It’s almost impossible to make a movie without any cliches. Sometimes they’re intentional and made to bring a little humour to the film, sometimes not. Mostly they are used because of a lack of originality: If something is once proven good, why not using it again and squeeze a little bit more money out of the idea. Some directors use cliches to their advantage by using the same ones in all of their films. This way their style becomes more known and these cliches become their trademark.

Here are some of the most (ab)used cliches:
  • Someone/thing is about to destroy the world/USA/western civilization, and there’s only ONE MAN, who can save it. (Rambo, Commando, etc.)
  • A cop movie: The hero is a cynical, divorced/widowed drunk who has no life but his job. His captain always yells at him for not following the rules, but thinks he’s the best damn cop they’ve got. The hero is forced to work with a partner, who eventually becomes his best friend by saving his life.
  • If someone tells the hero what he’s going to do after everything is over, you can bet that person will die.
  • In a fight, the hero first takes massive hits and when he’s half-conscious, the bad guy says something which really annoys the hero, who then beats the hell out of the bad guy.
  • The movie is about criminals who do a job that goes wrong.
  • The bad guy always tells his scheme before he leaves the hero to die in some imaginative way. If he tries to kill the hero himself, a sidekick will appear and and shoot/knock out the bad guy.
  • The bad guy never dies the first time he's killed. Usually this happens when the hero is concentrating on a woman, and the sidekick who’s nearly dead then shoots the bad guy, after which the sidekick can die peacefully.
  • The Maltese Falcon- parody: A detective tells his story of how he was sitting behind his desk in his office, when a beautiful but mysterious woman walked in.
  • In space, there’s a deep humming sound even if no one’s around. Naturally spaceships, explosions, lasers and everything else make a sound in space!
  • Something bad always happens, when someone says: What could happen? or This is the last time I’ll do this