Young Writers Society

I dont know how to put this. Put I wanted to know whether this thing is effective as an idea. A character and plot coming dangerously close to cliche and behaving in a completely different way by fooling the reader. Turing the cliche on it's head.

Like a bomb defused at the last minute is a horrible cliche, but an unexpected blast is actually using the cliche to con the reader. Is it a good thing to do?

This is called Playing With a Trope, which can be done in multiple ways (more at link, although a warning that tv tropes is a time sink).

It's a very fun thing to do and is completely and totally acceptable way to use cliches. The one trick is to make sure the story is interesting enough that people are willing to stick with it while the cliches are in use.

Plus, clichés are often so because there's something about it that works. With the bomb cliché you mentioned, it works because it builds tension - but it's so predictable that we already know what's going to happen anyway. But bear in mind that playing with a trope and the results of that can often become cliches themselves. To use Rosey's link:

The butler is the prime suspect at the beginning, but then eliminated as a suspect — except he did do it, and the exonerating evidence is false.

The heroes fight with giant glowsticks, the kind that you have to snap and shake.

Those ideas have become clichéd themselves, and you can use those to mess with the reader even more.

Blues' specific example of messing with supervisions of tropes (which is the exact form you're talking about: setting up a trope then saying "nope not happening") is called either double subversion (setting up a trope, subverting it while saying it wouldn't happen, then after setting it up the trope won't play straight, actually subverting it) zig zagging (when you're basically using the trope but in such a mish mash of ways it doesn't fit in any other category).