Blessed With Suck / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

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• Those who take the Mark of the Beast in the Apocalypse film series are blessed with limited telekinetic and telepathic powers and can also receive miraculous healings, all at the cost of spending eternity in the Lake of Fire.
• In Boris and Natasha, Professor Paulovitch invents a time-reversal device which reverses time by a few seconds when a nearby disaster happens. As he explains to the title characters, he quickly realized this could be bad if fallen into the wrong hands and tried to have it destroyed, only for its effects to keep saving it.
• In The Butterfly Effect the protagonist gains the power to go back in time and change key events in his childhood. But whatever he tries to fix he just ends up messing up his life and that of his friends even more. The Psychic Nosebleeds that follow shortly after changing the event aren't that nice either.
• While Darkman is impervious to pain, he had to burn nearly to death to get that way, and to undergo a dubious experimental surgical technique which left him subject to uncontrolled rage and mood swings. Plus, with no sense of pain, he can't even tell if he's injuring himself until he actually looks.
• In the movie Death Becomes Her, two of the main characters take a potion that grants eternal life and youth. No, the suck doesn't involve Who Wants to Live Forever?, as most of the aspects of that trope are either ignored or handwaved (anyone who takes the potion is supposed to sever all human contact after so many years anyway, so as to avoid suspicion). The suck comes after both newly immortal characters try to kill each other, and find out that, while they won't die, their bodies will. From then on, they are stuck in their own broken corpses, having to utilize undertaking techniques just to keep themselves looking and moving like living people. By the end of the movie, even this isn't enough, as their bodies fall apart around them, leaving them spending what may very well be eternity as a pile of rotting body parts.
• Down Periscope gives us Sonarman 2nd Class E.T. "Sonar" Lovacelli, a man with hearing so sharp that he's able to detect two crabs fighting each other at the bottom of the sea and determine exactly how much money a man dropped on the ground (after reacting like someone dropped a depth charge when he first hears it) through a pair of passive sonar headphones. All the other submarine commands he was assigned to before being sent to the U.S.S. Stingray were flat-out afraid of him being a security risk (even after he, a big Kind Hearted Simpleton, kept reassuring the captains that he didn't listen to everything).
• The plot of Ella Enchanted. Ella receive the "Gift" of obedience by Lucinda, a fairy. So, is forced to obey every direct order given to her, no matter what. Being obedient 24/7 is just as bad –- if not worse -– as It sounds.
• Fantastic Beasts: Queenie Goldstein is a natural Legilimens... so natural that oftentimes she cannot control it. As a result, she has been driven somewhat mad of having to hear voices all the time.
• The protagonists from the Final Destination series (Alex Browning, Kimberly Corman, Wendy Christensen, Nick O'Bannon and Sam Lawton). The visions in regards to the impending disasters along with their own demise drives the plot of cheating Death. Either that, or Death is pretty sadistic or he is a sore loser. It's a whole lot worse than that. There is absolutely no escaping Death — the visions are given for no apparently good reason, although Death wanting to play is the theory that the characters of the fourth film voice... about five seconds before getting killed.
• In the Drew Barrymore film (and the later TV miniseries sequel) Firestarter, Charlie McGee inherits psychic powers from her parents who took part in a government experiment (they got lucky, most of the other patients went batshit insane). Her father got the ability to read minds and psychically "push" people to do what he wants or see what he sees, but it gives him pinprick brain hemorrhages to do so. Charlie doesn't have this problem, but her pyrokinesis (the ability to make fires by frowning) prohibits her from being close to anyone, due to control issues. To top it all off, the government agency that sponsored the experiment wants to use her as a weapon. According to the film, by the time Charlie hits puberty she'll be powerful enough to crack the world in half. If that ain't this trope, nothing is.
• Godzilla. It's his own radiation that ends up being the cause of his own death in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. Yes, we're talking about the SAME radiation that allows him to spew nuclear plasma and destroy his enemies.
• Zigzagged in Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray's character repeats the same day over and over again, with no way to stop the cycle. At first he's confused, and then overjoyed, but soon he's depressed as anything because he has no life to look forward to. However, eventually he realizes that the unlimited time can be used to master any skill, prevent any and all mishaps that would otherwise occur during his single day, and, once he learns to truly care for her, win the heart of his love interest. Which, it turns out, breaks the spell and canonizes that last perfect day as the one that actually happened.
• A major element of Matt Damon's character in Hereafter. He can read people's minds and/or communicate with their dead relatives by touching their hands. Cool, right? No. Imagine accidentally discovering the girl who you've been flirting with was sexually abused as a child by her father. Takes A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read to whole new levels.
• In Highlander, you might think living forever as an immortal badass is awesome, and sure it does have it moments. But it's nothing next to the heartbreak of watching your mortal friends and loved ones die of old age. And even other immortals are transitory friends who you will probably have to kill sooner or later anyway due to the nature of the Game.
• In Looper, by the year 2040, 10% of the population is telekinetic (or TK). However, as Joe mentions in his narration, everyone expected superheroes but most of those who are TK can barely even lift coins with their abilities. The few characters who can do more become a Chekhov's Gun near the end of the movie.
• Men in Black 3 introduces Griffin, an alien who can see all possible timelines at once. When he shows J and K the Mets winning the 1969 World Series three months before it'll happen, J says it's incredible; Griffin calls it a pain in the ass. Unusually for this trope, though, he does seem to enjoy the ability to some extent; he refers to said World Series as his favorite moment of all time, because of all the insanely improbable things that came together to make it happen. Though at the end of the film, it's replaced by the moment where J gets back from the past and meets up with K, who's (slightly) less Stoic thanks to the events of the movie.
• All of the Precogs of Minority Report are cursed to foresee events that have yet to come, Agatha especially. Throughout the movie, she tells random people and Anderton things she's seen happen. She even sees her mother's death replay in her mind.
• The curse in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The perks are complete immortality and invulnerability. The drawback is a complete loss of all feeling except for unquenchable thirst and hunger, and to be revealed as shambling skeletons in the moonlight.
• The Projected Man: Paul can emit electricity, and can absorb massive amounts of energy. Unfortunately he needs to regularly absorb energy to survive and ease his excruciating pain, his electrical discharges drain that energy, and he can never touch anyone without gloves or he'll absorb all their bioelectricity. Also, he's severely deformed, with what appear to be burn scars, and unhinged from his experience.
• The Ring: Samara Morgan had the innate ability to imprint images and visions in the minds of other living things; unfortunately, the power manifested at birth, and she was never able to control it, leading both her mother and adoptive mother into complete madness. The second film says that Samara's powers came about because her mother let dead spirits possess her, and while these gave Samara awesome powers, her body was pretty much hijacked and all she could do was watch as the spirits controlled her body and — often — caused problems for people. She spent her whole life asking for people to drown her, because that was the only way to get the spirits out of her body.
• In Ringu, Sadako Yamamura was born with extraordinary psychic abilities, which gave her clairvoyance, psychography, and astral projection that enabled her personality to endure after death and in the books, her abilities are powerful enough to allow her genetic manipulation of people and viruses. Her mother was also shown having similar abilities. Instead of fame and recognition, these powers led to both of them being scorned, driven away and persecuted by society, leading to Sadako's mother throwing herself into a volcano, and Sadako herself being killed and thrown down a well, where her spirit will linger forever.
• It's no fun being a Scanner, mostly because of all that Power Incontinence. Also, hearing the thoughts of everyone around you gets noisy and distracting.
• Schindler's List: While Helen is spared from the horrific conditions of Płaszów when she is hired by Amon Goeth to serve as his maid, it arguably puts her in an even worse position. Amon is incredibly sadistic and unstable, but he also lusts for Helen and because she is a Jew, Nazi law forbids him from ever acting on his impulses. Helen has to live serving a complete psycho of a master who might rape her at any point and who often vents his sexual frustration by battering the everloving crap out of her. There's a reason Itzhak Stern described Helen Hirsch as the “most unfortunate of all the inmates of the kids camp.”
• The so-called Holy Implant in Six: The Mark Unleashed.
• In Sky High (2005), one of the main plot points involves how all the people with the awesome powers go into the Hero class, the What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway? characters are stuck as "sidekicks". Subverted by the handy Plot Tailored to the Party, which lets the sidekicks do their part and teach everyone a valuable lesson.
• Being sensitive to the Force in Star Wars isn't really fun at all. Yeah it comes with nifty psychic powers and super reflexes, but Force Users have to maintain strict control over their emotions, sometimes to the point of being The Stoic. Otherwise they run the risk of falling to the Dark Side of the Force, and while this also comes with nifty (and scary) powers, spending too much time on the Dark Side inevitably leads to the loss of friends and loved ones, insanity, and death. Being Force-sensitive also means being able to feel the deaths of others, especially loved ones; imagine feeling the population of an entire planet, or worse, that of an entire star system with your spouse as the icing on the poison cake, perish all at once.
• Thir13en Ghosts has Dennis Rafkin, a medium with the ability to detect ghosts and and instantly read minds through physical contact. He also has no control whatsoever over his powers and has Convulsive Seizures because of them.
  Dennis: I come within ten feet of anything dead, I go into seizures! I touch somebody, and a whole life full of shit just flashes in front of my eyes!
• When Evil Calls: Michael wishes for X-Ray vision and then happily ogles the girls' basketball team in the nude. However, he can't turn it off, so he's then horrified to also see his male teachers naked, along with his obese father.
• In X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, the main character grants himself x-ray vision. While he obtains some benefits from it — including the ability to cheat at cards — his vision gradually increases in power until he can see through his own eyelids, through reality itself and into the swirling madness beyond. The rumored deleted ending makes it worse. After ripping out his own eyes, he screams, "I can still see!"

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