Plot holes are a fact of movies but every now and then you get one so bad it just kills suspension of disbelief for you. What movies fall into this category for you?

* Star Trek: Wrath of Khan - How could the Federation not know Ceti Alpha Six blew up? They knew about Praxis immediately in ST IV. Or how did Checkov's ship not notice a missing planet and a debris field? This one is so glaring and it drives me crazy how Trek fanboys go on about how great WoK is. Other than Spock's sacrifice and the sub battle-inspired climax the movie is a scenery chewing contest between Shatnet and Montalban.

* Crimson Tide - A lot of problems with this one. Hackman's character was so out of control in contrast to Scott Glenn in The Hunt for Red October. Navy people have pointed out the petty officer who had the heart attack and the chief of the boat would never be allowed on a sub to begin with because they were so obese. But the clincher was the XO insisting on floating the bouy to get the EAM because they were too deep from hiding from the Akula. But they were prepping to launch anyway and had to come shallow to launch, so they would have come up and gotten the EAM anyway. So all he had to do was be patient and wait. But the whole story is predicated on floating the bouy, the winch seizing and giving them away, and everything that followed.

The Silver Surfer thread was a nice touch, though.

Are you familiar with this show business adage: If you buy the premise, you buy the bit.

Sister Act 2 has Whoopi Goldberg character go from being a lounge singer in Vegas to dressing up as a nun again, not to hide from mobsters this time but to teach music? And for no particular reason besides to live up to the title of the movie.

Speaking ov Vegas in movies, Showgirls is entirely predicated on the premise that you could rise from being an unknown stripper to being the most famous featured Showgirl on the Strip. Apparently writer Joe Eszterhaus had no idea that nobody makes showgirls famous - they are interchangeable and unrecognizable. The more beautiful naked girls the better. That is a big part of the appeal. Nobody goes to see a celebrity showgirl - that doesn’t exist. How did he not know that? Did he get Vegas confused with Broadway?

Yup. That ruined Showgirls for me too...

The Dark Knight Rises: Batman not only fully recovers having bad knees (no more cartilage) and from having his back almost completely broken by Bane, and escapes from the prison pit, and then somehow makes it back to Gotham in record speed without any problem (by hitchhiking on boats? planes? who knows?) and THEN survives a nuclear blast. And people complain about the nuke the fridge scene from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull! The film is like a 50 point IQ drop from previous film.

Also: sorry, Wrath of Khan is FAR too awesome to be destroyed by the aforementioned plot hole. It beats the all the TNG movies and *definitely* beats all the Kelvin-verse movies put together.

"Yes. Yes, indeed."

Wrath of Khan plot hole is easy to patch. When Kirk marooned Khan and his people there, he didn't properly document it. He just dropped everyone off and left. It's the sort of jerk move he would have made at the time. The Federation would have no reason to pay special attention to the Ceti Alpha system. The explosion of Ceti Alpha 6 was probably logged, but nobody bothered looking up the data.

Or you can just go "whatever" and enjoy the remaining 110 minutes of the movie.

I don't have a problem with that. If Arnold as Conan the Barbarian can defeat a wizard in his universe, why can't Gina Gershon as a stripper be a headliner in hers?

My most recent is The Mist. Our characters walk around the pharmacy for five minutes gathering supplies. Only then do they notice that it's full of spider webs, and only after that do all the monsters attack all at once. It was like Wile E. Coyote not falling until he looks down. Great for comedy, lousy for horror.

I don't go to those kinds of shows in Vegas, but I know people who do. And there are absolutely "headliners" in some of them.

No offense Groucho, but you’re telling someone who has lived in Las Vegas for almost twenty years that there are Showgirls featured by name on billboards and ads for Vegas shows? Because that is absolutely not the case. There may be headliners (like porn stars or Playmates) at a strip club, but back when there were revues with showgirls (the last was Jubilee at Bally’s which closed about 5-10 years ago), it was the show and the number of girls that was the star, not any actual performer.

In The Girl With Dragon Tattoo (2009), the investigator is summoned to some rich guy, who says every year on his birthday he receives a picture of a flower that had some significance to a girl he used to know that's disappeared, and he believes they are being sent to him by the person who killed her to taunt him. The first question the investigator is going to reply with is, "That's a leap. How do you know she's dead? Maybe she's the one sending them." The fact he doesn't makes it obvious that she's still alive and during the rest of the movie I feel like I'm wasting my time. Also, the bad guys should have been able to find her, as apparently she was just a Google search away living under her sister's name.

In Preist (1994), the main character is tormented because the rules of the confessional prohibit him from revealing one of his parishioners is raping his daughter. He wants to save her, but his hands are tied! Turns out that isn't true in real life, that if someone tells a priest, "Yeah, I'm going to rape my daughter tonight," that isn't a confession, and there is no privacy privilege. So either this movie is about the stupidest priest in the world, or it's made by ignorant people who are wasting my time.

In Wolf (1994), the Michelle Pfieffer character is clearly being set up as some kind of werewolf hunter who is making sure Jack Nicholson is a werewolf before she kills him, but this entire storyline is dropped for an action-packed ending, presenting her suddenly as a whole new character.

I know this has been discussed ad nauseum, but I still have issues with the end of the prequel trilogy where Yoda faces off with the Emperor and barely loses, then goes off into self imposed exile instead of helping the rebellion, and Obi Won actually beats Anakin convincingly and then just gives up to go babysit from afar(I realize that other media has since retconned that into Obi Won doing other stuff). Then combine that with all the other "coincidences" like C3PO and R2D2 being involved the whole time and Boba's origin. The whole point of the prequels was to lead up to a New Hope and it actually made everything worse off (IMHO).

That's really the fault of a narrative black hole in SW:ANH.
We're presented with a galaxy (far, far away) where everything is shit because of the Emperor/Empire, and we're told in the vaguest terms that everything used to be great.

Filling in that hole with the prequels, Lucas set himself up for huge problems because now he was waving a big flag and drawing attention to the fact that the time difference between when Jedis kept order for the Republic and the complete control of the Emperor/Vader was just Luke and Leia's lifetimes, so like 20 years at most(?).

I don't agree that's a "narrative black hole". Star Wars is about what's happening in the present, you're told as much about the past as you need to know. The failure to come up with a good story for that past is a failure of the prequels, not the original movie.

I also disagree. The problem was that Lucas chose NOT to tell that story and elected to try to tell us the whole galactic war was really just a really bad family feud.

When people know who James Bond is. "Hey, that's James Bond". Cringe worthy.

Why do they always wait until 30 minutes before sundown to go kill the vampire? I'd be at the creepy old house staking the motherfucker at 9am.

For me it was the beginning of Equilibrium, and that ruined the whole movie for me. They pull out a huge Mona Lisa, which of course prompted me to say "fake", and then they scan it and declare "it's real!"

I wouldn’t call it a hole but the second they started using CGI in Now You See Me I checked out. You can’t ask me to buy into the whole plot which revolves around their elaborate tricks when they can’t actually be achieved in real life.

Fuck that cheat!

I did not mean that there was any problem with the plot of SW:ANH. My point was that to make the plot of ANH work, Lucas created a sketchy past that when he went back to fill it in, all the limitations became glaring.
For example, fujishig complained about Yoda. The way Yoda is presented in Empire, it would seem like his past life as an active Jedi was looong ago, not 25 years.

I don't know how Lucas was supposed to explain how a dysfunctional but galaxy-wide Republic became a distant memory in 20 years.

I can't believe we're talking about Showgirls here...

The only reason that movie exists is to show off that Saved by the Bell girl naked. Mission accomplished.

The mission was only half accomplished. We never got "the movie" with college years Kelly.

Some of those Alien and Terminator films have a bunch.

Honestly, all the Terminator movies have a huge plot hole you have to overlook. Even with that said, the first two are still great movies.
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Jaws the Revenge (1987)

The shark was killed in each of the three Jaws films that preceded this one and yet the movie asks us to believe this particular shark has a vendetta against the remaining members of the Brody family. How did this idea even make it past the security guard at Universal Studios?