Ridiculous Market and Movie Character Overreactions

Markets often overreact. Like last May 6 when the Dow dropped 1000 points after Greece’s parliament voted on measures to control it’s out of control debt. Or even like today when rates rose .2% after New Home Sales rose 17.5%, making mortgage bond traders think the economy is fixed. It’s enough to drive you insane. Think stockbrokers jumping out of buildings. Or hitting the bottle hard after losing your life savings. But you can find peace and regroup by enjoying even deeper cliches: below are the funniest 2 Most Ridiculous Movie Character Overreactions from Cracked.com’s awesome collection of 7.

Rocky Balboa & Apollo Creed In Rocky III: The whole mythos of the Rocky franchise is that you have a fighter who isn’t as big, or as fast, or as strong as the other guys. But he wins fight after fight with sheer heart and willpower.

The Overreaction: After we are treated to one of the most spectacular training montages in history, you get a very weird sequence where Apollo and Rocky are doing sprints on the beach. Rocky runs a little faster than Apollo — Rocky after all is a fighter in training, whereas Apollo is retired — a fact that Rocky celebrates a lot.

First he pumps his fist and screams … then he jumps into the ocean, screaming, arms raised … then the two men passionately embrace, like long-lost lovers who had each long presumed the other dead … then they jump around in the water, together, clapping … then they passionately embrace again, howling at the sky … whirling around and around until Rocky raises his fist to the sky in one final, freeze-frame moment of triumph … And then the credits roll. Oh, wait, no, that’s not the end of the movie. In fact, Rocky hasn’t even fought yet. This is how they end their freaking morning run. It’s nice that Rocky outran his trainer, but holy shit. America didn’t celebrate this much on V-E Day.

Keanu as Johnny Utah In Point Break: Point Break is about some bank robbing surfers led by Patrick Swayze and the crime-fighting team of Keanu Reeves and Gary Busey trying to bring them down.

The Overreaction: When Patrick Swayze jumps out of an airplane with a parachute and Keanu Reeves, in the ultimate act of reckless badassery, jumps out after him with a gun. And no parachute. He hurls himself toward the ground and catches Swayze in midair, and the two have a shouting standoff as they reach terminal velocity.

To understand how bizarre and pointless this decision was, you have to rewind a bit. Keanu’s character, FBI agent Johnny Utah, catches up with Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) at the airport, who’s loading equipment and cash into a plane. A shootout occurs, and Bodhi takes Utah hostage and drags one of his friends along with him, despite the fact that the guy’s been shot and is clearly dying. It winds up not even mattering, because Swayze kicks him out of the plane a few minutes later anyway.

Swayze jumps out after him, leaving Keanu by himself in the plane. Of course, Keanu has no choice but to jump out because the plane is going to crash-

-Oh, wait, no. That’s not right. The plane and the pilot are perfectly fine. And get this — we’re pretty sure there were more parachutes on board if Keanu wanted one.

Swayze’s plan was for his entire gang to parachute out of the plane, and there were four members of the gang before the others were killed in the airport shootout. He put one chute on the wounded guy and took another for himself, leaving at the very least two more parachutes in the airplane that Keanu doesn’t bother trying to locate before flinging himself out to what was almost certain death.

Or, better yet, Keanu could’ve used his super policeman powers to force the pilot to land the damn plane — after contacting local law enforcement below to be on the lookout for a couple of parachuting jackasses hovering around in the general vicinity.

Either option would’ve been way more reasonable than launching headfirst into the sky like Steven Segal in Executive Decision.