Wrong Genre Savvy/Film

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Examples of Wrong Genre Savvy characters in Film include:

• Lady in the Water has a scene where the hero, Cleveland Heep, consults the movie critic in order to identify the tenants who fill in the roles of Story's helpers. However, when their plan goes awry and Story is attacked and injured, Cleveland realizes that he incorrectly identified himself. Note that the movie critic was more or less right in his ideas of who the tenants would be, but Cleveland merely interpreted the clues incorrectly.
  • Not to mention the scene where the same movie critic is confronted by the monster, and instead of running away he goes on spiel about how the movie has had no violence, deaths, lewd acts, or nudity and deduces that he is going to live with just a wound because of these factors. He must've forgotten about the female lead being naked for all her screentime.
• In the Star Wars prequels, Obi-Wan is extremely Genre Savvy when he tells Anakin that Aristocrats Are Evil if they are politicians. Too bad he's applying this trope—and that of God Save Us From the Queen—to Padme as well as Palpatine, because they aren't anything alike. Padme is in fact an example of The High Queen and debatably the most moral character in the whole Star Wars universe. Obi Wan specifically warns Anakin to be cautious of Padme because she is a politician, and although he specifically includes Palpatine in that general categorization, against Anakin's more naive trust, the point still stands. Her being an aristocrat technically doesn't come into it but it is a variant in a way since aristocrats often are politicians in the Star Wars universe.

Anakin Skywalker: "... and besides, you're generalizing. The Chancellor doesn't appear to be corrupt."
Obi-Wan Kenobi: "Palpatine is a politician. I've observed that he is very clever at following the passions and prejudices of the Senators."

• • Obi-Wan's problem is that he believes he's living in a naturalistic universe rather than a fantastical one. He's a cynic who believes that all politicians are corrupt and self-serving. He doesn't believe that any of them could be effective, let alone really dangerous: the worst they can do is take advantage of a crisis to serve their own ends. It never occurs to him to think that one of these politicians is actually a devious puppet master who is engineering a crisis in a bid to bring the entire political system down. Ironically, his status as the Only Sane Man works against him: if he'd realized he was in a universe where there actually is an Ancient Conspiracy working behind the scenes, he might have spotted Palpatine sooner.
  • The entire Jedi Order during the last days of the Old Republic have this problem too: they see themselves as the stalwart protectors of a noble old order (and perhaps they really were at one point). In reality they're the arrogant and hidebound old masters whose inflexibility and strict adherence to tradition almost directly leads to the fall of their most powerful member and their complete destruction at his hands.
    • In Matt Stover's novelization of Revenge of the Sith, Yoda realizes this the moment he and Palpatine's lightsabers clash. Skill and power were irrelevant—the Sith had already won because they had become something new while the Jedi had remained the same. The Jedi had been preparing for the wrong kind of war.
• In Arsenic and Old Lace, the theater critic describes in great detail and mocks what happens to the stupid unsuspecting victim characters in a play that he had just seen, inadvertently giving the Big Bad ideas.
• The unease audiences feel toward Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs is heightened by his seemingly unsavvy placement in the structure of the story. Genre conventions would make him the villain. But the story's villain is Buffalo Bill. "Hannibal the Cannibal" is actually the Trickster Mentor. He is Yoda to Clarice's Luke, the shadow counterpart of her FBI academy instructor. Other characters call him a monster, but Clarice addresses him as she would a teacher and he is among those who congratulate her when she graduates. His function in the story places him much closer to the main character than we would expect him to be, and far too close for comfort. With his breakout at the end of the film, this genre-savvy character sheds the mentor role and assumes a more conventional role as villain. In a sense, his act signals a return to order.
• Last Action Hero: Child hero Danny rides his bicycle head-on to play chicken with the main villain's car, reasoning that it has to work because he's the hero in a non-R rated movie where the kid would never die. Then it dawns on him that he's the Plucky Comic Relief instead, and is vulnerable. Cue ET visual gag.
  • The second half of the movie deals heavily with how badly Jack Slater's Genre Savvy as an Action Hero fails him in the gritty, real world until he learns the new rules whereas Benedict becomes Dangerously Genre Savvy right out of the gate instead.
• Pixar's Toy Story 2: Through much of the film Pete the Prospector plays the role of Sage, dispensing advice to other characters. But a glimpse of Woody's Roundup, the TV show that represents his origin, shows Pete playing a self-sabotaging buffoon. The glimpse hints that his sagely nuggets of wisdom may actually be fool's gold. By the end of the film his true role is revealed.
  • Buzz Lightyear (or one of his duplicates) goes through this in varying degrees in all three movies.
• A positive example: Guy from Galaxy Quest, though for the most part Genre Savvy, goes through the events of the film in a depressed and terrified state, because he is convinced that he is nothing more than a designated Red Shirt among the Show Within a Show's stars. In the end, he is told that he has a promising future as the Plucky Comic Relief.
  • In fact, everyone in that movie who acts like it's a movie is proven wrong, and everyone who acts like it's real is proven just as wrong.
  • For even bigger payoff, pay attention during the shootout on the bridge. Everybody except Guy gets shot.
• Jack Burton of Big Trouble in Little China thinks he's a sort of western-style hero who takes charge and beats the bad guys with guts and bravado. However, he doesn't know anything about all the eastern mysticism going on. His best friend Wang has to explain everything to him. It's Wang who is actually the hero, out to rescue his girlfriend. Jack is actually the sidekick, just tagging along and trying to recover his lost truck.
• Near the end of The Madness of King George, Lord Chancellor Thurlow wastes time announcing the king's return to health by bemoaning the messenger in King Lear who arrives too late to save Cordelia. The whole film is an averted Lear—something the king seems to recognize, even if Thurlow doesn't.
• Chad and Lynda from Burn After Reading both start acting like they're in a Spy Drama after they find a disc with the financial records of a former CIA analyst, acting all mysterious around the analyst and refusing to give their real names. However, they're in a Black Comedy, so Hilarity Ensues.
• In Megamind, Megamind thinks that Hal will be the perfect person to train as a hero once he's seen him: he thinks he's a complete nobody who can realize his true heroic potential with his help. Unfortunately, Hal fits a different set of tropes...
• In the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, when the Kraken is taking down a ship full of Red Shirts, one of the merchants runs forward, bravely offering what they had previously thought was the dress of a ghost who was haunting their ship. That would have worked out a lot better for him if he had been in a ghost story, and if that ghost story was actually about him.
• In The Man Who Knew Too Little, the "hero" thinks he's in a huge role-play featuring acted danger and spying.
• An exchange from Detroit Rock City, about whether or not some road-tripping stoners should pick up a hitchhiker:

Jam: It's a teenage girl walking along the side of the highway. They make scary movies that start out like that!
Trip: But they make porno movies that start out like that too, man!

• Park Chang-yi in The Good, the Bad and the Weird is basically a melodramatic and serious Shonen anime villain stuck in a goofy Korean parody of Spaghetti westerns.
• Stranger Than Fiction is a unique case, where the main character realizes he's in a story after he starts hearing his own narration. He seeks out help to try and become Genre Savvy, and correctly deduces that in the context of his narrator's story, he's in a tragedy, which is ironically Wrong Genre Savvy as the meta-story (the movie about the story about a man who hears his own narrator, i.e. the movie you're watching) is actually a comedy.
• The hostages in From Dusk till Dawn, particularly Scott Fuller, have all the Genre Savvy needed to survive in a heist film or hostage-taking film. Scott even lampshades this by telling his father, "I've seen this on TV, Dad!" Pity for them the bar the Gecko Brothers choose to stop at is full of Fricking Vampire Strippers!
• Return of the Living Dead: When confronted with a reanimated cadaver, a group of characters put a pick axe through its brain based on what they know about zombies from seeing Night of the Living Dead. It has no effect.

Burt: I thought you said if we destroyed the brain, it'd die!
Frank: It worked in the movie!
Burt: Well, it ain't workin' now, Frank!
Fred: You mean the movie lied?

• • Ironically, the idea of zombies who are smart enough to repeatedly moan "Brains" and/or who explicitly feel overpowering hunger instead of mindlessly eating, comes from this trilogy, not the original series.
    • Or even care about brains; the originals seemed to show a distinct preference for liver.
• The college kids from Tucker and Dale vs. Evil believe they are in a typical Hillbilly Horrors-style horror film after two rednecks announce that they "have" one of their friends and they start dying one by one. In actuality, they're in a comedy and the two hillbillies saved the girl from drowning. All the deaths are a result of the "victims" being Too Dumb to Live.
• In the little-known Alien ripoff Creature, someone says they remember seeing an old movie (specifically, The Thing From Another Planet) where they tried to stop the monster from killing everyone with an electrified forcefield. Not too effective against this monster.
  • Also how they tried to stop Godzilla.
• The camp Disney flick Condorman features a comic book artist as its protagonist, who dreams of being a comic book action hero. He gets his chance when he persuades his CIA buddy to let him take a courier mission, but then proceeds to ham it up as the most ludicrously obvious Cloak and Dagger spy ever—which causes the Soviet agent he's meeting with to fall in love with him and defect. In a weird way, his Wrong Genre Savviness actually twists the story until he is a superhero in a spy movie.
• The knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail tend to act like they are in a standard Arthurian romance, without realising they are in anything from 1) A very low budget Arthurian Romance, 2) A realistic depiction of the dark ages 5) 3) A musical or 4) A modern day Police Procedural.
• In the 2009 Star Trek, the "new" Kirk assumes that a Romulan from The Future would know what the Enterprise crew will do, so they should be unpredictable. His Vulcan shipmate more accurately recognizes that the Romulan and his ship are a Timeline-Altering MacGuffin, causing a new chain of events (though nonetheless failing to prevent the assemblage of the same Enterprise crew). Later, old-Spock takes advantage of Kirk's ignorance to falsely "imply" that Never the Selves Shall Meet is a rule of this particular Timey-Wimey Ball.
• My Name Is Bruce has this from two angles: Jeff kidnaps Bruce Campbell, expecting him to be a real-life Badass like Ash, and hoping that he can cure Gold Lick's monster problem. Bruce, on the other hand, is oblivious to the horror because he thinks that the whole thing's a prank.
• In the opening part of The Dark Knight during the robbery pulled by The Joker's accomplices, we see each individual robber are being killed by a teammate once their job is done. With only two of the robbers left one of them, Grumpy, pulled a gun on his only surviving teammate, Bozo (who turned out to be the Joker himself), telling him that he's probably been told by the Joker to kill him right after he loaded the cash. Bozo corrected him by saying that he was supposed to kill the bus driver. The confused Grumpy demanded, "What Bus Driver?" right before he was killed by an incoming bus running through the bank. It turns out Grumpy was right about him was being killed next, he's just wrong on who would do it.
• Sam in Tron: Legacy holds the lightcycle baton like a lightsaber.

Sam: "What's this? What do I do with this?"
Jarvis: "I'll give you a hint ... Not that."

• • Even funnier if you're familiar with the Alternate Continuity where you did have to use a lightcycle rod as an improvised weapon...
    • And even then... not like that.
• Tom in Five Hundred Days of Summer thinks that he's in a romantic comedy where everyone gets their happy endings, you can stand up to people hitting on your girlfriend and knock them out with one punch (when he tries this, the guy gets up right away and kicks his ass), etc. Justified because he's grown up on romantic comedies and confused them with reality (and missed the point of The Graduate). He's in a Deconstruction of a love story.
  • Actually, he is right to believe he is in a romantic comedy. He is just wrong about the girl.
• Another positive example: what keeps the plot of Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below from being a Tear Jerker is Asuna, who's almost always happy and vigilant despite the relatively large amount whams coming in even early on. Remember that this is coming from the same person who made 5 Centimeters Per Second.
• Queen Narissa, the antagonist of Enchanted, singlehandedly puts the "decon" in the film's Decon Recon Switch of fairy-tale movies, but fails to recognize the "recon". The one character she can easily handle is Edward, who besides Pip is the only one who lacks Hidden Depths beyond what would be expected of the genre.
• The priest from Outlander mistakes the moorwen for a demon and tries to exorcise it. The morwren mauls him in the middle of his chant.
• In Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, all of the teenagers (except Allison) assume the two eponymous hillbillies are insane killers, simply because they fit the common stereotypes of slasher movie villains, and are now holding Allison prisoner with the intent to rape and torture her to death. Tucker and Dale are, in fact, the most lucid and honest characters in the film; while many of the teenagers die the typical gory deaths associated with slasher films, it's due to their own stupidity in their inept attempts to "rescue" Allison.
• The Stranger from The Big Lebowski is convinced that he is in a western, and narrates the film as if it were one.
• Fred in Big Hero 6 is a comic book fanboy who manages to be savvy enough to realize he and his friends are in a universe where superhero antics have a chance to work, and convinces them to use their abilities accordingly. Unfortunately, he makes the assumption that their enemy, Youkai, a.k.a the person who stole and is replicating Hiro's micromachines, must be a Corrupt Corporate Executive planning to Take Over the World with his stolen tech For the Evulz, and the group plan in consequence. Unfortunately, he and the rest of the group discover that their enemy in fact was their former professor and mentor, who on top of being a subversion of the Mentor Occupational Hazard, stole Hiro's invention in the confusion of the science exhibition's fire, and was planning to use them to take revenge on the not-so-Corrupt Corporate Executive because he held the latter responsible for the apparent death of his daughter. Everybody in the team was expecting a Good Versus Evil plot; that the villain was in a Revenge Before Reason rampage that had nothing to do with them, threw them off the cliff.
• In 2016 Deadpool film, we have Colossus, a gentle, good-natured, shiny hero who insists on trying to recruit Deadpool into the X-Men and make him a hero with methods and speeches that wouldn't be out of place if coming from Professor X. In another X-Men movie his recruits attempts could have a chance of success. Sadly, Colossus doesn't realize that the guy he is trying to recruit is an Anti Hero at best (and an very sociopathic one at that), that the movie he is in is very heavy in the language and the lampshading, and his gentlemanly act makes him the Butt Monkey of the film.

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