Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Attack Of The Hollywood Clichés!’ On Netflix, A Comedy Special That’s Neither Funny Nor Special

Charlie Brooker has proven himself great at depicting future tech dystopias with Black Mirror, but less adept at satirizing the past. See: Death to 2020. Or better yet, don’t. Can Rob Lowe help him pull off a parody of cinematic tropes? Did my first sentence give it away yet?

ATTACK OF THE HOLLYWOOD CLICHÉS!: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Charlie Brooker, the aforementioned writer and filmmaker who brought us Black Mirror (and before that, Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe for BBC Four audiences), has enlisted Rob Lowe to host this brisk hour-long journey through 30 of the most common clichés that Hollywood cannot seem to avoid repeating onscreen over and over again. Lowe does most of the narration, although Brooker’s crew also gets soundbites from a collection of mostly British film critics, as well as three actors in Florence Pugh, Andrew Garfield and Richard E. Grant, and two comedians in The Lucas Brothers.
Did I mention this is billed as a comedy special?
Alrighty then.
Did I mention they cover 30 clichés in under 60 minutes? Alrighty then. Here they are:

1. The ‘Meet Cute’ in a rom-com
2. The Maverick Cop
3. The ‘Dead Man Walking’ secondary character who’s doomed to die 
4. The funeral with someone attending from far away
5. The city of Paris, always letting us know we’re there with a shot of the Eiffel Tower
6. Unusual props, such as the bag of baguettes
7. The character showing cockiness by eating an apple
8. The one-man army who kills all opponents
9. The fist fight, on a moving train
10. Metaphoric imagery to suggest sex or orgasm
11. The Spit Take 
12. The Jump Scare
13. The Wilhelm scream
14. The Smurfette principle: One lone woman among the men/boys
15. Making women run in high heels
16. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl
17. The Montage
18. The Car Chase
19. The White Savior
20. The Magical Negro 
21. “You killed my father”
22. Animals with a sixth sense
23. Expendable LGBTQ+ characters
24. The Badly-Timed Tech Fail 
25. The Angry Desk Sweep
26. The Bad Guy
27. The Final Girl
28. The Ticking Time Bomb (Airplane!?) 
29. The Mad Dash to Declare Love
30. The Good Guy always wins

What Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Any basic hourlong overview of anything, but only if you didn’t know of that thing beforehand.
Memorable Dialogue: Lowe’s opening lines tell you everything you need to know. “Hi. Unlike you, I’m Rob Lowe, and I love movies.” Is this the tone we’re going with? Lowe adds: “The fact is, I’d rather be watching a movie than doing this right now. But let’s pretend I didn’t say that…”

Sex and Skin: Some.
Our Take: What’s the point of this special, again? Feels more like the attack in the title is an attack upon us, the viewers.
We have to wait five minutes before we see any comedians, in Keith and Kenny Lucas, and seven-and-a-half minutes into the thing before we hear anything resembling a pure joke, when Lowe cracks: “Hollywood loves a winner, but not every character in your story can be a hero, unless it’s set in the Marvel Universe, which only 96 percent of movies are.” If it’s supposed to be a comedy, then where are the jokes? Or even the comedians? Most talking-head review shows/specials pack their episodes with stand-ups spitting witty asides about the dumb clips that we’re watching. Not here. Grant comes the closest, when he describes part of the “Hays Code” that regulated movies from 1934-1968: “One of the actor’s legs had to be on the floor. How you’re supposed to f— people with one leg on the floor, I don’t know.” Instead, we normally get something more like Garfield speaking sincerely about the greatness of Jackie Chan’s fight scenes.
Which, sure.
To be fair, there is a special or even docuseries to be made about Hollywood tropes and why they exist. This is not that, however. Instead we’re just rattling off topics, seeing a clip that illustrates it, and hearing a film critic describe it?
The special does dig up some fun film facts, such as the in-joke behind the “Wilhelm scream,” the percentage of Rocky IV that consisted of montages, or the percentage of Oscar-nominated LGBTQ characters who died before the end credits. They interview Nathan Rabin, who coined “manic pixie dream girl” in his piece for The A.V. Club on Elizabethtown (and is a valued Decider contributor!)
They could’ve even gotten more serious and investigated why we cannot seem to distance ourselves from these tropes. Or they could’ve leaned into the mockery much more. Or both, in the case of women running from danger in high heels. They chose none of those options.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The moment they showed us the montage from Team America: World Police, I realized I’d much rather be watching Team America: World Police. Similarly, if you want to see clichés sent up in style, you also could do well to watch Airplane!, Cabin in the Woods, or Scream. If you watch this Netflix hour, you’ll only scream at yourself.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Attack of the Hollywood Clichés on Netflix