A simple solution to a problem does not make an exciting movie. It's when the protagonist takes the long way around in series of challenges on a journey to triumph that we are hooked. It may be only after we sleep on it, or even much later that we realize the best solution to the movie conflict would have been much simpler. The most obvious example is when we realized that Frodo could have just rode on one of Gandalf's Eagles to Mt. Doom. You can see it in many films, like the 1993 film Free Willy.
In Free Willy, a boy who has been separated from his parents befriends a killer whale that has been separated from his pod. Initially, the owner of the water park where Willy is held plan to make use of this bond to make money off of the titular whale, which falls through when he becomes irritated by the audience members and refuses to perform. As a result, the owner chooses to sabotage Willy’s tank so that he can collect the insurance payment from the whale’s death but is found out by the boy and his foster parents.
Instead of something reasonable such as calling either the police or the insurance company about the attempted insurance fraud, the boy and his parents decide to steal the whale, bring him to a marina, and then get him to escape into the sea. In real life, this would have been remarkably foolish, both because of the stress of the journey to such animals and because of the legal complications in which the whale rescuers would have gotten into because while they might have had a good cause, there was no doubt that they had broken the law as well.
Read four other examples of simple solutions in movies you may never have considered at Unreality.