Bunny Ears Lawyer / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

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• Ahnuld's buddy Hank in The 6th Day is a goofball who lives with a robotic prostitute, but he takes his job as a helicopter pilot seriously and is more than happy to cover for Ahnuld on his birthday. He gets killed for his troubles.
• Ace Ventura is certifiably insane — manic episodes and schizophrenia, at the least. He is also very good with animals, a highly observant and capable investigator, a decent actor, very good driver, love-machine par excellence, and no slouch in analytical thinking. He finds a stone in a dolphin's water tank filter, which he recognizes almost immediately as a stone from a Miami Dolphins' 1984 AFC Championship ring.
• The pilots in Air America are completely insane, but really good pilots.
• Willie Beamen in Any Given Sunday had the habit of throwing-up at least once every match. However, he's a reasonably competent quarterback that he took over as the starting QB when the previous one was injured.
• Austin Powers: Austin parodies James Bond by being very strange and silly. But at the end of the day, he is still a master spy and Action Hero.
• Rodney Dangerfield's Back to School character Thornton Melon embodies the Dangerfield goofball persona, but also has tremendous business acumen.
• The Big Short:
  • Michael Burry, the financial investment genius who goes around the office in T-shorts, shorts, and barefoot, constantly drumming to heavy metal music and monologuing to himself.
  • Danny Moses is often derided by the rest of his fund for his optimism and overly cheerful attitude, but proves his worth as a highly-skilled trader.
  • Ben Rickert is a retired investor with connections everywhere, and is also a paranoid survivalist who hates Wall Street.
• The titular character from The Cable Guy might be pushy, obnoxious, have absolutely zero social skills, No Sense of Personal Space, and be a dangerous and vindictive sociopath, but he happens to be one hell of a cable guy. The man can find where the problem is in your cable simply by talking dirty to the walls and is able to clear up interference by doing nothing more than moving furniture. Later subverted when he was in fact fired from the cable company, countless times by using fake identities, and is now merely impersonating a cable guy.
• In the film inspired by Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action Jerome Facher, played by Robert Duvall is an eccentric old lawyer, who is a huge baseball fan, to the point of playing with a ball during a conference call with a co-defendant's attorney in a serious case, always uses an old briefcase, with a cartoon character sticker on it, which keeps breaking up and that he keeps repairing with huge amounts of duct tape, even in the courtroom during an hearing. But, believe us, he is also the kind of lawyer every sensible defendant would like to have on his side.
• Deconstructed on Death Machine, which gives us Big Bad Jack Dante. He is one of the most horrifying man-children ever put on screen, but he's so good at creating the kind of weapons MegaCorp CHAANK wants that the more amoral executives try to tolerate him. The deconstruction lies in that by the point the movie starts he's screwed up a bit too much for them to consider his projects practical but he's creeped them out to the point that they can't bring themselves to fire him, so protagonist Hayden Cale (the Only Sane Employee by virtue of being a Naïve Newcomer) decides that there's no advantage in having such a psycho around no matter what.
• Down Periscope is all about figuring out that this trope applies even in the navy.
  • Commander Dodge is famous throughout the Navy for his cavalier attitude to command and his immature antics (not to mention his penis tattoo) but he is also a prime example of immature not meaning irresponsible. His goofball antics never affect his performance on the job in spite of being less than professional, he is well-liked by his subordinates, and he manages to whip a World War II-era rustbucket of a submarine and a Rag Tag Bunch Of Misfits into an effective fighting force over the course of a Montage.
  • Sonar, the Sonar technician has hearing so good that he's been considered a security threat. He can count money just by hearing it drop on the floor of a neighboring submarine. Also, he's studying the language of whales. And he's a bit off. Nonetheless, he saves his crew from peril with all those abilities.
  • Nitro, the electrician and radio operator, is more than a bit off because he's absorbed so much electricity. Nonetheless, he's probably the only one capable of making the electrics on the Stingray actually work.
  • Even the Stingray, a World War II relic diesel submarine could count, because it's the only sub that could manage to sneak into Norfolk.
• Dr. Strangelove is a brilliant former Nazi with a severe case of alien hand syndrome - his right hand gives the Sieg Heil salute without his control, and takes extreme effort to force back into his lap, and occasionally attempts to strangle him. Among other things.
• Ian McKenzie (Marlon Brando) in A Dry White Season is a seemingly scatterbrained, eccentric attorney who seems too cynical about the case (and pre-occupied with his house plants) to even bother trying, but in court he presents plenty of undeniable evidence (including photos and eye-witness accounts) that Gordon (and many others) were tortured and murdered in police custody. He still loses because the judge is on the side of the police, but McKenzie's case would have surely convinced any impartial judge.
• Nathan from Ex Machina, acts like a drunken frat boy around Caleb, but is smart enough to invent fully intelligent and self aware AI with durable android bodies that easily pass for human.
• ‘’Go Tell the Spartans’’: Wattsberg spends most of the first half of the film awkwardly trying to explain his color-coded chart of Viet Cong activity and the logistics factors that have him convinced of its accuracy. Major Barker and Captain Olivetti spend most of the first half of the film rolling their eyes. Then it turns out that Wattsberg was right on the money.
• Kuryu, the main character of Japanese movie Hero (based on the TV series) is almost literally a Bunny Ears Lawyer. He constantly wears almost-aggressively casual clothes while his contemporaries wear suits, he indiscriminately buys random items from the shopping channel, and spends the whole movie trying to learn Spanish simply because he inadvertently ordered a book in that language. His quirks are overlooked however, partly because he is a cunning and successful lawyer, but mostly because his co-workers are all subtly quirky too.
• In High Crimes, a woman seeks someone known as one of the best military lawyers to defend her husband, who's been accused of war crimes. She finds him living in a ramshackle house, watching daytime television and struggling with alcoholism. Yet he's sharp as a tack and successfully gets her husband acquitted.
• Detectives Gavilan and Calden in Hollywood Homicide. Gavilan is a Deadpan Snarker who moonlights as a real estate broker and is being investigated for financial improprieties by Internal Affairs. Calden is an aspiring actor who fancies himself a Warrior Poet. In the film's climax, they manage to solve their case and catch the bad guys in a wild Chase Scene, while indulging their side interests at the same time.
• "Oddball" from Kelly's Heroes has a bazillion and nine strange quirks, not least of which is an obsession with positive thinking, but still manages to be a highly skilled tank commander.
• The detective in Laura always plays with a handheld maze game.
• Daniel Rafferty in the film Laws of Attraction. When we first see him, he's dozing in court, is scruffy, unkempt, and as we later see, works out of a ramshackle office in a rundown area of Chinatown, despite the fact that he could clearly afford better, as evidenced by his very nice apartment. But within two seconds of meeting uber-uptight attorney Audrey Woods, he wipes the floor with her and it's mentioned that he's never lost a case.
• Elle Woods in Legally Blonde is a law student who literally wears a bunny outfit to a party ^note if only because she was told that it was a costume party, as a prank. Her awesome knowledge of fashion helps her defend her clients. She also legitimately got into Harvard law based on her academic record and testing.
  • In the sequel, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde, her awesome knowledge of fashion allows her to root out political shenanigans on Capitol Hill.
• Martin Riggs from the Lethal Weapon series is suicidal in the first film, and then just plain crazy after he gets over it. He deliberately plays havoc with the department's psychiatrist (and starts to make her snap), for bonus points. His near unstoppability when dealing with thugs is likely the only reason he is left on the force.
• Live Forever As You Are Now with Alan Resnick: Alan is quite eccentric and strange, doing things such as forcing those who go through his program to spend five-hours looking at a mirror and go to his house so he can strobe lights in their face, and describes the Uncanny Valley with an example about putting skin on a rock. At the same time, he's an accredited computer wizard, who did at the very least come up with a way to create digital clones of himself and others.
• The Man with Two Brains. Dr. Hfuhruhurr literally wears them going into surgery. It's a practical joke, but it's a Visual Pun as you discover that is exactly the kind of doctor he is. C'mon, folks — screw-top brain surgery?
• The Martian: Rich Purnell manages to somehow be completely unaware of anything outside his work tasks as a trajectory calculator for NASA Astrodynamics, including how to interact with his supervisor and who his non-immediate bosses even are, but is nevertheless a "steely-eyed missile man"
• Marvel Cinematic Universe: Tony Stark is a mess of psychological issues (including but not limited to; near-narcissism, self-destructive tendencies, self-loathing, and daddy issues), who often manages to annoy everyone around him with his behavior, even (hell, especially) his allies. He's also one of the finest engineering minds on Earth.
• Me, Myself & Irene: Charlie's illegitimate but loving sons are incredibly profane and obnoxious hoods... who have incredibly superhuman intelligence. They manage to operate a helicopter... with German instructions.
  Shonte Jr.: Anybody know how to fly this damn thing?
  Jamaal: Motherf***r, it can't be that hard, it's just lift versus drag and rotation!
• Miss Meadows: Miss Meadows is very eccentric (actually, emotionally disturbed to the point of some delusions), dressing and acting in the manner of a "nice girl" from The '50s. She also wears tap shoes constantly and needs little to no provocation to start dancing. However, she's a competent, beloved teacher and quite good with a gun.
• Vinny in My Cousin Vinny is an acerbic Brooklyn stereotype with a mouth like a stevedore(being played by Joe Pesci, this is to be expected), but turns out to be a brilliant and tenacious opponent in the courtroom. Also, his girlfriend Lisa, an aspiring hairdresser who knows enough about cars that her testimony ends up proving the defendants' innocence.
• Night of the Dribbler: At first glance, the two police officers assigned to investigating the attacks on the Watergate college basketball team don't seem like the most competent cops, forgoing obvious suspects in favour of seemingly-esotaric leads. However, they manage to somehow deduce that Stan's dad is the killer, and show up to arrest him at the end of the movie.
• Official Secrets: Rhys Ifans's character, Ed Vulliamy, is an erratic, profane, and scruffy investigative reporter who is adamant that the imminent Iraq War is based on a sham (much to the annoyance of The Observer's pro-war editorial board). He's also the guy who confirms, despite the freaking NSA's best efforts to the contrary, that Frank Koza exists and authored the embarrassing memo that main character Katharine Gun leaked.
• Oppenheimer: The titular character. He's arrogant, prone to mood swings, and has very little tact, but nobody has mastered the atom quite like Oppenheimer.
• Dr. Newton 'Newt' Geiszler from Pacific Rim. He's loud, disorganized, excitable, and eccentric to say the least. If he wasn't such a competent Kaiju biologist, he'd probably get checked into a mental hospital due to his borderline-obsession with the things.
• In both the 1968 and 2005 versions of The Producers, Leo and Max make a mistake that torpedoes their Springtime for Hitler gambit when they assume that Roger DeBris is a bad director because he's an eccentric, cartoonishly Camp Gay director of romantic comedies. He's actually a good director who can elevate a romanticization of Hitler into something that people enjoy.
• In Ra.One, Shekar, who is quite good at his job of game designing, but incredibly spacey—to the extent that no one seems to notice when he is replaced with a robotic double incapable of comprehending sarcasm.
• John Mason (Sean Connery) from The Rock is a good example. Despite being considered one of the most dangerous men alive, the US government is essentially ready to give him anything he wants in order to get him to work, because he escaped Alcatraz and lived to tell about it.
• Stéphane from The Science of Sleep is completely... mad, possibly... due to his confusing dreams that keep melding with reality (that he's not entirely about to cope with). However he is a technical genius. He makes a toy horse gallop with robotic parts — rather realistically and possibly a one-second time machine. His "Disaterology" also becomes a big success.
• The Serpent and the Rainbow: Mozart is a bit of a duplicitous jokester, but once he actually does agree to make Dr. Alan real zombie powder instead of the (cheaper and easier to make) rat poison he'd been peddling, Alan compared him to a Harvard PHD while watching him mix his chemicals.
• Holmes in Sherlock Holmes (2009) is a brilliant detective, but he is also quite eccentric as well as having a recurring cocaine dependency. Watson is used to this kookiness but a lot more normal.
• Subverted in Smokin' Aces. There is an eccentrically sleazy lawyer. For his first scene, there is literally a costume rabbit head showing in the background. However, he proves to be completely incompetent.
• Dr. Robotnik from Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), naturally. He may be gleefully evil, have aspirations to Take Over the World, and be (as one member of the military's high command described him) a "psychological tire fire" who is almost impossible to control, but he also has five PhDs, boasts an IQ of 300, builds machines worlds above what anyone else can create, a genius tracker able to decipher a creature's height, weight, and bone structure from a footprint, multilingual, a capable hand-to-hand fighter, and has a perfect mission record doing black ops for the Pentagon.
• J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man Trilogy. While he's very bombastic and over the top, when he's told in Spider-Man 3 that he'll have to issue a retraction after he fires Eddie Brock Jr. for fabricating a photo of Spider-Man, he exclaims that he hasn't had to print a retraction in twenty years! Indicating he is very good as an editor-in-chief despite his sensationalist tendencies.
• Jimmy from Timecop is lucky he knows how to use a computer for more than just watching virtual reality porn. An alternate timeline shows us a much more serious Jimmy with no such vice.
• Lampshaded early in Top Gun when Stinger chews out Maverick and Goose for the umpteenth time. Maverick's lost his qualifications as section leader several times, and has a habit of making high-speed passes by control towers and at an admiral's daughter. About the only reason he hasn't been kicked out of the Navy altogether is that he's a damn good pilot. The sequel somewhat deconstructs this by showing that, while he was never booted from the Navy, his behavior has also considerably stagnated his career with a superior pointing out he should be at a much higher rank than a Captain, with his friend Iceman now being an Admiral and COMPACFLT, and how Iceman has used his rank to protect Maverick from repercussions. In the end though, he does prove to be the only one capable of preparing a team for what is likely to be a Suicide Mission.
• Glen Whitmann, in Transformers, is a brilliant computer hacker, who may have ADHD and exhibits extremely erratic, perhaps sociopathic behavior. Apart from a lack of basic manners and some sort of unspecified paranoia, his great passions in life appear to be video games and getting into places he does not belong. Which could honestly be said of 90% of computer hackers. Hacking is, after all, all about getting into places you don't belong.
  • Agent Seymour Simmons, who is just a smidge off his nut, but who is very good at what he does. In a bizarre subversion of this trope, his Bunny Ears-ness is implied in the novel The Veiled Threat to be the reason he isn't working for NEST.
• In the 2011 film Warrior: Frank Campana is known for his unusual training methods involving classical music, but damn if he gets results.
• In When Evil Calls, Detective Ringwald bears all the hallmarks of being a Defective Detective, but somehow is the only person who zeros in on the cause of the mysterious deaths plaguing Wilburn High School, despite it involving the supernatural.
• Zarabeth from Witchboard has a habit of chewing bubble gum, an eccentric fashion sense complete with a multicolored pompadour hairdo, a Valley Girl-like accent, and a very sarcastic sense of humor... But she's also a genuine medium who has a successful séance in her one prominent scene, then starts to piece together the mystery at the center of the plot on her own before the main characters do... enough so that she ends up being killed because she knows too much.

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