetrating his heart - is also poisoning him.

Not being one to just sit around and accept his slow, painful death, practically the entire movie finds him searching for a way to replace the reactor's palladium core and save his life. This impending doom makes his behaviour more reckless, fuelling many of the movie's dramatic moments, including the controversial party scene.

He even goes so far as to create a brand-new element; the material that ultimately solves his problem.

How It Could've Been Resolved Quickly: Tony is a stupidly smart guy, and yet, there are two far simpler solutions to his health issue that he conveniently doesn't think of.

The first (and most obvious) is surgery. Why not go under the knife and have the shrapnel removed? It's not like this is impossible - he has such an operation at the end of Iron Man 3. It's too logical an option for Tony to not think of, and what's more, it would cure him permanently.

An alternative play would be for him to hook himself up to the car battery he used back in the first Iron Man. This would be too cumbersome to be a long-term cure, but it would give him the time to detoxify, and it would take a long time for the palladium poisoning to reach critical levels once again.

With this poisoning absent, Tony's desperate behaviour - and consequently, a lot of the plot - would vanish. The whole "create a new element" thing feels unnecessarily convoluted when he could have cured himself with two much easier methods.