Line #67 Film/BigBadWolves


1	[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/big_bad_wolves_56d493e66f9af.png]]
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3	''Big Bad Wolves'' (original title ''Mi Mefakhed mehaZe'ev haRa‘''[[labelnote:Hebrew]]Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf[[/labelnote]]) is 2013 Israeli thriller film. A series of brutal child murders puts the lives of three men on a collision course: The father of the latest victim now out for revenge, a vigilante police detective operating outside the boundaries of law, and the main suspect in the killings--a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanakh Tanakh]] teacher arrested and released due to a police blunder.
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5	!!This film contains the following tropes:
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7	* AnachronismStew: Not entirely unrealistic ones, but they’re still somewhat jarring:
8	** Dror’s classroom has a blackboard, while most classrooms in Israel when the movie was created had whiteboards.
9	** Dror himself has a coat with leather elbows and looks all in all like a stereotypical teacher TwoDecadesBehind.
10	** Gidi’s ringtone sounds like that of a mobile phone from the UsefulNotes/The2000s, despite it being a smartphone.
11	%%%* BadassIsraeli: Several; Gidi, Micki, and Yoram.
12	* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler: Dror dies without revealing where Micki’s daughter is (or for that matter where the heads of his previous victims were) and the cops don’t find the hidden room she’s being kept in, but she’s clearly still breathing, and Dror is dead.]]
13	* BoundAndGagged: Gidi keeps Dror bound to a chair and gagged, and later handcuffs Micki to a water pipe and gags him as well when he starts hesitating.
14	* BreakThemByTalking: Dror tries this on Micki and Gidi, telling them he’s a father himself. It works on Micki, who starts doubting he’s the killer, but not on Gidi, who just says, ‘You’re good.’
15	* ChekhovsGun:
16	** The drugged cake that Gidi baked to drug Dror. [[spoiler:His father eats a slice when Gidi is away, digging up his daughter’s head from the fake location Dror gave him, allowing Micki to escape.]]
17	** One of the nails out of the box Gidi drops. [[spoiler:Micki hides it under his shoe, waiting for an opportune moment; when Yoram eats a slice of the drugged cake and falls asleep, he uses Gidi’s absence to escape.]]
18	** The discarded bicycle outside of Gidi’s house. [[spoiler:When Micki finally escapes, he uses it to run off and get help.]]
19	** The [[spoiler:mobile phone Micki gives his daughter]] allows [[spoiler:her mother to realise she was kidnapped]] when [[spoiler:she won’t answer]].
20	* ChekhovsGunman: The Arab on the horse, who appears when Gidi goes out to smoke a joint, and later [[spoiler:lends his phone to Micki when he manages to escape]].
21	* ColdBloodedTorture: Happens to Dror twice. The first is just a rough beating, the other emulates the killer’s MO, based on the police report: [[SlippingAMickey feeding the girls a cake with sleeping pills]] and [[RapeIsASpecialKindOfEvil violating their every orifice]] when they’re out (this part was omitted in the version done to Dror), waiting till they wake up to [[{{Fingore}} breaking all the girls’ fingers]] and [[AgonyOfTheFeet tearing all of their toenails out]] (and waiting till they wake up again if they pass out again), and finally [[OffWithHisHead decapitating them]] with a rusty saw.
22	* CreepySouvenir: Micki accuses Dror of keeping the toenails of the girls he allegedly kills in a jar on the fridge.
23	* CulturalTranslation: Some of the [[ShoutOut/BigBadWolves Shout Outs]] that wouldn’t make sense to non-Israelis were adapted in the English translations.
24	* DaChief: Tsvika, the police commissioner, chews Micki and Shauli out and demotes Micki for getting caught roughing up a suspect.
25	* DefectorFromDecadence: Micki starts hesitating when Dror talks to him alone, and tries to stop Gidi from further inflicting his ColdBloodedTorture on him.
26	* DefiantToTheEnd: [[spoiler: Dror, in a rare villainous example.]]
27	* DeliberateValuesDissonance: The real estate agent and Yoram make disparaging comments about living in a house surrounded by Arab communities.
28	* EvilAllAlong: [[spoiler: Dror was the killer after all.]]
29	* {{Foreshadowing}}: The camera pointedly shows Dror hanging his bicycle up on a hook in his house. In the end, it’s revealed that [[spoiler:he keeps his victims in a hidden room behind the bicycle]].
30	* FreudianThreat: Yoram threatens to blow-torch Dror’s crotch after asking Gidi if he’d like a hot dog.
31	* GoneHorriblyWrong: Someone records Dror’s [[JackBauerInterrogationTechnique interrogation]] and uploads it to Website/{{YouTube}}, further ruining the police’s already poor name and getting Micki demoted.
32	* GoodCopBadCop: Micki asks Gidi who should be the good cop and bad cop. Gidi says that there’s no room for good cops.
33	* GratuitousEnglish: The abandoned house in the beginning has a graffito reading ‘Ritalin’ on it.
34	* HenpeckedHusband: Yoram is henpecked by his wife, Malka. She nags him about his medication, forced him to become vegetarian and prohibits him from smoking.
35	* InformedAttribute: People keep referring to Dror as short. Although the actor is scrawny and nonthreatening, he’s about as tall as the rest of the cast.
36	* IronicName: Dror, whose name literally means ‘freedom’, spends most of his time on screen BoundAndGagged.
37	* JackBauerInterrogationTechnique: Rami and Micki try to do to Dror to get information about the girl out of him. It fails. Gidi tries to do the same, far more cruelly, more intent on killing him than bringing him to trial.
38	* JumpingOffTheSlipperySlope: Yoram’s turmoil about Gidi’s actions disappear rather quickly as he decides to join in.
39	* LostInTranslation:
40	** The [[ShoutOut/BigBadWolves Shout Outs]] that didn’t get a CulturalTranslation wound up as this instead.
41	** Gidi’s mother’s name, Malka, literally means ‘queen’ ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_(name) like ‘Regina’]]); when Yoram answers the phone, he says, ‘Hello to the queen!’ This was translated as, ‘Hello, Malka!’
42	* LuddWasRight: [[spoiler:Micki]] implies this to defend himself when he’s [[MistakenForRacist interpreted as saying Arabs are technologically inept]].
43	* MistakenForRacist: [[spoiler:Micki]] asks the Arab on the horse, ‘You don’t happen to have a mobile on you by any chance, do you?’ The question’s negative hypothetical phrasing is interpreted at first as rudeness, assuming Arabs are technologically inept.
44	* MyBelovedSmother: Gidi’s mother is a henpecking wife and a smothering mother. She ignores Gidi’s protests and forces Yoram to visit him with a bowl of soup when Gidi claims to be sick.
45	* MyGreatestFailure: [[spoiler:Gidi’s is cheating on his wife with [[SexySecretary his secretary]] instead of picking up his daughter, letting her get caught by the killer.]]
46	* [[spoiler:NiceJobBreakingItHero: How heroic exactly he is is subject to debate, but Gidi killing Dror means there’s no way to know where Micki’s daughter is.]]
47	%%%%* PaedoHunt: What triggers the plot.
48	* PapaWolf: Gidi is only doing this because he suspects Dror killed his daughter.
49	* PetTheDog: Gidi treats an Arab man who rides past his porch with respect, addressing him in Arabic and even handing him the cigarette he just rolled, showing that he’s a decent man when his daughter’s killer isn’t involved.
50	* PoliceBrutality: Micki does this for the first time when he ‘interrogates’ Dror. Unfortunately for him, someone happened to be video taping it, and he was fired.
51	* PrimalFear: Yoram tells Gidi that fear of fire is instinctive in all animals, and is thus a useful interrogation technique.
52	* OldSoldier: Yoram, who has obviously seen some shit, is displeased with how Gidi is unfamiliar with the [[JackBauerInterrogationTechnique interrogation techniques]] he learned in the army.
53	* RoaringRampageOfRevenge: Gidi is on one because his daughter was killed and he suspects Dror.
54	* RussianRoulette: Micki plays this on Dror in an attempt to get him to talk, adding a bullet to the revolver after each trigger pull. It’s unclear whether he’s rigging the game or not.
55	* SadisticChoice: Gidi tells Dror he can either die the same way the girls did at the hands of the killer, or tell him where the head is and die quickly by gunshot.
56	* SesquipedalianLoquaciousness: Gidi uses the somewhat highbrow (in Hebrew) loanword ‘modifications’; when Micki is confused, Gidi says, ‘[[LaymansTerms Changes]].’
57	* SlasherSmile: Subverted. [[spoiler: Dror’s expression moments before he dies is something resembling very ambiguously a smile. Only the final shot confirms it was indeed him all along.]]
58	* SoundtrackDissonance: ‘[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI-7GkqBZp4 My Love Will Get You Home]]’, the song used in the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsfzhiW5l8c trailer]], has a melody that suits the atmosphere of the film very well, but lyrics that ring exceptionally ironic with regards to the characters.
59	* SteppingOutForAQuickCupOfCoffee: After Micki argues that the video won’t go away, and asks Tsvika to let him keep trying to prove it was Dror to fight it, Tsvika tells Micki he’s a civilian now, and civilians can do as they please... so long as they don’t get caught.
60	* TapOnTheHead: Gidi knocks Dror and Micki out cold with a shovel-blow to the back of the head.
61	* TurnInYourBadge: Tsvika first sends Micki to Traffic when the first [[JackBauerInterrogationTechnique interrogation technique]] used on Dror fails and the girl dies, then temporarily fires him until the public forgets about the incident. A non-police example happens to Dror after the video of his [[JackBauerInterrogationTechnique interrogation]] goes viral and too many parents and students protest.
62	* WhamLine: When Micki calls his police chief and instead finds himself talking to his wife, [[spoiler: panicking because their daughter has gone missing: ‘She hasn’t answered her phone since you picked her up from ballet yesterday!’]]
63	* WhamShot: The very last shot shows [[spoiler:the room Micki’s daughter is hidden in]].
64	* WhenIWasYourAge: Malka talks about how people of Gidi’s generation divorce way too easily.

Context Film / BigBadWolves