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Times where a plan Goes Horribly Right in Live-Action Films.


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  • The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension: Buckaroo's test of the Oscillation Overthruster is a complete success. Unfortunately, it gives a bunch of alien criminals a way back to their home planet. The alien government will blow up the Earth if that's what it takes to keep the criminals out.
  • In All Cheerleaders Die, Leena uses her magic bring Maddy and the other cheerleaders back from the dead. She succeeds, but they return as zombie cannibal succubi.
  • In American Fiction, frustrated Monk writes an intentionally bad urban fiction book to highlight the publishing world's hypocrisy, only for it to blow up as a best seller and beloved.
  • The evil robots from Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. They were too much like the originals, to the point that they were easily distracted, made bad decisions, and generally acted like idiots, much like the actual duo. However, they did have some very dark moments and actually killed Bill and Ted, though it didn't stick.
  • Die Brücke (The Bridge), both 1959 and 2008 films. Seven young German schoolboys are drafted into the German Army in April 1945 and they are assigned to defend an anonymous and insignificant bridge. Sufficient to say that they do.
  • The 1999 satirical comedy But I'm a Cheerleader is all about a gay teenager who's sent to a conversion therapy camp by her conservative parents. The protagonist notably starts the film deeply in denial about her sexuality, with the counselors at True Directions going to great lengths to convince her to acknowledge her sexuality so that they can help her "overcome" it. They get exactly what they wanted: after a lifetime in denial, she finally admits that she's gay—and she decides that she'd like to stay that way.
  • In Captain America: The First Avenger, the Nazis wanted to create a supersoldier who could destroy their enemies. They certainly got that with Johann Schmidt (aka, Red Skull). Too bad he also wants to usurp Hitler and dominate the world.
  • In the same vein, Colossus: The Forbin Project has Colossus (the American computer system which controls all American nuclear weapons) connect with Guardian (the Russian computer system which controls all Russian nuclear weapons) and agree that humans should be removed from all decision making, on every level, not just the launch of nuclear weapons. By the end of the movie, the combined Colossus/Guardian have replaced all world governments by threatening to successively destroy cities if anyone disobeyed their orders.
  • Implied in Congo to be the reason why the ancient city became lost. The people of the city had bred a population of aggressive, hyper-territorial, and intelligent gorillas to act as guardians for their diamond mine. Though it's not confirmed, the implication is that the gorillas eventually came to see the people of the city as intruders and slaughtered them.
  • The Craft: Sarah casts a love spell on Chris Hooker in retaliation for telling the school that she put out for him. It's tame enough at first, with Chris just following her around and doing favors for her, but it soon escalates to stalking and eventually an Attempted Rape.
  • The Dark Knight: The Mob gets so scared of Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and Harvey Dent that they hire The Joker to take Batman down. However, the Joker decides that just killing Batman isn't enough and plots to destroy Gotham City from the inside out, decimate the Mob's leadership and take control over the organization himself, and corrupt Dent into a psychotic murderer like himself for the hell of it.
  • In Dave, when the President of the United States has a stroke, White House Chief of Staff Bob Alexander has Dave pose as him and continue to do Bob's bidding. But Dave soon decides to truly use his office to help the country with a major jobs bill. Bob confronts him about it and threatens to "fire" Dave. Dave makes it clear he's perfectly happy going out and telling the press the truth. Too late, Bob realizes there's no way he can expose the scheme without revealing himself as the mastermind and going to jail as everyone else accepts Dave as the President.
  • Dumb Money: Keith invests in GameStop because he thinks it's undervalued and the stock has potential to go up in price, despite being massively shorted by several Wall Street hedge funds. A few of his Internet followers take him seriously and follow suit. The price does go up far beyond what he expected, but it also kicks off a meme-driven social movement that both creates and destroys fortunes and turns into a massive Internet war between Wall Street and regular people that ends up in front of Congress.
  • The Event Horizon was a spaceship created with an experimental FTL drive that was meant to either breach the boundaries of ordinary space-time or just cheat like crazy by turning it into a pretzel. It did exactly that: it effectively opened a gateway to what is can best be described as Hell! (Which incidentally made its premise far closer to the game Doom than the actual movie Doom; it's also often seen as a Spiritual Adaptation of Warhammer 40,000.) From that point on, things went very, VERY badly wrong, instead: good luck actually using it to get to any specific point in normal space-time as-when-where predicted. Or in one piece.
  • In Ex Machina, Nathan's true aim is to test whether Ava is "human" enough to manipulate Caleb into helping her escape. She does, and she immediately murders Nathan.
  • Freddy vs. Jason: As part of his plan, Freddy brings Jason Back from the Dead and tricks him into going to Springwood to kill the kids, counting on the fact that he will be blamed for the murders so he would be able to obtain enough power to escape Hell himself and haunt Springwood once more. The plan succeeds, but Freddy failed to anticipate that Jason would continue to intrude on his territory and steal Freddy's potential victims.
  • In Full Metal Jacket, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman's goal for his group of Vietnam War recruits is to turn each man into a remorseless, killing machine. He gets irritated with Private Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence for figuratively and literally (he's on the overweight side) failing to pull his weight, but eventually after he becomes The Load of the group and gets tortured in a blanket party, Lawrence starts excelling with his gunmanship in great bounds that even take Hartman by surprise. However, his increase in skill came with a progressive downward spiral of mental well-being until he winds up completely batshit insane but at the same time everything Hartman wanted him to be. He ends up killing Hartman, but does immediately kill himself afterwards since he knows of the repercussions.
    • As an extra detail, in the novel, Hartman lies bleeding from his gunshot wound and actually expresses satisfaction that he managed to turn Pyle into a cold-blooded, ruthless killer before Pyle finishes him.
  • In Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, the back story of Conner Mead involves him suffering a minor romantic disappointment. He then gleefully accepts his uncle's advice on womanizing so that he'll never feel vulnerable to a female ever again. It works to the point of him becoming a womanizing jerkass whom everyone hates.
  • Godzilla: Happens often.
    • In Godzilla vs. Biollante, Japanese geneticist Genshiro Shiragami's daughter is killed in a bombing raid. He eventually decides to bring her back by mixing her DNA with a rose and Godzilla cells. This results in her technically coming back, but unfortunately she is in the body of a Godzilla/Human/Plant hybrid which also has a personality of her own that surfaces after an encounter with Godzilla...
    • In the 1991 film Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, people in Japan attempt to "re-create" Godzilla so that they can stop King Ghidorah. Not only do they succeed in mutating a Godzillasaurus into Godzilla, but they also end up making him bigger AND more powerful than before. And then Godzilla proceeds to rampage across Japan yet again...
    • Kiryu from the films Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla and Tokyo SOS is an attempt by the JSDF to create a weapon out of the skeletal remains of the 1954 Godzilla. They succeed, but, unfortunately, Kiryu tends to act like his flesh-and-blood counterpart.
    • In Godzilla (2014), the military decides to use a nuclear warhead to lure in the radiation consuming monsters. The MUTOs take the bait — and bring it to a populated area where their babies are. The military then has to retrieve it and deactivate it.
    • Godzilla vs. Kong: Apex built Mechagodzilla as the Ultimate Robeast that can defeat any Titan on the planet. The robot wasn't intended to be self-aware, merely piloted by a brain interface that allows the pilot to use it as an extension of their own body. Evil Is Not a Toy as uploading King Ghidorah's mind into the AI not only drove Godzilla mad, but once Ghidorah hijacks the controls, the mech goes on a rampage, leveling a large chunk of Hong Kong. Ultimately, this deconstructs man's desire to surpass nature. You wanted the ultimate anti-Titan weapon, humankind... you got the ultimate anti-Titan weapon.
  • Halloween (2018): 40 years since the events of the original film, Michael Myers was committed to a mental institution and had gone completely catatonic. Almost everyone had forgotten about how much of a threat he could be. Keyword is almost: two journalists bring his old mask on a trip there and have the bright idea of taunting him with it in hopes of getting a response. They get one, alright: Michael then proceeds to break out of his imprisonment, brutally murder the journalists in a bathroom, don his iconic mask, and drive back to his hometown to begin yet another rampage.
  • Head of State revolves around a politician getting a black man to run for president (this film was made before Barack Obama's election, of course) and almost win, but gain the support of minority voters for his party so that the politician himself can get their votes in the election after that. Keyword being "almost".
  • Here Come the Girls: Stanley Snodgrass is one of the most awfully atrocious, accident-prone performers in show business history and has been fired from every play he's ever been in and is now utterly unhirable. The people who produce the titular Show Within a Show (and the police) decide to hire him so he will be the bait for the Serial Killer Abhorrent Admirer of the show's lead actress, who has threatened to kill any actors that get near her. Stanley agrees to be hired, but only if he gets a run-of-the-play contract and the killer (as much as the producers hoped he would succeed) fails to murder Stanley.
  • In High School Musical, Chad and Taylor's plan to break up Troy and Gabriella to get them to focus on the basketball game and academics decathlon respectively (instead of each other) goes well...until Troy and Gabriella become so depressed they STILL can't focus on their respective activities, which is exactly what was meant to be avoided in the first place. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
  • Honey, I Shrunk the Kids alternates between this and Gone Horribly Wrong. The machine created by Wayne Szalinski originally blew up anything it was used on, such as fruit. But when Ron Thompson hits a baseball through the Szalinskis' attic window and gets in the way of the laser, the machine begins acting on its own, and shrinks objects (and people) as intended, but ends up shrinking the Szalinski and Thompson kids in the title incident. When Wayne finally figures out the flaw in the machine and corrects it, he is able to get both the Thompson and Szalinski kids back to normal.
  • Inception Cobb knows inception is possible because he's done it before attempting to wake his wife up from a permanent dream state by implanting the idea in her mind that the world around her wasn't real. It worked so well, she later kills herself trying to wake up from the real world. Possibly.
  • This is how General Ross describes how Bruce Banner first changed into the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk (2008).
  • In Indestructible Man, Prof. Bradshaw plans to move his experiments into the cause and cure of cancer to human subjects. Benton's corpse is subjected to chemical injection and massive jolts of high-voltage electricity in order to study the effect on human tissues. However, Benton's heart is re-stimulated, and he completely revives (though rendered mute due to electrical damage to his vocal cords), immensely strong and with skin virtually impervious to scalpels, police bullets, even to bazooka shells. He also murders Bradshaw and his assistant.
  • I, Robot: The robots were programmed to protect humans. And by "protect", they meant locking them inside their houses from the dangerous outside world.
    • Asimov's stories had lesser examples of this trope, with several robots caught in a Logic Bomb-style loop due to their absolute adherence to the Three Laws.
  • The explosives test in The Italian Job (1969). The explosives used are indeed powerful enough to completely destroy the armored car replica. There's just one problem:
    Charlie: You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!
  • In Jurassic World, they decide to create a hybrid dinosaur to draw in more attendance after the normal dinosaurs begin losing appeal. This creates the Indominus rex, which is far too powerful and violent for captivity. Not helping are the spliced raptor genes letting it control Delta, Charlie, Echo, and Blue, which goes about as well as you'd expect.
  • The Lodge: All the strange occurrences around the lodge are the result of Aidan and Mia deciding to gaslight Grace into a psychotic breakdown as revenge for her marrying their dad after their mom committed suicide. They are then absolutely shocked when the survivor of a fundamentalist suicide cult forcibly off her medication and convinced she's dead and stuck in purgatory proceeds to kill them all.
  • Machine Gun Preacher: Sam Childers' wife became a born again Christian when he was in jail. After he got out, she persuaded him to start coming to church, because she wanted him to share her new-found faith. She probably wasn't expecting that God would call him to go to Africa and help orphanages.
  • Maleficent's curse is proven so strong that even her own magic can't revoke it and it clears all the paths to ensure Aurora's doom.
  • This happened in the backstory of The Matrix. Man and machines were at war, and since most machines of the time were solar-powered, man decided to "scorch the sky" to block out the sun. This forced the machines to look elsewhere for an energy supply.
  • In Mystery Men, while we don't actually see this trope directly, we do see the fallout, and it gets brought up in a conversation. Captain Amazing is THE top superhero in Champion City. If he shows up, you can be sure he'll stop the bad guys! And therein lies the problem: he's done too good of a job stopping the bad guys. All the big-name super-villains are locked away (and at least a few are dead), so he no longer has anyone to have big battles against. As of late, he's been reduced to fighting street gangs hassling old people...
  • The Pit and the Pendulum: A plot to break Nicholas backfires because the broken Nicholas takes on the persona of his father — a notorious torturer with a legacy of brutal revenge.
  • In Plan B, Bruno's "Plan B" to win back his ex-girlfriend Laura is to pretend to be attracted to her new, bisexual boyfriend Pablo and make him sexually confused enough to dump Laura. He succeeds... but makes himself sexually confused too in the process and is unable to take up Laura's offer to get back together due to the Faux Yay having become very real between him and Pablo.
  • The Prestige: Robert Angier wants Nicola Tesla to build him a teleportation device. He does... but it lacks the Required Secondary Power of getting rid of the original.
  • In Primal Force, various animals are brought to a private game reserve island and are genetically experimented on, so they'll provide more challenging hunts for rich people. This causes baboons, the first animals that were experimented on, to viciously kill everything on the island (sans one man), and remain on top of the food chain there.
  • In The Producers, the main characters decide to run a scam, which involves collecting investment money by over-promising paybacks from the profits, then making a farce out of an extremely offensive musical, hoping that people will hate it. The show crosses the line so thoroughly that it comes back again, and audiences find it hysterical.
    "I was so careful. I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?"
  • Rashomon: The film itself is this. The final version of the incident is told from the point-of-view of a peasant and is meant to be the truth. However many people don't trust the peasant either, thinking that he either didn't witness the event, and is lying to get attention, or did witness it and is trying to make everyone look bad since, as a peasant, he has been victimized by both Samurai and bandits. Rashomon has even entered into common usage as a situation where it's impossible to know the truth of what happened, including the "Rashomon"-Style trope on This Very Wiki.
  • Red, White & Royal Blue: The White House and Buckingham Palace force Alex Claremont-Diaz (son of sitting president Ellen Claremont) and Prince Henry into a fake PR friendship to avert a media crisis after the two cause an international incident at Henry's older brother Prince Philip's wedding. The ruse works so well that not only do Alex and Henry become friends, they end up falling head-over-heels in love and starting a Secret Relationship which ultimately causes an exponentially worse media crisis than the one they were trying to prevent.
  • Resident Evil (2002): Project Alice was a glorious success, producing a psychic super soldier with a bitter hatred for those who made her what she is. "My name... Is Alice. And I remember everything."
  • Rise of the Planet of the Apes: What'dya know! The ALZ-113 formula really does improve the mental faculties of the common chimp!
  • The plot of The Ruling Class. Jack Gurney is a schizophrenic who believes himself to be Jesus Christ. His manipulative family tries anything and everything in their power to break his delusion. After some incredibly intense and traumatic therapy they apparently succeed; Jack no longer calls himself Christ and answers to his given name. They don’t realize until too late that all they’ve really done is make him switch to a whole new delusion. He’s now convinced that he’s Jack the Ripper. But hey, at least he’s not calling himself God now...

    S-Z 
  • Santa Hunters: Santa's magic slowly weakens the more people see him. The four cousins not only see him, but catch him on video and things start going bad for Santa and the cousins after that.
  • Saw: If John Kramer's philosophy was to get people to appreciate their lives and gain a new outlook, Mark Hoffman can be said to be the ultimate culmination of his logic... for all the wrong reasons. His indomitable will to live makes him survive the Reverse Bear Trap 2.0 (which Jill Tuck sabotaged to be inescapable) and go on to lose all pretenses of following John's philosophy, murdering anyone he fancies instead.
  • Maureen Prescott went to Hollywood to try to become famous. Even though she left the city with a traumatic experience, and a couple roles as an extra in B horror movies, it's safe to say that after 2 books, seven movies, 4 real-life "movies", there's not one person in the Scream series that doesn't know the name Maureen Prescott. And all it took was a series of bad decisions and her brutal death at the hands of the killers of the first movie. But, she was famous.
  • Serenity (2005):
    • The Alliance's Pax chemical went horribly right as well as horribly wrong. Pax successfully made all but a fraction of the test population more docile, but made them so passive that they lost all motivation to eat, sleep or breathe, causing all of them to simply lay down where they stood and let themselves die. The ones who were fortunate enough to survive this had the opposite reaction to the Pax, becoming hyper-aggressive and murderously violent, becoming the very first Reavers.
    • River, the Academy's guinea pig to create a psychic Super-Soldier. Their plans worked. She used her psychic abilities to learn about Pax and her Super Soldier skills to help expose it. Of course, she also went bug-fuck crazy during the experiments.
  • In S1m0ne:
    • As the page itself puts it:
    When the main star of film director Viktor Taransky's latest film walks over "creative differences", Taransky is left with two options: scrap the movie altogether, or find a replacement. Unfortunately, given Taransky's plummeting career and the esoteric nature of the film itself there are no actresses who are willing to take the part. There's one last, desperate thing he could try: an acquaintance left him a computer program on a disk, and he can use that program to digitally create a replacement. It works — the film is a hit, and the "actress" is a runaway success, so Taransky markets her as a real person — giving webcam and phone interviews, "casting" her in his later films, and even performing a music concert as her, but things start to get out of hand. A pair of journalists who are trying to get a lead on the famously reclusive "Simone" are starting to suspect something is wrong, and Taransky himself is beginning to feel overshadowed by his creation.
    • Eventually, Viktor decides to finally escape Simone's success by faking her death in a car crash. However, he finds himself arrested for her murder and no one believing his claims that the woman never truly existed.
  • Commando Elite from Small Soldiers. Some idiots put an advanced military chip into toys to make them look more lively. The toys are also programmed to "exterminate their enemies at all cost" because they thought it looked cool. It didn't go well.
  • In the backstory of Snowpiercer an attempt to combat global warming through geoengineering made the world too cold, to the point where the only signs of life left are on board the titular train and some polar bears seen at the end.
  • The trailers for Species nearly called the trope out by name.
    Scientists attempted to combine human and alien DNA. There was only one problem with the experiment.... It worked.
  • Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams: Originally, the creatures on Romero's island were much smaller, but Romero applied a growth serum to them, intending to make them slightly bigger. The growth serum was far more effective than intended, and made the creatures much, much larger.
  • Star Trek
    • Star Trek: The Motion Picture features the deep space probe Voyager 6 whose basic mission parameters are to travel the universe, learn all that it can, then report back to its creators. When it is intercepted by a planet of sentient machines, it is significantly enhanced with such tremendous power that when it does eventually report back to its creators, it can't accept that it was originally created by inferior organic life forms and threatens to destroy the earth unless the current inhabitants turned over the real creators.
    • Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Commander Kruge orders his gunner to fire upon the engines of the USS Grissom so he can take prisoners. Unfortunately, said gunner makes a "lucky shot" and blows up the ship entirely, killing everyone on board, and gets executed on the spot for his mistake.
      • The USS Grissom itself is an example, as it was an underpowered science ship with no weapons to speak of. It was incapable of holding the planet militarily, and being defenseless meant that the Klingons wouldn't attack it (attacking a defenseless opponent is seen as dishonorable). Kruge, having gone rogue, had no compunctions about disabling the ship, leading to its destruction.
  • Star Wars:
    • Downplayed in The Phantom Menace: Darth Sidious' plan was to use the Trade Federation's grievance with his homeworld of Naboo (that he orchestrated in the first place) to make them occupy his planet and advance his political career a step closer to becoming the Supreme Chancellor... But then Padmé Amidala managed to escape, forcing him to use the situation to get himself directly to the post of Supreme Chancellor too early, as he can only serve for at most two terms of four years each and the Clone Wars he's going to use to create the Galactic Empire still need ten years to start. He manages to work around it and prolong his term long enough, but it added a lot of unnecessary complications.
    • In Revenge of the Sith, Darth Sidious' plan to push Anakin into the Dark Side and turn the Republic in the Empire required the Jedi trying to arrest him and pretending to lose so that Anakin can save him. He had not planned for Mace Windu being actually capable of matching him in single combat and even win the moment Palpatine was distracted, resulting in Anakin having to save Sidious for real.
    • Rogue One: Galen Erso was acutely aware that the Imperials could finish the Death Star without him. So, once captured, he pretends to be broken and does his best to make himself indispensable. This allows him to both delay the project, and to sabotage the Death Star itself with a weak spot. However, his propaganda worked too well, to the point the Rebels starts seeing him as a priority target (even after the Death Star is completed, as they fear he could lead other weapon projects) which results in his death.
    • The Death Star was to terrify the galaxy into submission by existing, with Tarkin using it on the politically and culturally important planet of Alderaan to demonstrate the Empire now had the ability to destroy a planet through its planetary shield and the willingness to do so on anyone. He succeeds... But when the first Death Star is unexpectedly destroyed, everyone who opposes the Empire is now aware that the Empire will stop at nothing to subjugate them, motivating them to fight to the death and go directly after the second Death Star while it's still being built, in the latter case overriding Mon Mothma's moral objections over the Emperor and Darth Vader's presence making it too close to an assassination.
    • The Battle of Endor was orchestrated by the Emperor: using himself, Vader, and the incomplete second Death Star he'd lure the Rebel Alliance to attack it with a massive force so he could destroy it and weaken and dishearten his enemies while having Vader and Luke fight to eliminate a potential enemy and, depending on who won, get a better apprentice. It works perfectly... Up until the generator of the planetary shield protecting the Death Star is destroyed and Luke defeats Vader but does not kill him, resulting in the Rebels destroying the Death Star and the massive Imperial fleet defending it and Vader killing the Emperor.
  • Stealth: The Navy builds an artificially intelligent airplane (EDI) that can fly itself and make tactical decisions on the battlefield. To help EDI develop, they send it on missions with flesh-and-blood pilots, with orders to observe the pilots and learn from their actions. One of the pilots on said mission disobeys direct orders and pulls an insanely risky, but ultimately successful, stunt to accomplish the mission. EDI indeed learns from this: accomplishing the mission is more important than following the orders of your superiors.
  • Super Mario Bros. (1993): After finally getting sick of Iggy and Spike's stupidity and incompetence, President Koopa uses the reverse setting on his Devolution Device to vastly augment their intelligence. Unfortunately, now that Iggy and Spike are smart enough to think for themselves, they pull a Heel–Face Turn.
  • Tales from the Hood 2:
    • In "The Medium", the gangbangers want Phony Psychic John Lloyd to contact the spirit of dead pimp Cliff Bettis. John succeeds, but perhaps the gangbangers should have pondered the wisdom of contacting the spirit of a man they murdered...
    • At the end of the film, Dumass Beach unveils the Robo-Patriot, a robotic law enforcer built to protect America (by filling Beach's privately owned prisons with "undesirables") programmed with second-hand experience, courtesy of Mr. Simms's tales. Those tales of social injustice, however, leads to the Robo-Patriot branding "Dumbass Bitch" as a threat to America, leading to his demise.
  • Skynet, from the Terminator series, is basically this. The Americans wanted a supercomputer to control their missile grid and eliminate human error by guaranteeing a fast response to enemy attacks. Unfortunately, they didn't bargain that "hyper-intelligent" also meant "self-aware", as Skynet gained sentience very rapidly, becoming a rogue virus in the process. Realizing its dark potential, the operators tried to cut the juice, but Skynet retaliated by firing nukes worldwide, resulting in 3 billion deaths in a single day.
  • The Three Stooges: In "From Nurse to Worse", the Stooges decide to commit insurance fraud by declaring Curly to be insane, so they can get easy money. Curly does so by pretending to be a dog, and his performance is so convincing and over-the-top that the doctor declares him dangerous and decides he has to operate on Curly's brain.
  • TRON:
    • TRON: The MCP, starting as a chess program that could learn. Eventually, it had learned enough to fully control the Encom system and create plans for world domination.
    • In TRON: Legacy, Flynn created Clu 2.0, an avatar of himself with all his knowledge about the system, near-equivalent power to a User, and a directive to create the "perfect" system. Clu ends up making the Master Control Program look like an inefficient pansy, even brainwashing Tron and making Flynn a prisoner in his own system.
  • The bad guys in Under Siege had such an easy time taking over the USS Missouri because they were trained for exactly this sort of thing... by the CIA. Who knew a bunch of mercenaries led by a nut wouldn't stay loyal to the US government?
  • The Wave (2008) is about a popular teacher being assigned a subject (autocracy) that he was not enthusiastic about teaching to students that only chose the subject because he was the teacher. To get his students interested and to show the allure of fascism he stages an elaborate experiment where his class will be a dictatorship with him as its leader. It does not take long before everyone including himself gets much too enthusiastic about the idea.
  • In Where the Sidewalk Ends, Mark’s attempts to deflect the suspicion from him works well. So well that he accidentally frames an innocent man.
  • Without a Clue:
    • This deconstruction comedy reveals that Watson is actually the brilliant detective but, worried about police cases interfering with his medical career, he hired actor Kincaid to play his creation Sherlock Holmes. Thus, it's Watson who makes the solutions and Kincaid just acts them out. However, Kincaid is also an arrogant drunk and after too much bungling, Watson finally gets tired and fires him. He then offers his services to the police as "The Crime Doctor" and is ready to write about himself in the Strand. However, Watson discovers that he's done such a great job selling Holmes as the true genius and himself as the sidekick that no-one believes he's up to the task and so Watson is forced to hire Kincaid back to continue the act.
    • Kincaid gets this himself when Watson goes missing but the police assume Holmes can keep up the investigation. Kincaid, who couldn't deduce his way out of a paper bag, realizes just how well he's sold the act and that there's no way he can figure this out on his own.
  • X-Men Film Series
    • X-Men Origins: Wolverine had them try to create an indestructible warrior. That worked pretty well. Then they pissed him off. That didn't.
    • In X-Men: First Class, Sebastian Shaw wanted to awaken Erik's powers and turn him into a Person of Mass Destruction. Serves him right.
    • X-Men: Days of Future Past: The Sentinels were programmed to hunt and destroy mutants amongst the non-mutant populace and they proved extremely effective in this task. However, they soon began targeting people who could potentially have mutant children and then those who might have mutant grandchildren. Eventually they began wiping out the entire human race to fulfill their purpose.
    • Logan: Most of the Transigen experiments were simple failures due to Children Are Innocent. The kids resisted any conditioning to break their natural empathy, and eventually Transigen had to scrap the project. Then there's Laura, Logan's genetic daughter, who came out the other side a ruthless killing machine, exactly like Transigen wanted. Then her adoptive mother helped her escape, and she spent the entire movie ruthlessly killing anyone sent after her.
  • In Youth in Revolt, Nick and François successfully act out, but it results in burning down half the town with his mother's car. Though Nick gets what he wants, by the end he has to deal with the consequences.
  • In Zombieland, Bill Murray decides to scare Columbus by pretending to be a zombie. But Columbus does think he's a zombie, and shoots and mortally wounds him.
  • In Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!, the zombie formula was originally intended to break down cancer cells. It worked, but then started breaking down non-cancer cells, transforming people into zombies.


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