YMMV / Malice

The Film

• Fake American: Nicole Kidman as Tracy.
• Genius Bonus: A plot point in the film involves an ornate ballerina statue. Tracy claims to have created the statue as a gift to her husband. While visiting his mother-in-law for the first time, Andy notices a duplicate statue. Further indication of Tracy's constant deceit. Mrs. Kennsinger explains that you can buy those statues in any store. If you already knew that the statue was a replica of "Little Dancer at Fourteen Years" by Edgar Degas, you wouldn't have been surprised by the twist...
• Memetic Mutation: Most people know this Film based solely on Jed's "God complex" monologue.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Anne Bancroft as Tracy's mother. She's amazing as she leads Andy in a series of questions that allow him to figure out what really happened and then smiles with some pride when he gets it.
  Mrs. Kennsinger: Welcome to the game, kid.
  • George C. Scott as Jed's former professor during the deposition scene.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Gwyneth Paltrow as one of Andy's students, and later, victim of the campus serial rapist.
  • The serial rapist himself is played by Jigsaw.
• Rewatch Bonus: Tracy is annoyed when Andy invites Jed to live with them without talking to her first and later is angry at Jed and his fling's loud lovemaking. It seems pretty typical and understandable, but once it's revealed that they've been in cahoots all along, it really makes sense.

The Novel

• Paranoia Fuel: Anyone could have been through Malice at some time. Anyone. Even you.

The Video Game

• Angst? What Angst?: We're told at the begining that Dog God destroyed Malice's homeworld, yet she spends no time angsting about it or even acknowledging it.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: At the very beginning Death points out the large zombie horde behind Malice as one of the reasons she's being kicked out of the afterlife, to which Malice denies that she was responsible for them. This is never brought up again with the zombies simply being relegated to obstacles in the game's Non-Standard Game Over, and we never get elaboration on how Malice created the horde in the first place.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The game shares a shocking number of similarities with Horizon Zero Dawn:
  • Each star a Significant Green-Eyed Redhead female protagonist with a cocky, I Work Alone attitude (the titular Malice, and Aloy in Horizon).
  • Both protagonists are treated with a reverance by the games' NPCs they reject (Malice is hailed as a goddess and called "Mother" by the Earth's inhabitants while Aloy is hailed as a legendary machine hunter and almost worshipped after "speaking" with the All-Mother).
  • Both games feature thematic elements based around motherhood (Malice is called "Mother" by most of her allies and is heavily implied to be Mother Nature, while Aloy grew up in a tribe that worships the All-Mother to the point of naming every major location around it).
  • Each game is set in a world that mixes nature with machinery, complete with Mechanical Animals to fight.
  • Finally, both games' plots involve the leads trying to prevent the main antagonists (who are malevolent, red-themed entities) from killing off all life on the planet. (Dog God in Malice and HADES in Zero Dawn.
  • Funnily enough, both games share at least one voice actress as well: Dian Perry, who plays an unspecified character in Malice and contributed to the crowd voices in Zero Dawn.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general critical consensus for the game. Lackluster story aside, it's competent platform game if a bit short and easy.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Death is probably the most entertaining character in the game. Unfortunately, he is also a One-Scene Wonder.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Despite the interesting premise, what little plot there is to this game is bare-bones, disjointed and not very interesting.