Best movie plot holes of 2021

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Spider-Man: No Way Home picture

Plot hole: The whole premise of the movie is that due to a botched spell, people who happen to know that "Peter Parker is Spider-Man" are pulled inside this universe. It's a bit of a stretch already that amongst those people is...Peter Parker himself, twice over, but let's say it makes sense. The problem is that Jamie Foxx's Electro does not meet this condition; he never found out. You could say it's a retcon or it's a different universe from the original movie's, but even this cop-out explanation is negated by the movie itself when Max Dillon makes a joke that shows that he didn't know Spidey's identity or even race.

Sammo

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Suggested correction: Although Max didn't discover Peter's identity on film, an explanation of why Max knows his name IS offered. When the villains are talking about what happened before they found themselves in the MCU, Max indicated that once he tapped fully into the power grid and information systems, there was nothing he didn't know at that point. Since we know there is a clandestine organization tracking Peter from the end of ASM1, it's possible Max gained the info from their database.

In the interest of clarity, you refer to the one line that goes "I was stuck in the grid, absorbing data."? Nothing about tapping fully, and becoming omniscient as the correction presents. So we have to give it that specific meaning and make a connection to the obscure postcredit scene by Fiers in the unfinished trilogy that asks Connors if he said anything to the boy imagining that it produced data that was 'on the grid' somehow, and Electro never processed this information in the movie. Not sure if it's quite an"explanation offered", since the movie offers none. It's a 'possible' explanation like the other one people use, about hearing Gwen say Peter's name (I like this one better because at least it would give a special meaning to a throwaway line and I do I love attention to details).

Sammo

Suggested correction: I don't find it such a stretch that he knew Peter's name but didn't know what he looked like.

Electro didn't learn Spidey's name during the events of the original movie.

Sammo

When Spider-Man is explaining his plan to defeat Electro to Gwen, Gwen addresses him as "Peter." Electro was laying on the ground nearby and likely would have heard this. Presumably, knowing that Spidey's real name was Peter was enough to pull him in.

There are almost 10,000 "Peter" in New York alone in our world. Knowing just the super-common first name wouldn't cut it and the movie does nothing to support this theory, in fact does everything to undermine it (Strange's explanation, Electro's joke, complete lack of addressing it, etc). Also if he overheard that bit in the original movie, he would have also learned their plans to defeat him.

Sammo

It's not shown, but Harry could have shared details off-screen.

What kind of details and for what purpose? Harry himself learns that Peter is Spider-man when Electro is already dead and they had a very improvised and loose alliance to begin with.

Sammo

Suggested correction: I guess we're all going to ignore the fact that this Electro has a completely different look than the Max we saw previously. It's quite possible he's from a different universe.

DetectiveGadget85

He's not from a different universe than the Electro from The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The Lizard and the Andrew Garfield version of Spider-Man both know who he is, and he talks about events from the aforementioned film. His different appearance is also explained in the film.

Phaneron

All that means is he went through similar experiences and has a similar appearance as the Max they knew. Ala J. Jonah Jameson.

DetectiveGadget85

Suggested correction: It's not people who know who is Spider-Man that are spilling in, it's people who are connected to him in any way.

lionhead

No, no. Strange says it explicitly "That little spell you botched, when you wanted everyone to forget that Peter Parker is Spider-man? It started pulling in everyone who knows that Peter Parker is Spider-man" and so on. That's why in the end they fix it by making everyone forget who Peter Parker is, not who Spider-man is.

Sammo

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Sing 2 picture

Plot hole: Johnny's dad jumps in his truck and gets to Johnny in moments. That same journey was shown to be an overnight bus journey for everyone else.

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage picture

Plot hole: A core plot point (lifted by the comics) is that Venom needs phenethylamine, and the only way to get it is from brains and from chocolate. Let's just go with it and forget the fact that phenethylamine can be legally purchased as dietary supplement, which would solve every problem. So, Venom gets incredibly angry because Mrs. Chen's shop ran out of chocolates, and *therefore* they need to go raid a chicken plant to eat some chicken brain. Uh, Venom lives in San Francisco. Chocolate is sold everywhere. If Mrs. Chen ran out of it, there are hundreds of stores and vending machines that have it in abundance. The escalation does not make sense.

Sammo

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Suggested correction: The point is he needs to steal it. At Mrs. Chen's shop he gets it for free because he protects her from robbers. Eddie doesn't have the money to buy all the chocolate Venom needs all the time. Stealing some chickens as an alternative is better than trying to shoplift at a different store.

lionhead

In the rest of the movie Eddie lives in his old apartment constantly in need of repairs, but shows zero serious money problems. He has lavish breakfasts, and he replaces the $2,000 TV the same day. Raiding the chicken place appears riskier than slipping his symbiote in a vending machine or shoplift, especially if it's just temporary - again assuming he's so poor that he literally has no money to eat, which is something the movie should have let us know, instead of pointing to the contrary and making him talk angrily about the need for them to not draw attention.

Sammo

Not only are the original mistake and Sammo 100% correct, but chocolate isn't exactly expensive. You can get 5 pound bulk orders of melting chocolate on Amazon for like... $25. And that's just a quick 2-second Amazon search. You could probably get it even cheaper elsewhere online. Even if Eddie hypothetically has little money (which doesn't seem to be the case - he has a nicely sized apartment in a major city, new TV, etc.), it's still ridiculous that he couldn't get his hands on chocolate. This is definitely a case of the movie ignoring practicality and reason to manufacture a funny situation.

TedStixon

I agree. There are many other stores that sell candy so all Eddie had to do was to go to one of those instead. Plus, at the end of the first movie, Eddie told Ann that he was going to become an investigative journalist, so he has a new job.

Suggested correction: Which would you rather have phenethylamine, chicken, or chocolate for dinner? That's like saying just because we need food to survive...we should just eat anything or buy our base vitamins and minerals over the counter and from the store.

DetectiveGadget85

Sure. How does that have anything to do with the entry? Venom wanted chocolate for dinner and not chicken, supplements to a diet don't mean that you can't eat actual food and the main point was and is that if a store in a metropolis is sold out of chocolate of any kind, there are a dozen other stores in a few blocks' radius who sell it without you having to resort to crime to eat it.

Sammo

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No Time to Die picture

Plot hole: At the end of Spectre, Blofeld loses his eye in the crash. In No Time To Die, he is being held in Belmarsh Prison, which is a high-security facility and houses many terrorists like him. However, despite the stringent security measures, he somehow has access to a bionic eye, which was provided to him during his imprisonment. This would have been thoroughly checked multiple times to ensure its safety before being granted to him.

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Suggested correction: Blofeld loses the eye in an explosion earlier in Spectre, before he went to London. He likely already had the eye with him when he was captured after the crash.

In the UK there are several TV shows about police and prison corruption. It isn't much of a stretch to imagine that one of the guards was bribed and smuggled the eye in for him. Blofeld is a criminal mastermind - he would have many resources at his disposal despite capture.

He just happened to have a bionic eye on his person as a backup in case he lost one of his real ones in an accident?

Phaneron

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Halloween Kills picture

Plot hole: Tommy leads the mob after the 2nd escaped patient, thinking it's Michael, but Tommy should have known it wasn't Michael. He saw the patient on the TV at the bar at the beginning of the film.

brianjr0412

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The Matrix Resurrections picture

Plot hole: It's supposed to be really difficult to get even a single member of the crew into the tower where Trinity was being held, we were shown the difficulty that program Morpheus had. Then when he gets there, all of a sudden Bugs is swooped in. No explanation, made the previous 5 minutes seem ridiculously pointless.

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Suggested correction: Bugs comes in because he turns off the defenses to the tower.

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The Tomorrow War picture

Plot hole: So humanity in the future managed to solve time-travel, but is unable to develop armor-piercing, exploding ammunition? And it uses old, untrained civilians as soldiers to fire M16-16 and WW2 heavy machine gun ammunition at fast moving targets, instead of developing rapid-fire computer-targeted guns? The movie shows 0.5" ammunition (from said WW2-era machine gun) CAN take out the Aliens, so? (Not to mention flame-throwers, shown as effective but sparsely used, no tanks, etc).

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Suggested correction: The rifles the civilians are equipped with aren't M-16s; they are modified BCM carbines "MK III" and "MK IV" with HERA Arms CQR furniture.

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Wrath of Man picture

Plot hole: In a heist that started with 7 men, they only thought to acquire 2 quad bikes for part of their getaway, fortunately only 2 men reached that stage of the plan. (01:44:44)

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Suggested correction: My understanding is that two guys were supposed to load the quads with the cash, then load the cash into the Prius and those two guys take off from there. We hear this being recited in the planning stages, which is being shown to us as the action is unfolding. He then says that anyone remaining is to take the pickup truck. They would have wanted to get the cash off site ASAP, so the plan was likely that the remaining guys get to the pickup truck on foot.

jshy7979

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Army of the Dead picture

Plot hole: Unless Tanaka is lying, the fact that aircraft cannot fly INTO Las Vegas but can fly OUT of Las Vegas makes absolutely no sense. The whole point of a quarantine zone is to keep people INSIDE.

wizard_of_gore

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Eternals picture

Plot hole: Deviants were created to get rid of dangerous local predators allowing intelligent life to thrive on the planets Arishem 'seeded'. He then created the Eternals to get rid of the Deviants once he realised they eat the species they should have protected. Problem is, it is stated that the Eternals go through their extermination routine multiple times. But the 'mistake' can't be happening all over again in a cycle, and Deviants would ruin a planet if left unattended.

Sammo

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Suggested correction: Arisham made them both part of the cycle to get the planet to be filled with intelligent life. So he always introduces Deviants before Eternals. It's a good way for him to tell the Eternals they are there to protect the intelligent life against the Deviants without knowing their true purpose. To keep them busy.

lionhead

He refers to the introduction of Eternals as something he did "to correct my mistake." By that definition, he keeps making the same mistake over and over. If he just told them that they have to protect humanity and help their progress, he would obtain the same purpose. After all, for 500 years without Deviants the Eternals stayed put and passive as instructed and didn't create any particular trouble -if they did, they are a limited number he can easily pluck them out of the planet much more easily than a non-specified amount of ever-evolving beasts that he admits are out of his control and can grow much more powerful if they manage to kill Eternals.

Sammo

He is lying. They are not a mistake, and they are not beyond his control. That's one of the main reasons why they go against Arishem in the first place, because everything is a lie, even after learning their true purpose. The Deviants are there to give the Eternals purpose, helping the intelligent life on the planet flourish, in the most natural way, for reasons we can only guess. The Deviant is upset too, learning the truth that they are only put on the planet for the Eternals to kill.

lionhead

To make sense of this part of the movie you are discarding everything the movie says labeling it as a lie and creating an alternative lore.

Sammo

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The Black Phone picture

Plot hole: Spoiler Alert: When Finney gets the rope that was hidden in the wall, he needs to thread it through the window bars about 8 feet above his head. After trying to lasso the rope through the bars, he grabs a rolled-up carpet and threads the rope from the bottom of the carpet through the bars and it wraps itself around the bars. There is no way a rope (or even a bendable cable) would be able to thread itself 8 feet through a carpet. After he grabs it, you can tell it's a loose rope, not a stiff wire. (00:51:15)

odelphi

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Suggested correction: It's a cable (which is also what The Paperboy calls it) not a rope. The window bars are maybe 8 feet from the ground, not 8 feet above Finney's head. It's quite possible that a thick cable could be pushed up through the rolled up carpet. It's also possible that there's a little mystical help taking place, maybe from the dead kid that was talking to Finney via an apparently broken phone.

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Zack Snyder's Justice League picture

Plot hole: WW mentions that "As Darkseid waged war on Earth, he found a secret there", that being the Anti-life equation. But later on it turns out that after being defeated, planet Earth is so "anonymous among a trillion worlds" that he never manages to find it again and destroys another 100,000 worlds (his words!) to look for it again. That would mean that they lack any sort of navigation, and it's hardly possible anyway that the planet would be "anonymous" when it contains what Darkseid wants the most.

Sammo

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Suggested correction: This is in the form of a question and should be uploaded as such. There are several reasons to think why Darkseid couldn't find Earth.

lionhead

The questions were rhetorical, but thanks to your comment I edited rephrasing it without any questioning ambiguity, since my interest is not much in hearing fan theories filling the gaps in the narration, but rather in pointing out the obvious contradiction where Darkseid is fully aware right from the start that the most important thing in the universe is on Earth, but can't find it again and conquers another thousands of worlds instead "still looking" for it.

Sammo

Earth was a random planet they attacked and on that random planet Darkseid found a secret, he didn't go there for the secret, he found it whilst there. I don't expect him to go into his ship and put a pin on a map to remember where the planet was in case they were defeated. They expected to win. In their retreat, their way to navigate back to Earth got lost. Perfectly reasonable. You don't know anything about Darkseid's way of conquering and also no idea on how they navigate from world to world.

lionhead

You know he was not alone, he had an army with a whole slew of ships and subordinates, it takes a lot of suspension of disbelief to swallow the idea that they are conquering worlds going in totally blind and "conquer" worlds they can't ever visit again lacking any charting.They refer the Earth by name and know who their opponents are. An explanation would be also less stringent if Darkseid didn't learn about Anti-life at all and simply "moved on", but it's not the case.

Sammo

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Diabolik picture

Plot hole: Diabolik blinks in Morse code to his accomplice the location of one of his hidden stashes. He says it's in 'the third brick to the left' and the street name, but no address or other reference. She (who previously knew nothing about the location) finds it immediately. It's worth noting that the movie is a faithful adaptation of a couple issues of the comic, but this bit of subplot is a fresh addition and the original hiding spot in the 1963 issue was a plausible one (cave behind a specific waterfall).

Sammo

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Snake Eyes picture

Plot hole: Blind Master can sense when a person is lying. When Snake Eyes admits he is not pure of heart he explains this is because he is driven by his desire for revenge on his father's killer, which Blind Master reads as a truth. However, this is still a lie: a lie of omission. Snake Eyes is only telling part of the truth and omits the fact he is betraying the clan on Kenta's behalf to get his revenge. Snake Eyes is being deliberately deceptive, which is the definition of lying.

BaconIsMyBFF

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Blood Red Sky picture

Plot hole: Elias detonates the fuel tank on the plane causing it to completely combust. He previously used the detonator they needed to blow the airplane door. Before this all happened they were supposed to place explosives on the fuel tank which nobody accomplished because they all got killed, but it still exploded. (01:49:00 - 01:52:30)

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Licorice Pizza picture

Plot hole: When Alana is backing up down the hill after running out of gas, she passes a single story house on the left which has an obvious motion detector light on the front of the house that triggers the light to turn on as her truck passes by. Motion detectors of that type were not around in the seventies.

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Claw picture

Plot hole: Kyle got a flat tire and there was no cell phone reception to call for help, so he and Julia decided to walk to the Ghost Town. However, almost all vehicles - especially a relatively new SUV like Kyle's - have a spare tire. Kyle surely had a spare and could have at least tried to change the tire himself. (When Kyle saw his damaged tire, he complained that it was a $300 loss, not that he did not have a spare tire with him). (00:04:55)

KeyZOid

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The Ravine picture

Plot hole: Tony said, "If Danny beat him [Kevin] any more, he would have never lived" and Kevin spent a month recovering in the hospital. Tony and Danny were "advised to take a plea" and agreed to 10-25 years in prison. When Kevin went to the correctional facility to "forgive them in person", Kevin said, "We never properly met. I was in the hospital during your trial." Guilty pleas do not result in a trial and a felony criminal case would not be resolved within 30 days of the commission of the crime. (00:44:50 - 00:49:06)

KeyZOid

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Where's Rose picture

Plot hole: The time-line and calendar of events are flawed. Nate (dad) stated Eric will be leaving for college "at the end of next week." Rose saw a portion of Eric's calendar: "17 Orientation [Monday] and 23 First day of school [oddly on a Sunday]." Eric received a cell phone message dated Saturday August 15 asking if he was coming to the party, which he went to. Eric had a full academic and sport (football) scholarship - he should have already been at the University weeks earlier for training. (00:19:20 - 00:32:35)

KeyZOid

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616 Wilford Lane picture

Plot hole: A real estate agent would first ask a prospective home buyer what price range he was interested in and calculate "how much house" he could actually afford to buy before taking him to look at available houses. Austyn took Jim to see multi-million dollar houses, then Jim told her he was "looking in the $250,000 range." Austyn told Jim they could close at $2.5 million and he'd only need 10% down. The 10% down ($250,000) equaled the total amount that Jim wanted to pay for a house. (00:14:03)

KeyZOid

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