Which classic trope will always be considered the best of the best for you and why?

Likewise, the re-assembling the team/getting the band back together trope. E.g Blues Brothers, Galaxy Quest, The Worlds End

Mystery Men

MCGRUBER!!!! Best team assemble ever

You son of a b****. I’m in

See also: Assemble the Team for the Big Heist.

I prefer four people teams. Leader, brain, brawn, wildcard. A-team does it, Scooby Doo does it, IASIP does it

The magnificent seven and the Ocean heait series of lives first comes to my mind.

Inglourious Basterds, Ocean’s eleven

“That was a helluva thing.”

Avengers, Fellowship of the Ring

History of Violence does this well

They're living in some remote cabin just chopping wood when the colonel roles up to ask them to do one last mission. They also have a dead wife and estranged child.

Just realized The Fifth Element is at least a little bit this.

RED (and RED 2): Retired, Extremely Dangerous

Good call. These are always fun. Equalizer falls under this one.

The Man from Nowhere was a really good foreign action movie like this

I know people on here make fun of Mark Wahlberg, but Shooter is pretty fun movie with this trope.

I love that One Battle After Another kinda parodied this.  What if you're not a badass anymore, you're an out of shape stoner dad who forgot all the secret passwords?

I don't like the retired badass, but if you can somehow do a step below it like Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State, then it works. I don't want an unbelievable superhero that's just living a mundane life and accidents into kicking ass. But I like a retired or semi-retired pro who gets pulled into something that doesn't really concern them. So usually they're a side character or a mentor.

Unforgiven is a prime example of this one

Commando

RED

I love how they did it in Lilo and Stitch where Cobra Bubbles, who in the original film basically just stumbled upon the plot, is revealed to be former CIA involved with aliens in the past and that a major crux of the plot was a prank he pulled in the past.

"Bus Driver" from 2016 with Steve Daron in the title role. I work in school busing, so when I saw this as an option on one of the free channels on my Roku box, I gave it a shot. It's not award winning, but I didn't feel the need to watch something else. Glad I didn't pay extra for it. Working in this industry, I've said driving a school bus is a great retirement gig. This movie is about a "retired badass" who did just that and had to use his old skills to get out of the mess.

That works well in TV as well. This way you have time to develop the character. Garak from DS9 is my favorite.

First Blood

Payback was a dark fun movie. Not a good person in that movie. Except Lucy Lu.

my top pick for best revenge movie ever: MANDY

What about a tv show? Check out The Glory on Netflix. It's about a woman who gets revenge on her high school bullies. Horrifyingly, It's based on a true story as well.

They're all dead, they just don't know it yet. - The Crow

Cry havoc and let slip the hogs of war

"you got me standing now. We're all standing. Bunch of jackasses... Standing in a circle." Thus, the Guardians of the Galaxy (mcu) are Born.😂😂

I like it when they do it without the "look at us, we're so screwed up, now we're family" speech. Show me, let me see and understand that they're becoming a chosen family, let them understand it

Band of the Hand - 1986

The Black Bulls are my family!

The cavalry is the absolute best. Rohan answering will always be peak.

Theoden king stands alone. Not alone.

I like this too, and you just made me realize one of the things that irks me about some thriller/horror movies. To ramp up tension, an ambulance/search and rescue/first responder will show up and then almost immediately get slaughtered. It feels so discouraging and not in the way the filmmakers intend it. I'd rather the main characters not be able to reach the EMTs at all, than they inadvertently lure them to a gruesome death.

> "noble sacrifice" This one, especially if it comes at the end of a redemption arc. I'm such a sucker for a redemption arc

Or when someone learns too late the difference between nice and polite. 

I think one of my favorite examples might be in Forrest Gump, where he starts beating the shit out of the Black Panther affiliate who slapped Jenny

This reminded me of the "Evil Man vs Good Man" quote from Pratchett's Men at arms. >Something Vimes had learned as a young guard drifted up from memory. If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat. They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word. Spoiler: Captain Carott is \*indeed\* a good man.

A great example of this is in the Midsomer Murders episode "Destroying Angel" where the title has two meanings - one being this trope, the other being the poisonous mushroom used to commit one of the most horrific, torturous murders ever carried out in the series (seriously, it takes a week to kill and when you die, they have to pour what remains of your liver down the drain).

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

National Treasure, yo.

They don't make enough of these anymore

I just love the “who did you have in mind?” sequence in _Oceans 11_.

Terminator is the classic example, but Isaac in The Orville is my favorite

Immediately thought of Sophie Thatcher >!saying "...no"!< in *Companion* (2025).

Ryan Reynolds basketball speech in Van Wilder

Why limit it to sports? I'd include Aragon's monologue right before attacking the gates of Mordor.

This is what I really loved about the final fight in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Marian isn't just standing around as the two swing swords at each other, she joins in on the fight when she can even though she is *clearly* out of her depths.

"That was good. Pretty good. For a girl." "Hey! That was pretty good for Rambo!"

That one Asian action movie, where they go to building with bad guyd they expect to shoot at them on sight, get surprised, jump through indoor window to cover, and THEN one with pump action shotgun starts putting shells into that shotgun... implying he very much just walked into place with fully unloaded shotgun, with shells in his pocket, with plan to start loading weapon only after encountering and start of firefight. :D I mean that gun safety 10/10. :D

"While you boys get the fire going and bring in the luggage, us girls are going to use this suspiciously large group shower in the remote cabin we're staying at!" "Wash *my* back Jennifer!" "Tee-hee, only if you wash my *front* Sydney!" "This weekend is gonna rock!" "All right!" *Creepy guy watches from the shoreline and grips the haft of a rusty axe.*

Any good callback coupled with a subversion is great. Not just wham lines either. Like in the Deadpool & Wolverine stinger, when we get to see that Johnny Storm really did say all that, or in Easy A where we get a remark about not relating to Huck Finn coupled with a later discovery that her gay friend did indeed run away with a big black guy.

What a savings.

The Shawn of the Dead one was rough.

Run that last part by me again??

Don’t kill the boss villain despite having chopped their way through an army of henchmen.

Is this sarcasm

Personally I loved how Deadpool subverted that "Don't sink to that level" trope.

The Expanse did that last one the best. "You're not that guy" "Thank you!" "I am that guy"

I originally watched the movie and loved it. Then I watched the TV series and was absolutely blown away. So I go and read the comic finally. It was good too. I then rewatched the adaptations. I was so surprised at how the Rorschach blood splatter wasn't from the comic. When I watched the movie, it was just such a perfect payoff to his superhero gimmick. He still explodes in the comic, but you don't get the overhead shot of the blood as an ink blot in the snow. I also liked how they made the fights more badass. I get people complaining about that because it's giving into the superhero trope it was meant to deconstruct, but I found it more believable having them be good at fighting. These were people who supposedly made a career out of fighting criminals for a while and were the ones who didn't die, so they must have been at least somewhat competent. The comic didn't portray it like this and made it feel like both criminals and superheroes just like to cosplay and run around like kids in a playground, which doesn't make sense. If the superheroes were that shit at it, the criminals would just immediately murder them. Also, Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Sheeeeeeeeeit. The casting in the movie was really good. I was also shocked by the TV series because I had assumed that the reason it was so good and meshed perfectly with the original story was that this was all stuff from the comic that wasn't part of the movie's story. When I watched the TV show the first time, I didn't realize it was completely original. The fact that they were able to make such a great sequel and fill in the missing gaps from the comic, particularly around Hooded Justice, while tying it into the new main story was excellent.

Marge: You loved Rashomon! Homer: That's not how I remember it.

There's a show called the afterparty you're gonna enjoy!

You would probably appreciate the Japanese film Monster from a couple of years back.

Desperado, with Antonio Banderas

This is why I love Columbo, since even the worst murderers are the main characters of their episodes so you can at least see the circumstances from their point of view.

Played for humor in The Rocketeer where the Mafia Don and FBI agent look at each other while shooting Nazis, realize they’re on the same team for once, shrug and go back to shooting Nazis.

Reacher. And, as we’ve learned in the last week, in real life too.

The end of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. 😁

It can be done well, but oh dang one sees absolutely horrible, or at least poorly done, versions of this way too often. Generally 'elite' military squads where every member would have been ejected from military before halfway point of basic training for being absolutely unprofessional bunch of low self esteem attention seeking troublemaker loosers is one of things that can break suspension of disbelief very fast in movies/series/books, unless it is somehow extremely super well crafted or explained... especially in cases when they represent all other military as like 1-3 different personality lacking super simple mass stereotypes. I mean at least something like The Gray Man just mentions how that villainguy was ejected from whole organization in 2..3 months after recruitment, due to being unreliable and unhinged, just that he manged to make illegal/half-legal private sector contract career doing very illegal stuff for money succesfully enough, that some higher ups use him to do stuff that would be so illegal they wont even dare to do it covertly in way they do normal very illegal stuff, and that is likely majority part of why he is not locked up somewhere, or leaking liquids and air through bunch of holes.