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Self-Revealing Reflexes -- possible new trope?

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VoiceofIsaac Since: Mar, 2010
#1: Mar 23rd 2011 at 10:03:59 AM

I've seen this trope appear in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" and Robert De Niro's "Ronin", and it may have appearred elsewhere as well.

The core concept is that a spy, or other highly-trained person, who is trying to be incognito, can be outed by the fact that their training has given them extremely fast reflexes. The person's deception or true character is revealed by a reflex action that he cannot control, or at least not easily control.

In "Smith" and "Ronin", this manifested as a character grabbing a glass of wine or cup of coffee that was about to spill, and doing it so very quickly that no normal civilian could possibly have reflexes like that.

Sometimes it's a deliberate test, as De Niro does to his fellow mercs in Ronin. Other times it's an accident, where Brad Pitt's quick grab of the falling wineglass reveals to his wife that he's a spy, and her reaction to same then reveals to him that she's a spy.

This trope could be applied elsewhere — perhaps an undercover cop is tripped up by reflexively pulling a sidearm into a trained firing stance when feeling threatened, where his undercover persona was supposed to be an untrained thug that wouldn't handle a gun so professionally, or perhaps his persona wasn't supposed to be carrying a gun at all.

Is there another trope that this falls under, or is this something worthy of a new entry?

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