Metal under the shirt: Movie's least inspired climax

Warning: this article contains spoilers for Netflix's Enola Holmes and A Fistful of Dollars.

I watched A Fistful of Dollars with my dad in my early teens, and it was life changing. It was the movie that helped a genre get off the ground and it made me fall in love with Westerns. It also has a brilliant ending. The unnamed hero stands up alone to the corrupt villain and is shot down, only to rise again and reveal that he had protected himself with a heavy circle of iron tied under his shirt. He guns down the bad guy and rides out of town with cash in his pockets.

But then I saw that ending again.

To be fair it was a small scene in the third Back to the Future which was parodying A Fistful of Dollars.

But then I saw the ending again, and again.

It's a trope that crops up all over the place, almost anywhere there's a gun and a climax there's someone shoving sheet metal under their shirt to protect themselves from bullets. In the days of tiny ball and gunpowder it may seem plausible that a hard piece of iron can save a life, and I admit this is a pretty specific nitpick, but there is a reason guns became the dominant weapon of the world all those years ago.

Guns were invented to penetrate plate armour. That is the reason that the much clumsier, harder to reload musket took over from the longbow. On a battlefield where knights in full plate were essentially tanks, that was a revolution. Of course guns become more efficient and powerful as the technology got better, but the method stayed the same. A tiny pinprick with enormous force can't be stopped by something relatively brittle like steel. That's why kevlar is flexible and not just, y'know, steel plates.

The most recent movie that bit into this trope was the recent Enola Holmes. A fun movie featuring kids and written mostly for kids, it would be pretty devastating to have one of those kids die in the last act. Enola's love interest gets shot in the chest and is presumed dead, only to wake up after she's bested the enemy because he had the chestpiece from a nearby suit of armour under his shirt.

For the plot, I'm glad he didn't die.

Again this is a nitpick, but it bothers me that the exact thing that was made obsolete by guns is so frequently used to foil them. The other reason that this bothers me is that it's almost always used at the climax of the film. Having a character die at the climax of a movie is bold and often not the right choice, like in Enola Holmes it wouldn't have fit, but using such a crutch to manufacture tension is weak.

The tough part is finding a way to take the power away from guns, especially in a period piece where things like kevlar are not available.

And honestly? I don't have an answer.

The ease of having something to slide under a shirt that saves a life is perfect for a surprise mini-twist, and for getting a character to break and show outright affection all in a single scene. But the catch-all of the metal-under-the-shirt means it's no longer original or unexpected, and so no longer has the same effect on audiences as it intends.

Perhaps there is another crutch out there that a Hollywood writer will find in time, something that fits the same scenario without breaking immersion, but for now perhaps it's time to fit the tension and twist to the movie.

Take Enola Holmes for example. Guns were not a part of the movie. They existed in the time period, and there were scenes with gunpowder but no guns. So why was it necessary to introduce one in the climax? I don't know, but my guess is that it was used specifically to have the metal-under-the-shirt climax. Stepping into a huge mansion with nefarious people about, would it not have been more fun to battle a devious villain who had set up elaborate traps, especially since the protagonist is such an intelligent character? Or have her love interest be actually wounded and she uses her vast medical knowledge to save his life, still showing the affection that she had been withholding up to that point?

I love A Fistful of Dollars and I enjoyed Enola Holmes, but when it comes to the climax of a movie I hope Hollywood figures out how to come up with something new.