Why Would Jerry Give Criminals A Car With No Papers, Totally Unlicensed
Doesn't make sense. Car is so easily traceable.
shareThe whole point was that Jerry and the two cons were bumbling idiots. Add to that Jerry's desperation and you would expect some pretty absurd actions.
Actually, if you read about real life crime stories like this, the actions of Jerry aren't all that different. People like that are always doing shockingly stupid things that will ensure their capture. For example, I read The News of the Weird (a collection of hilarious stories from newspapers). Every year, they have a list of stories they will no longer feature because they have become too common. One of the stories that they stopped running last year (because there were too many of them) was stories about people robbing banks and getting caught because they signed their name on the "Put the money in the bag" note.
Yup - in so many films and TV shows the bad guys are often portrayed as brilliant masterminds who are playing 10 dimensional chess and are always 2 steps ahead of law enforcement.
In reality, there certainly are brilliant criminals, but usually if you're very smart it's much easier to work at a legitimate profession. So many criminals aren't too bright and commit crimes because that's the only way for them to come into significant amounts of money. The only alternative is working a low-wage job.
(editing since watching a scene again I realized my assumption was wrong)
I honestly don't know how they expected to make a car disappear. How was Jerry going to be able to hide the fact that a car was gone from the lot forever? Maybe he had faked some paperwork. Marge showing up asking about a missing car really threw a wrench into his plans.
Perhaps Jerry's plan was to, after he got all the money, make it look like a customer paid for the car and use part of the ransom money to pay for it.
I'm sure he could have just made up a fictional buyer and used some of the ransom money to pay for it. In his mind, it would've worked if everything went according to plan, since he didn't expect they'd look at him too closely.
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