Road Block

The police are just waiting for our fleeing heroes to arrive at their Road Block. Too bad they don't know the heroes are going to escape with Slo-Mo Big Air, or that they know another way; the roadblock will only be rammed by other police cruisers. Alternatively, the heroes will cleverly bluff past the guards, who are often incompetent.

Also used by security departments of evil corporations and road construction crews.

In video games, blocks serve other purpose and are used excessively to avoid player wandering off the map.

Examples of Road Block include:

• Both of The Blues Brothers films.
  • In The Blues Brothers, the Blues brothers escape the cops by driving into a mall.
  • In The Blues Brothers 2000, a Road Block has been set up; Elwood gets around it by driving under a river.
• It's possible to hilariously subvert this trope in Need for Speed Most Wanted and Carbon. During a police chase, the police occasionally set up a roadblock in front of you in increasing frequency, depending on how much they want to take you down. While it's certainly possible (and fun and profitable) to simply smash through the roadblocks, if you want, you can simply take another street. That's right: the police are so adept at setting up roadblocks that they block off one street, giving you the option of as many as four other different escape routes. Brilliant.
  • The Hot Pursuit games that came before them had roadblock as well that were very easy to smash through without totalling your own car, since no amount of damage would stop it from moving. The exception were the spike strips, which were hard to see and therefore harder to avoid, and would stop you in your tracks if just one tire touched them and blew out.
• The film version of Wanted has a scene that pretty much exemplifies this trope.
• Der Clown – Payday has two Road Block scenes. One is flown over by the good guys, one is removed when a tractor-trailer driven by the Big Bad and with the heroine tied to its front speeds towards it.
• The 1986 movie Band of the Hand ends with the heroes pulling up to a police barricade in a camouflaged jeep filled with guns. The heroes proceed to bluff their way past the roadblock.
• Another bluff past a roadblock occurs in A Perfect World, in which a convict and his young hostage/companion ride with a friendly family past a roadblock. Once out of sight, the family is left on the roadside, and the convict and boy take the car.
• The Mother series loves to play with this. EarthBound uses road blocks in the prologue to keep Ness from going downtown, and later from going into Twoson, under pretense that the police are going for the world record for how many roads they can close at once. Played with even more in Mother 3, where Road Blocks appear as as immobile enemies who, in true Mother fashion, possess red eyes, hands, telekinetic powers and the ability to call clunky robots into the fight. Averted, however, in that they don't actually block anything, since you can just run over them while in a vehicle, and at later levels, by charging into them.
• A minor occurance in the first Sin City story (also depicted in the movie). The cops are chasing Marv on foot through the hotel. He drops out of the window and tries to go down the alley, only to see a cop car heading him off, blocking his way. He ends up jumping through the windshield to beat up the drivers and subsequently, take the car.