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Fridge Brilliance

  • A minor thing, but Jack Slater dismisses Benedict by saying "Why am I dealing with a putz like you when I could do something dangerous like rearranging my socks?". How is rearranging one's socks dangerous? Well, in every movie, when Jack Slater comes home, he shoots his closet, killing the assassin hiding there, and given his blasé reaction to it... He basically resigned himself to the fact that he's gonna shoot assassins hiding in the closet for the rest of his life. Rearranging his socks will forever involve dealing with the assassins hiding in his closet. That's why something as mundane as rearranging one's socks is dangerous according to Jack Slater.
    • There's also the possibility that some off-screen villain may actually rig his sock drawer with an explosive booby-trap, and Jack has resigned himself to this as well.
    • He's also probably just speaking ironically because rearranging ones socks isn't dangerous at all, boasting by contrast how little a threat Benedict is to him.
  • The Ripper's axe makes a loud "unsheathing" noise every time he moves it in the opening scene. Later in the movie, in the real world, it hardly makes any noise at all.
  • Not long after Danny is thrown into the world of Jack Slater IV, he makes a comment about how, as they're teamed up as partners, he'll teach Jack how to be "vulnerable", and Jack'll teach him how to be brave. As it turns out, this is exactly what happens over the course of the movie:
    • Jack confides in Danny regarding his miserable social life, his fear of how his daughter may turn out, and overall makes clear that behind the one-liners and action hero prowess, off the clock, even he feels he's a sad, broken man with little to live for, only goes on his adventures because he's given little choice, and believes that his days are numbered and he just doesn't know how his end is coming. He also turns out to enjoy spending time in quiet, normal conversation with the everyday people of the real world, as well as classical music, and is clearly hurt when Danny is concerned that his abilities in the movies aren't going to translate to the real world (but does make clear in the climax that he can absolutely be a hero to the real world just as well as he can in the movies).
    • Danny shows an impressive amount of guile and cunning both during his time in the movie and after - having the presence of mind even in the face of obvious danger to ultimately stall Practice until Whiskers arrives to take him down, uses marked bills to signal to Jack that he and his daughter are in danger, and tricks Benedict into believing him a non-threat, leaving him wide open to Danny attacking and disarming him moments before he shoots Jack dead, giving Jack the opportunity to turn the tables and kill Benedict instead. Additionally, he saves Jack's life multiple times, first from falling to his death, then later by the aforementioned sneak attack on Benedict, followed by a bluff on a couple of paramedics that gives him a chance to get Jack to the theater (It Makes Sense in Context). Oh, and unhesitatingly pulling Benedict's revolver on DEATH HIMSELF and threatening him to back down from the dying Jack, even if it turns out it wasn't necessary, still took some serious guts on the young teen's part.
  • Why does Benedict still fall into the villain trope of explaining his whole plan to the hero even after coming to the real world? He knows that villains can do just that in here and still emerge victorious!
  • Jack's apartment is so bland and empty because it likely doesn't exist in the original Jack Slater 4's script. What purpose would it serve when his ex-wife's house already acts as backdrop for the common "hero visits his family" or the "hero has his house broken into" action movie tropes? Morever, it cannot act as the place where Jack stores his memorabilia from previous films, as his ex-wife house also already fulfills that function with the counterfeit cash and the picture of his son. In lieu of any actual detail from the real world to work with, the movie universe likely just fills in the blank in the laziest way possible.
  • Jack Slater is not on Death's list because as a fictional person, it's up to the writers to decide if he lives or die, not Death. He's curious because he's just encountered someone out of his jurisdiction for the first time.
  • After the scene where he shoots Vivaldi, Benedict monologues to himself in a room with mirrors and smiles at the camera. The scene has been regarded by some as a goof due to the cameramen being visible in the mirrors. However it is unlikely that the editors missed this glaring mistake - rather, it serves as a meta scene where Benedict becomes aware of the fact that he is inside a movie, subtly Breaking the Fourth Wall.

Fridge Horror

  • While action movie characters coming into the real world and deconstructing the fact the normal narrative cliches don't apply...Death, a supernatural entity, keeps his powers in the real world. This implies that the abilities of a fictional character aren't changed, merely how they effect the world around them and vice versa. Had Benedict succeeded in his goals, all the monsters he thought to bring to the real world would've kept their powers...but no longer be confined to the rule of 'the Final Girl wins' or have their victims protected by Plot Armor and in a world that would have no idea how to counter their abilities.
    • This may be an aversion. There's an indication that there is a short period of time that the characters' abilities work and that the longer they stay in the real world, their abilities slowly fade. Jack breaks a window of a car by punching it. He says it hurts, but his hand is okay, no indication that he suffered any broken bones or scraping from the glass which would be common in a real world scenario. So, while Death's abilities continue to work outside of the film, there's the likelihood that his abilities will slowly cease to work. That means any monster characters could also lose their abilities as well, meaning that nigh invincible slasher character won't be protected by the Plot Armor anymore either.
      • See the movie True Lies. When they were filming the car window punching scene Arnold Schwarzenegger punched the window that had not replaced with fake glass and did not even react.
      • True, but keep in mind, that some actors when they get into the moment, they improvise and are so focused on giving their performance, they don't know about it until it happens. For example, Martin Sheen and the opening scene of Apocalypse Now. Him punching the mirror was a complete accident, but he didn't break character and was so focused in the moment. Another example is Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained, where he accidentally sliced his hand open during a scene, but remained in character and in the moment so not to ruin the take (even improvising by actually wiping his own blood on Kerry Washington's face and her reaction was real). We don't know how many takes Arnold did for that scene (including rehersal of the scene before the camera rolled), and he probably hit that window throughout several takes until the last one actually shattered it.
      • What abilities does Jack have in the movie world vs the world has this ability.
      • Well, for one, massive amounts of Plot Armor because he's the lead character. Danny is right about Jack being shot would be nothing more than a scratch for him in his world as opposed to the real world, where the bullet actually did damage. Another thing, more than likely his Improbable Aiming Skills featured in the car chase at the start of the new Jack Slater film. We don't know about his detective skills, as anything that's unique to him because of how the Movie World works may not completely apply to the Real World. Outside of those, who knows what other abilities he has within the film world. So, yes, Jack has some abilities that we know of, and those we do know were affected by being in the real world.
  • Why is Danny a latchkey kid who keeps running to action movies? We get a few clues. His mother makes a remark about how she didn't plan to be a young widow raising a child alone, so we know his father died and did not divorce or run out on them. He's obsessed, not only with action movies, but with Jack Slater as a man who is always going to win and never going to die. Once back in the real world, Danny goes off on a tear about how this world sucks, because bad guys can win and good guys can lose or die. All of this strongly suggests that Danny's father died in a violent altercation, possibly while trying to prevent a crime. How can Danny trust Jack out in the real world? His first and greatest hero died. May double as a tearjerker.

  • The Grim Reaper is still running loose by the end.
    • Considering how rule-bound he is, maybe he went back into The Seventh Seal voluntarily.
      • Likely once he realize he's losing his ability (see above) and won't be able to cope being Brought Down to Normal.
  • It's scary how easily the Ripper gained access to premiere, being that the character might be genetically and fingerprint identical to their actors, whose to say Tom Noonan wasn't wanted for questioning, or Charles Dance isn't getting confusing phone calls about his death?
    • Not to mention the paramedics bringing up treating a bullet-wounded "Arnold Schwarzenegger".
    • Considering we don't see Tom Noonan at the premiere, there's a good chance that, seeing he's an actor, he wasn't at the premiere because he was back in L.A. working on another film (assuming the timeframe of the film is 1993 and the filmography would be the same between the real world of the film and our real world, than that means that Tom may have been working on the film What Happened Was..., in which was an independent film he not only starred in, but written and directed, and was based off of a stage play he written). For Charles Dance (if he's not at the premiere and is on the set filming the movie Century), he may have been at the premiere with a lot of eyewitnesses. Arnold himself was also at the premiere and was seen interacting with Jack. So, in that view, there's a good chance that the ambulance drivers are looking at a very excellent lookalike who got injured while promoting the newest film (and if Charles Dance was there, the police would assume the same thing as Arnold did when he met Jack when it come to finding Benedict's body as another lookalike hired for the premiere. And seeing that they were taking Jack to the hospital, the police would be looking for an Arnold lookalike that was in the vicinity who mysteriously disappeared for reasons unknown).
    • Tom Noonan was at the premiere, a TV reporter first approaches the Ripper and think he's Tom in costume who gets pulled away by his agent who also thinks it's Tom, only for the reporter inmediatly to meet the real Tom Noonan and be confused how he switched out of his costume and make-up in a few seconds.
  • Frankie who gets kidnapped and eventually killed by Vivaldi and Benedict, being mentioned as 'Jack Slater's favourite second-cousin' which seems oddly distantly related until you recall what happened to Jack's son, and it's likely the writers already killed off everyone closer to Jack in previous Slater films that they have to make up second-cousins to keep in a disposable family member.
    • With the exception of his ex-wife (who wasn't present in this film) and his daughter (who was present and was as capable as her father).
  • Someone with the power of omniscience in the movie still retains that power in real life, even if temporarily, as demonstrated by Death knowing about the tickets. Even if all of the nasties Benedict unleashes upon the world lose their powers once physics kick in, there will still be a few like Satan who can wreak havoc by virtue of knowing things like state's secrets and nuclear launch codes.
  • Alternatively, who's to say that magic stops working in the real world? After all, the existence of the ticket proves that magic does exist in that world, so why should it be any different for the creatures that it brings there?
  • The movie universe demonstrates that it's capable of filling in the blanks to make sense of unrealistic movie conventions. The background music is revealed to be Slater having a music player next to him. The gag of him using a recording to answer his ex-wife is later revealed to him just hiring some lady to call him at work so he can save face. His daughter being an Action Girl at such a young age is then deconstructed as her having no social life outside of being an action hero wannabe. This makes all the other oddities in the movie much scarier because the universe has to come up with logical explanations for all of them. For instance, what if the universe justifies California having exclusively attractive people by making eugenics popular there in the past?
  • Jack's second cousin's death becomes a lot sadder comes the revelation that Jack doesn't have much of a social life. Frankie might well be the only close friend Jack has left.

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