Line #95 ShootTheShaggyDog/Film


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6	ShootTheShaggyDog in {{Film}}.
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8	!!Directors:
9	* Creator/AkiraKurosawa:
10	** ''Film/{{Ran}}''. Influenced by ''Theatre/KingLear'', he made his film incredibly depressing. Nearly everyone dies or is pointlessly killed. The father, Hidetora, lord over a great clan, plans to divide his kingdom between his three sons, expecting them to be loyal even though most of his power came through bloodshed, war, and treachery. He ends up banishing the third and youngest brother, who warns him of the stupidity of such a plan. He stays with his first son, at the First Castle. Through a large chain of events, Hidetora loses everything, and we mean EVERYTHING. He is left insane, and his only hope is his youngest son. When the father manages to reunite with his youngest son, he dies due to an arrow from an enemy soldier, and the father dies of a heart attack. The ending scene is bleak, as the blind brother of Lady Sue, wife of one of the other brothers, is left alone, as his sister was killed. He ends up dropping the gift his sister gave him, and is left to die in the ruins of his father's castle, forgotten.
11	** ''Film/TheBadSleepWell'', his (very loose) adaptation of ''Theatre/{{Hamlet}}''. Creator/ToshiroMifune spends the entire movie building up ThePlan to get his ultimate revenge on the corporate grifters who drove his father to suicide, but he ends up falling in love with the daughter of his primary target, leading the evil executive to drug his own daughter and arrange for him to be killed. You don't see him die--the daughter and her brother return to his hideout, only to be told by his badly beaten best friend that he, too was drugged and then sent on the road, where he was killed by a train.
12	* Creator/AlejandroJodorowsky [[SignatureStyle loves to do this]]. ''Fando & Lis'' ends with Fando killing Lis, whom he was taking to the mythical City of Tar in order to cure her paralysis. ''Film/ElTopo'' has the people the title character spent the entire third act helping mercilessly gunned down, rendering all his efforts worthless. ''Film/TheHolyMountain'' ends just before the climax, with a major character proclaiming the movie over and the shot panning back to reveal the film crew shooting the scene.
13	* Creator/TheCoenBrothers LOVE this trope. There are a few exceptions, but the vast majority of their films end with most of the characters dead and their accomplishments (if any) negated. Specific examples:
14	** ''Film/{{Fargo}}''. Even lampshaded in Marge Gunderson's speech to Gaear Grimsrud as they drive off in her police cruiser. Sure, Grimsrud gets his, but the cops are unable to save any of his victims.[[note]]Of course, if he hadn't had any victims, he wouldn't have been a criminal, and the cops wouldn't have been after him in the first place.[[/note]]
15	** ''Film/NoCountryForOldMen'': The main protagonist and his wife both die, and the villain, despite his injuries, gets away with everything.
16	** ''Film/BurnAfterReading'': Though this one is PlayedForLaughs.
17	** ''Film/BloodSimple''
18	** ''Film/TheLadykillers2004''
19	*** Though this one is more of an aversion, since this is TheCaper in which the protagonists are [[VillainProtagonist the bad guys]] who in the end get what they deserve by LaserGuidedKarma, while the titular old lady remains unharmed.
20	** ''Film/ASeriousMan''
21	*** Though the ending is somewhat [[AmbiguousEnding ambiguous]] since it ends before any of the protagonists actually die.
22	** ''Film/TheManWhoWasntThere2001''
23	* Creator/LarsVonTrier likes this trope:
24	** ''Film/DancerInTheDark'' - subverted. It might appear as the most depressing movie ever, anywhere, and ultimately pointless and ends with the execution of the blind main character. As is typical of Lars von Trier, it's a HeroicSacrifice on part of a female heroine. She accomplishes her goal of preventing her son from going blind by getting him the operation he needs, which is all she wanted anyway.
25	** In ''Film/{{Dogville}}'', the protagonist is running away from TheMafia, which is also [[MafiaPrincess her home,]] and seeks shelter in a tiny American village during the Great Depression. She ends up discovering that poor people can be just as evil. They do some pretty terrible things to her, for their own benefit, throughout the entire movie. After nearly two and a half hours of this, TheMafia shows up and Grace participates with them in killing everyone in the village. YMMV on how to take that, but it's made clear that HumansAreBastards, and she has earned nothing for the pain she went through. It's also argued that they all deserved it, including her, making this a trope subversion.
26	** ''Film/{{Melancholia}}'', Part one: a woman is completely undone by depression and is abandoned by everyone, save for her sister (who really hates her sometimes) and nephew. Part two: she kind of starts to get better and then [[EarthShatteringKaboom a giant planet destroys the Earth]] which was [[HumansAreBastards "evil anyway"]], so no biggie. Naturally, it's considered to be one of his most uplifting films.
27	* Creator/RomanPolanski has several:
28	** ''Film/RosemarysBaby''. Everything is true, and actually worse than Rosemary imagined: the cultists aren't going to sacrifice her baby - they're going to raise him as the Antichrist to destroy the entire world. Everyone who could help Rosemary is either seriously injured or killed, her husband Guy is in on it (and did it all for his own fame), and she is totally defeated and simply stands rocking his crib.
29	** ''Film/{{Chinatown}}'': Jake calls the police on Evelyn and reports her escape plan because he suspects she's the killer. She isn't and in fact, that's a manipulation by Evelyn's rapist father Noah Cross, who killed her husband so that his attempt to take water from Los Angeles to enrich himself, and his rape of his daughter, wouldn't become public. When Evelyn tells him the truth, Jake tries desperately to help Evelyn and her daughter Katherine escape, but the police catch up with them and Evelyn knows she can't convince them of the truth. She's killed and Noah drags away their daughter Katherine, probably planning to rape her too. Jake is left staring powerlessly ahead. "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."
30
31	!!Other Films:
32	* ''Film/AceInTheHole'': In the end, Chuck fails to get his story, and accidentally gets Leo killed. He then attempts to atone by publicly revealing the corruption that led to Leo's death, but it gets completely ignored, and he dies shortly after.
33	* ''Franchise/{{Alien}}'' franchise:
34	** ''Film/{{Alien 3}}'' starts out by killing off the characters that Ripley saved (including Newt, a little girl), stranding her on a prison colony, and showing that for all the pyrotechnics of the second film, the alien menace is still at large. Then Ripley herself dies.
35	** This also extends to the comic adaptation, ''Newt's Tale'', which tells ''Film/{{Aliens}}''' events from the perspective of the eponymous girl of the same nickname. Not only does it [[LateArrivalSpoiler spoil her eventual fate in the third film]], but it makes the extended backstory (where she narrowly escapes after her mother and brother are massacred by the xenomorphs during the colonists' last stand) more pointless than her appearance in the sequel. The comic book adaptation of the third film goes one step further and makes a point of showing her death by drowning.
36	* ''Film/{{All Quiet on the Western Front\|1930}}'' is similar. It follows [[JustForFun/HowToSurviveAWarMovie war movie conventions]] rigorously right up to the third act, where the main characters are picked off one by one in trench warfare, until they are all dead. The AudienceSurrogate Paul survives long enough to stand up while sketching a butterfly in the trenches on [[HopeSpot the day of the Armistice, promptly getting shot and becoming the last casualty of UsefulNotes/WorldWarI.]] The closing title card? "[[TitleDrop All Quiet On The Western Front]]." All this is, of course, true to the spirit of the book.
37	* ''Film/AmericanHistoryX'': Derek spends time in prison, becomes accepting of other races and cultures, and learns to turn his back on his past as a Neo-Nazi. After he leaves prison, he works to teach his younger brother Danny not to go down the same path of hatred that Derek went through beforehand. Eventually, Danny learns his lessons and leaves the Neo-Nazis. However, he gets gunned down by the black student he antagonized earlier in the film. The original ending, cut from the film, makes this more clear, as after his younger brother gets killed, Derek shaves his head and gives a Nazi salute, undoing everything that he tried to accomplish earlier in the film.
38	* ''Film/AnAmericanWerewolfInLondon'' is about as literal an example as it gets. If there is a cure for lycanthropy, no one ever finds out about it. David transforms again before he is able to do anything about his condition and goes on a short-lived rampage in London before he is cornered in an alleyway and shot to death. Alex's love is unable to help him, David dies failing to accomplish anything meaningful over the course of the movie besides kill several innocents, and the mystery of the werewolves in the moors remains unsolved. Cue credits.
39	* ''Film/AngelHeart'': It turns out that Harry Angel has been hired by the devil to condemn himself to hell.
40	* ''Film/ApocalypseNow'', if you stop to think about it. The entire purpose of the mission was for Willard to kill Colonel Kurtz so that the presence of American activity in countries other than Vietnam wouldn't be known. Ultimately killing the Colonel did absolutely nothing to affect the outcome of the Vietnam War, so Willard's trip, and all the suffering of his crew, was completely meaningless in the long run.
41	* ''Film/ArlingtonRoad'' tells the story of Michael Faraday, a university professor who is an expert on domestic terrorism, and whose wife died in a failed FBI mission some years earlier. He has a young son named Grant, a girlfriend, Brooke Wolfe, and keeps in touch with his wife's former FBI partner, Whit Carver. One day he begins to suspect his next-door neighbors, Oliver and Cheryl Lang, to be terrorists, based on a number of incidents that have occurred around them, including their son being hospitalized after an accident involving a firecracker. Nobody will believe him though, finding his ideas crazy and paranoid, pointing the finger at his being unable to recover from the trauma he experienced when his wife died in the manner she did. Things only get worse for Michael when Brooke ends up being murdered by Cheryl right after she starts to believe in Faraday's suspicions. Her death is subsequently covered up as a car accident. Not one to be let down, Michael continues to go after the terrorist couple, when Grant is taken hostage by them. He goes after them, following a van he is led to believe to contain Grant to the FBI Headquarters' parking garage, with Carver tagging along. He arrives at the garage, but finds out that he was following the wrong van. After that, he opens the trunk of his car, only for a bomb that had been carefully planted inside to go off, destroying the building he had been baited to, killing Michael, Carver, and hundreds of other people. How can things get any worse than that? Well, Michael is posthumously framed for blowing up the building, and now is forever demonized as a terrorist/suicide bomber; Oliver/William and Cheryl get away scot-free, having accomplished what they set out to do; and Grant lives now fatherless and motherless with relatives, never knowing of his father's innocence. And it's implied that the alleged terrorist Michael talked about early in the film, who he was never convinced was guilty, had a similar stunt pulled on him by the couple. Many people, including renowned movie critic Roger Ebert, were highly critical of the way this movie ends, due to the [[DiabolusExMachina ridiculous contrivances]] and complications involved that led up to this point, not to mention the fact that, in order for this plan to be successfully carried out in real life, you'd need to practically be BornLucky or have PsychicPowers, your target acting in every exact way you want them to, moving in on the right locations at exactly the right time. In short, the shaggy dog was shot by a GambitRoulette.
42	* ''Literature/{{Atonement}}'': Only hours after he finally confessed ([[WallBangHer and consummated]]) his love to the beautiful Cecilia, Robbie Turner gets falsely accused of having raped a 15-year old girl and is sent to prison. [[BoxedCrook He's given the choice]] to join the army and invade WWII Europe. Cecilia [[HopeSpot promises to wait for him]]. He makes it through the battles and half of the French countryside, back to the beaches, and [[EarnYourHappyEnding finally reunites with Cecilia]]. Except not. Robbie actually died of septicemia the night before the evacuation, and Cecilia was killed during the air raids of London. The happy ending is just a false one told by his repentant accuser. Hence the title "Atonement".
43	* ''Film/BarryLyndon'' tells you [[ForegoneConclusion with the opening title card]] that Redmond Barry/Barry Lyndon's going to amass a fortune and then lose it all. He does. Then there's the final epilogue. It was in the reign of King George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.
44	* ''Film/{{BAT 21}}'': An Air Force [[BigDamnHeroes Para Rescue]] team attempt to extract Lt. Colonel Hambleton after he is shot down over Vietnam, but their helicopter is shot down, and the entire crew is killed soon after, either by being shot or [[KickTheDog being made to walk through a minefield]].
45	* ''Film/BlackDeath'': The group arrives to the village and discover the inhabitants are actually heretics. They are then drugged and when they wake up the whole group is killed off one by one in horrific ways and Osmund is tricked into killing his lover. In the end only Osmund and one other member of the party survive, with Osmund's faith horribly shaken. We then discover that the whole film was probably Osmund's StartOfDarkness as we get an epilogue showing that Osmund abandoned being a monk to search the land for the main witch, torturing and killing any girl that looks like her, and even ones that definitely ''don't''.
46	* ''Film/BlackSwan'': Nina goes progressively more insane over the course of the movie, and seems on the verge of some kind of breakthrough at the end, only to die from a self-inflicted wound after her first performance. Of course, given the [[UnreliableNarrator aforementioned insanity]], it's impossible to know how much of the movie is real and how much is only in Nina's head, thus making the story potentially even more pointless. [[Main/WordOfGod Word of God]] states that Nina survives the wound, averting this trope.
47	* ''Film/BlindFaith'': Charlie tells what really happened, that the murder he's accused of really was in self-defense. It shows the judge receiving and considering his testimony on the events and his father finally deciding to help him. However, it was all pointless since Charlie hung himself with his shirt in his cell anyway as one of the guards freaked him out with a story about the electric chair, which he would be headed to, burning the flesh off of one inmate. This was pretty much the end.
48	* ''Film/{{Bereavement}}'': Allison's uncle and boyfriend are both killed trying to save her, neither getting any closer to doing so in the process. Allison manages to escape the serial killers's clutches, with his hostage/protege/kidnap victim, and make it back to her uncle's house. The killer beats her there and kills her aunt, then sets the house on fire. Allison defends her cousin from the killer, then is killed by the little boy, who then goes and kills the serial killer. The house burns down with Allison and her little cousin inside, and the boy setting up a new murder room for his own use.
49	* One word: ''Film/{{Bulworth}}''. Five words: Rapping politician, meet sniper bullet. Yes, in a ''comedy''.
50	* In the horror film ''Film/TheBurrowers'', Coffey's love interest and the other missing women are discovered to have died, most likely at the beginning of the film thus rendering the entire heroic quest meaningless. Every named character dies except for Fergus Coffey and the utterly psychotic Henry Victor...who, by the way, is responsible for the deaths of two Indians (execution) and Callahan (by botching an attempt to amputate a leg that likely didn't need it). Worse, with the two Indians dead, their secret method for killing the Burrowers seems to have been lost forever. It's deeply implied that the Burrower's attacks will continue and nothing has really changed.
51	%% * ''Film/CabinFever'' does this with one of the most hilariously cruel endings ever.
52	* ''Film/TheCabinInTheWoods'': The good news is that two of the five students survived. The bad news is that, since one of them had to die in a sacrifice to appease the Ancient Ones and the rituals all over the world have failed as well, everyone in the world dies.
53	* ''Film/TheCave'', where the parasitic evil that they spent the whole film trying to defeat has just infected a new host.
54	* ''Film/{{Circle}}'': The people in the circle resort to killing off various people to buy themselves more time, hoping they'll eventually figure out a way to stop the mechanism, but they never do. Also, in the second half of the film a group of altruists goes through a massive effort to prevent either the Little Girl or the Pregnant Woman from being voted out by an opposing group of egoists, only for the guy who led the charge to protect them then tricking them into killing themselves off anyway.
55	* ''Film/{{Clerks}}'': In the [[RevisedEnding original ending]], Dante is shot and killed in a robbery.
56	* ''Film/{{Cloverfield}}'': The reason everyone stayed in NYC was to help Rob save Beth. And then Beth and Rob get nuked after everyone else had already died. So much for that, then.
57	* ''Literature/TheCollector'': Miranda has a chance to escape from Freddie, but she's too weakened by pneumonia to do so. Of course, she dies. And Freddie buries Miranda in his yard. At the end of the movie, he is seen stalking his next victim at a nursing school.
58	* The Russian [[WarMovies War Movie]] ''Film/TheCrossing'' (not to be confused with the USA film) depicts a Soviet anti-tank platoon retreating towards the eponymous crossing, where the Soviet troops are regrouping. They travel one whole day towards the crossing, then on the dawn of the next day they are attacked by German tanks and are wiped out without managing to inflict any serious damage to the enemy. A tragic and pointless end.
59	* The ''Film/{{Cube}}'' series:
60	** In the original ''Cube'', characters are repeatedly set up as heroes in an escape for their lives from a mechanical maze, but they all die or are killed by another character, except for the autistic IdiotSavant Kazan. He would be the only person who could sound the alarm or summon help, but would not be able to communicate the situation, assuming he understood it at all.\
61	Additionally, The Cube itself is an utterly pointless product of bureaucratic inertia. It's not testing a theory, advancing human knowledge or passing moral judgement. It's just a case of: Something needed to be done. The Cube is Something. So it gets done.
62	** The sequel ''Film/Cube2Hypercube'' is even worse. After many perils, Kate manages to escape the maze...but once her superior has received what she was sent in to find, he has her unceremoniously executed. Her facial expressions indicate that she knows what's coming, but she does not try to resist or escape.
63	** ''Film/CubeZero'', a prequel to ''Cube'' shown from [[POVSequel the point of view of the maze operators]], reveals that Kazan was in all likelihood killed by the operators moments after the first film's ambiguous ending due to a cryptic line near the start of the movie. It also turns out that Rains manages to escape, but will continue to be pursued until recaptured. Wynn is lobotomized and thrown back in the Cube like many Cube "Operators" before him. Everybody else dies except for the villains.
64	* ''Film/{{Damnatus}}'', the fan-made ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' feature film. Our heroes find themselves hopelessly outclassed, but still fight on. They defeat the 'enemy' leader, but he was actually a rogue inquisitor, and in doing so, they screw up his plan to bind a daemon, with the result that it is instead [[NiceJobBreakingItHero summoned without any restrictions.]] They are all killed attempting to escape, and then [[EarthShatteringKaboom the planet is wiped out from orbit in an Exterminatus order by Inquisitor Lessus.]] This is par for the course in anything having to do with the Warhammer 40,000 universe; Grimdark future and all.
65	* By the end of ''Film/TheDayOfTheBeast'', José María and many other people have died, Cavan has lost his career and become somewhat insane, and both he and Ángel are homeless, with the latter silently believing that the Antichrist menace might've been nonexistent and thus all the chaos and deaths he caused were AllForNothing.
66	* The entire ''WesternAnimation/DCAnimatedMovieUniverse'' is ultimately this thanks to the events of ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeagueDarkApokolipsWar''. Everything the League's fought for since ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeagueWar'' has been rendered pointless since ''Apokolips War'' has a DownerBeginning of Darkseid defeating the combined forces of Earth's heroes, so even though the League fought Darkseid off the first time and thwarted his plans in ''WesternAnimation/ReignOfTheSupermen'', it was all for nothing -- [[TheBadGuyWins Darkseid still won]]. Even in the end of the film, with Darkseid and Trigon dead; the Earth is still doomed thanks for the former; most of the heroes are still dead and barring Nightwing and Robin, the few that came back are ''ComicBook/TheNew52FuturesEnd''-style cyborgs with BodyHorror and even with Nightwing, he's irreversibly driven insane thanks to the Lazarus Pit; and the only way to undo it is how the universe began in ''WesternAnimation/JusticeLeagueTheFlashpointParadox'' -- having the Flash go back in time and undo the events of the whole series. The kicker of this ending being that it was implied to be a Flashpoint that started this whole mess in the first place, and thus there is zero assurance that the next timeline created will be any more hopeful or alive than this one. That, dear tropers, is how you kill an entire universe.
67	* ''Film/DeadBirds'': At daybreak, William flees the field, while apparently being chased by a creature resembling the same one that attacked his group earlier. Then he's shot by a Confederate soldier, who examines his corpse, revealing that he wasn't being chased by the creature at all. He ''was'' the creature.
68	* ''Dead Men Walking'' features every single person in the film dying except the main protagonist, Samantha. As she gets outside, she starts running toward the gate to escape. Freedom and safety are in her sights. And then she's gunned down by an FBI sniper from the roof of the prison. Who then gives a resounding, triumphant fistpump. The end.
69	* ''Film/DeadMine'': A group of mercenaries and explorers searching for the fabled Yamashita's Gold in an Indonesian island find themselves trapped in an old mine after being ambushed by some militia. Said mine leads into a seemingly abandoned (if rather worse for wear) [[ElaborateUndergroundBase Japanese research facility]] left over from UsefulNotes/WorldWarII...which happens to be full of Allied [=POWs=]-turned-mutant-monstocities and even an elderly IJA soldier still following his orders. And that's not counting unwittingly waking up an army of super-soldier samurai who are ''ImmuneToBullets.'' Needless to say, they had it coming.
70	* ''Film/TheDeparted'': BigBad Frank Costello gets killed by [[TheMole his own mole]] over being an FBI informant, who is hailed as a [[FakeUltimateHero hero]]. Eventually, all of {{The Mole}}s, including the protagonist, the captain, and a cop minor character end up dead.
71	* ''Film/TheDescent'': The last half hour or so is an extended version of this trope, as it's implied that if you can't stay together as a cooperating pack [they can't] the only way to be badass enough to get out of the cave is to go crazy and become as vicious as the crawlers. Also, in the UK ending, everyone dies. At least Sarah regains her humanity at the last minute... by choosing to stay with the hallucination of her dead daughter and apparently accept death. Hooray!
72	* ''Film/DirtyMaryCrazyLarry'': The eponymous couple and their friend Deke spend the entire film planning and executing a daring heist. They evade the cops because Larry is a skilled driver and Deke is his mechanic, and they switch cars and hide from aerial pursuit in a walnut grove. Finally having left the cops behind, they're driving along a country road, whooping and laughing it up... and then they come around a corner and crash into a freight train and their car blows up and they're all killed. Roll credits.
73	* ''Film/{{Doppelganger}}'' (AKA ''Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun''. Turns out it's a mirror Earth. Literally; the exact same things happen, the exact same people are there, all of the writing is just backwards. Colonel Glenn Ross is thought to have aborted his mission to the mysterious planet on the other side of the sun; instead, he's arrived on it, but since the mirror Earth sent an identical astronaut to our Earth, both Earths believe their own astronaut has chickened out and returned home. Glenn spends most of the film trying to prove he's not crazy, finds the evidence in orbit (his spacecraft with right-sided lettering- all other evidence was destroyed when his landing craft explodes), loses radio contact before he can tell anyone else of his evidence, crashes and dies immediately thereafter, and the only person who semi-believes him falls out a window to his death at the very end. Glenn is dead, never vindicated, still no one knows what the planet on the other side of the sun is, and due to the inextricable mirroring of events, this happens on BOTH Earths.
74	* ''Film/DragMeToHell'': The old gypsy dies (but of natural causes), the demon escapes, and our heroine, is dragged to Hell. The medium who waited 40 years for a chance of redeeming her failure to save a young boy by meeting the Lamia again and killing it. Her assistant screws up the plan due to having a lousy aim, she fails to break the protagonist's curse and she ends up dead for her efforts.
75	* ''Film/TheDraughtsmansContract'': Mr. Neville is killed, his drawings are destroyed, and he never even found out who killed Mr. Herbert.
76	* ''Dresden'': British pilot Robert Newman manages to live through the bombing of Dresden with [[OnlyAFleshWound serious injuries and escapes back to England. After the war, he flies back to see his true love... when his plane crashes. He dies. They don't give him a death scene - he dies in the voice-over at the end]].
77	* ''Film/DrStrangelove'' is a film about the dangers of nuclear Armageddon. You can [[ItWasHisSled see where this one is going]]...
78	* ''Film/EasyRider'' ends when Billy and Wyatt are blown off their bikes by two rednecks in a pickup, for fun. George Hanson (Creator/JackNicholson) meets a similarly pointless end in a redneck attack about halfway through the film. How was this missed, etc. It was during a ''scenery / music / driving montage'', no less! And... Boom Up and out over the burning heap of motorcycle on the banks of the Mississippi to [[Music/TheByrds Roger McGuinn]] singin' about flowin' rivers and star-spangled deltas.
79	* ''Film/{{Elle}}''. At the end of the film, Michéle decides it's finally time to visit her imprisoned father (if only so she can [[SpitefulSpit spit in his face]]), however [[DrivenToSuicide upon hearing the news, he kills himself in his cell]].
80	* ''Employee Of The Month (2004)'' is a BlackComedy about a man who breaks up with his fiancee after getting fired from his dream job at a major bank chain, and cheats on her with his coworker, Wendy. After a night of hard drinking, chatting with his estranged friend Jack (a coroner), and multiple attempts to mend his relationship, the protagonist (David Walsh) walks back into his workplace with a pistol, insults his former coworkers, puts a gun to his former boss's head (but doesn't kill him), and promptly walks out of his office directly into a bank heist. Dave manages to foil the robbery, at the apparent cost of his own life. This turns into a quintuple twist; the robbery was part of a two-year plan to erase David's identity and leave him and his friends filthy rich. Dave, Jack, and Wendy meet up in a motel room, prepared to divide their earnings and part ways. Dave kills Jack. Wendy kills Dave and runs off with Dave's ex-fiancee (Sarah) with whom she's involved in a lesbian relationship. All of this sex and mayhem is finally rendered moot after the credits, when Sarah and Wendy's car is hit by a bus, killing them both.
81	* ''Film/EpicMovie'' ends with the four lead characters being inexplicably flattened by a runaway water wheel, making the whole movie even more pointless.
82	* ''Film/{{Fallen}}'': Creator/DenzelWashington plays a police detective, Hobbes, who spends the whole film trying to figure out a way to stop Azazel, a [[OurDemonsAreDifferent demon]] that can possess people just by having his host touch them, and move on to a new body within a few hundred feet if his host is killed. At one point in the movie, Azazel murders Hobbes' brother using poison. Eventually, Hobbes lures Azazel out to an isolated cabin, and smokes cigarettes laced with the poison his brother was killed with, before shooting Azazel (who is currently possessing his friend and partner). Azazel then possesses Hobbes and stumbles around in the snow for a bit, before Hobbes dies. The camera then pans out as Azazel narrates how pathetic and pointless Hobbes was, before it's revealed that he manages to survive by possessing a cat underneath the cabin. What's worse is how pointless the whole thing was: Azazel was only antagonising Hobbes for his own twisted amusement, and nothing is ultimately accomplished, except Hobbes' name being besmirched, and his nephew being left without any family. Even worse is that Azazel is shown earlier in the movie to be able to possess animals. Anyone who remembers that scene will realize that Hobbes' plan to kill the demon out in the woods is doomed to failure, since there are any number of birds, squirrels, and other animals around that could serve as a host. This is all {{lampshade\|Hanging}}d in the movie, first at the very beginning of the movie when Azazel as the narrator tells you that he is going to tell you the story when he '''''almost''''' died, and then with the story of another cop who had killed himself at the cabin, apparently in a (failed) attempt at the same thing. Bastards.
83	* The ''Franchise/FinalDestination'' series of films is about a group of people who see a premonition of their own death, and escape it with this knowledge. However, Death does not give up on claiming them and looks for other ways to kill the protagonists. The protagonists then spend the rest of the movie trying to escape dying again and again, only to fail and die, making all their efforts till that point fruitless. Anyone that escapes a movie experiences SuddenSequelDeathSyndrome.
84	* ''Film/FortressOfWar'': Subverted in the BasedOnATrueStory UsefulNotes/WorldWarII film. The whole garrison is killed (with exception of a few captured soldiers) and the enemy continues to advance into USSR. However, during the time of siege (first week of the war) they manage to kill more enemy soldiers then the rest of their whole army group did in this time, and this sets an important example to the demoralised Red Army, prompting it to stand ground and thus contributing to the ultimate victory.
85	* ''Film/FruitvaleStation'' has this trope as basically its entire point--a young man's life is cut short for no good reason. RippedFromTheHeadlines.
86	* ''Film/FunnyGames'', both the original German and English remake versions, follows a HopeSpot with a DiabolusExMachina to ensure that the movie has a DownerEnding. The entire movie is a TakeThat at [[YouBastard its own audience]], so it's somewhat to be expected that it would ShootTheShaggyDog as well.
87	* ''Film/{{Gallipoli}}'' deliberately invokes this trope in order to deliver an anti-war [[AnAesop Aesop]]. In it, two young Australian men go to great lengths to join the army during World War 1, go through some training that doesn't take the war seriously (for example, their drill sergeant gives them a lecture on contraception), and, in the final three minutes of the film, the characters go to war and are promptly killed. Roll credits. In the original script, the main character was meant to be shot and killed within a minute of him stepping onto Gallipoli beach. The worst part is that the film is closer to what actually happened than most war films.
88	* ''Film/TheGhostwriter'', one of Polanski's films, ends with the eponymous ghostwriter run over by CIA agents after not exposing that the CIA controlled post-September 11th British policy via [[TheManBehindTheMan the Prime Minister's wife]]. [[RayOfHopeEnding Then again we're only told his "accident" was "really nasty" and the PM published his memoirs before he was killed and if anyone else notices that each chapter's opening sentence sounds a bit weird before they're recalled and burned...]].
89	* ''Film/{{The Great Gatsby\|2013}}''. Any version of this story usually is this, but the 2013 film version in particular. Gatsby takes the blame for a fatal accident and is killed for it by the husband of the woman who died. Daisy, who caused the accident, [[KarmaHoudini stays with her husband and leaves before Gatsby's funeral. The only person to show up to the funeral at all is Nick, and for all his troubles, Nick ends up in an asylum. Both the two decent main characters are killed, but neither character that could be an antagonist gets off scot free.]]
90	* ''Film/TheGreatSilence'' is a borderline example. The film sets up a pretty standard story of an antihero out for vengeance and protecting some townsfolk from cruel bounty hunters. And then the bounty hunters kill the sheriff, kill the townsfolk, kill the hero's girl, and kill the hero. It is a total and unqualified victory for the villains. And yet the closing title card stated that the whole thing was so shocking for the public opinion that it resulted in a ban on bounty hunting, thus ultimately subverting the trope.
91	* ''Film/TheGrey'' is a film about a DwindlingParty. By the end, the only man left stumbles into the wolves' den and puts up a LastStand.
92	* ''Film/TheGreyZone'': The Sonderkommando rescue the Jewish girl who survived the gas chambers from the piles of corpses in the hopes of saving her so she'll be able to tell their story. Dr. Nyiszli almost manages to strike a deal for the girl's life with the Nazi officer in charge of the section, but it all ends up being for naught. Even at the end it [[HopeSpot briefly seems like the girl will run away to freedom]], then the officer calmly shoots her in the back of the head and orders her body to be burned with the others.
93	* The ''Franchise/{{Halloween}}'' series. Laurie is believed to fit this trope, but Jamie definitely does.
94	** In ''Film/Halloween4TheReturnOfMichaelMyers'', she's the local outcast for being related to Michael. In ''Film/Halloween5TheRevengeOfMichaelMyers'', she becomes mute due to a powerful connection with Michael, and all her friends, her sister, and her dog get killed. ''Then'' in ''Film/HalloweenTheCurseOfMichaelMyers'' she's kidnapped by a cult and is forced to have sex with Michael, and she finally dies by being impaled by farm equipment.
95	* ''Happy Times'' uses this trope. After the main character spends the entire movie unsuccessfully trying to start a relationship, he is left in a coma after being hit by a garbage truck. The hope that he might have at least helped someone else is destroyed since she runs away because she feels like a burden. Neither character knows what has happened to the other character and neither will obtain their dream.
96	* ''Film/{{Hereditary}}'' is a textbook example of this trope. The protagonists are almost completely helpless to avoid the fates planned by Paimon's cult, and all characters die gruesomely in order to possess Peter's body. The movie even dedicates a scene to discussing whether or not this is more or less of a tragedy in Peter's literature class.
97	* ''Film/HoldTheDark'': Our hero Russell ultimately achieves nothing, and suspects that his own intended purpose was simply to witness the Slones' story. Medora summons him to kill the wolf who carried away her child, but he decides not to kill any of the local wolves, and she reveals that ''she'' killed her son. Then he tries to track her down to prevent her murderous husband Vernon from killing her in revenge. He fails to stop Vernon from finding her in a cave, and Vernon shoots him with an arrow as he tries to get Medora to flee with him. Vernon and Medora reconcile and have sex only a few yards away from where Russell is bleeding out, and they ultimately leave him critically wounded with barely a word.
98	* ''Film/HouseOfTheDead'', in both movies. The first, after battling across an island and a castle and some tunnels, they finally fight the BigBad, the girl gets impaled with a sword and they get picked up by a helicopter immediately afterward. [[Film/HouseOfTheDeadIIDeadAim The second movie]] has a much crueler plot, where a team of special ops goes into a college campus which is infected with the undead. After losing all but three members, they get the MacGuffin, only for it to be lost in the process of escaping. So they have to go back and get it ''again.'' After its secured, only one member makes it back. He's then stopped by a now crazy member who was forced to cut off his own hand and the MacGuffin is lost again when he blows up their escape vehicle with a grenade after the female lead shoots and kills him. Now that this is over, they head toward Los Angeles, which is now smoking with destruction.
99	* ''Film/TheImaginariumOfDoctorParnassus'' features a rare upbeat version of this. Ostensibly, Dr. Parnassus and Tony go through Hell and (in Dr. Parnassus' case) back (literally) to protect Lily from Mr. Nick, but in the end, Tony's a con artist who gets killed, and Mr. Nick wins the bet and gets Lily's soul. Even Mr. Nick is surprised at the outcome. But not really, because then we learn that Mr. Nick claims not to know where Lily is, and we later learn she ends up HappilyMarried to Anton and living a happy life in [[RealLife the real world]]. To make it all even more upbeat, the final shot is Dr. Parnassus smiling at Mr. Nick, proving all of this is just their little game, and there are no real, lasting consequences for any innocent characters, really.
100	* ''The Inaccessible Pinnacle'' has Angus go all the way up the titular pinnacle to find a rare flower to save his love, only for her to die mere seconds before consuming the life saving antidote.
101	* ''Film/{{Impostor}}'' ends this way in [[DiabolusExMachina literally the last few minutes of the movie,]] with the main character spending the movie on the run and trying to prove that he's not an alien-created replicant bomb. Except that it turns out he ''is'', at which point he promptly explodes and takes every surviving character in the movie with him, save two characters who weren't anywhere near the explosion.
102	* ''Film/TheIncredibleMeltingMan'': The eponymous character, Colonel Steve West, is an astronaut who has been irradiated on his way back from Saturn and who is slowly melting to death. There is no cure whatsoever. Only killing and consuming people stops his pain, even briefly. In the end, during a confrontation at a power plant, his best friend Nelson is endangered and Steve regains a bit of humanity and saves his life - only for Nelson to be shot to death by a pair of random security guards. Steve kills the guards, collapses and expires. A janitor cleans him up what's left of him the next day and throws him in the garbage. Oh, also? ''More'' astronauts are headed to Saturn.
103	* ''Film/InvasionOfTheBodySnatchers1978''. These four people spend the whole movie running and are picked off, one by one. We think one might escape (albeit without the woman he loves) but no, he gets caught, and at the end his doppelganger catches out the last known human. Nothing is accomplished. Everybody dies.
104	* ''The Jammed'' is about a woman who tries to help three illegal prostitutes in Melbourne. Then end up (mostly) worse than when she found them. One commits suicide, one runs off and one ends up in immigration detention. This is an attempt at TruthInTelevision.
105	* ''Jedda'' focuses on the eponymous character, an orphaned Aboriginal woman raised by white farmers, being kidnapped by a tribal Aborigine, and the efforts of her love interest to track her down and bring her home. At the end of the film, Marbuck pulls her over a cliff, killing them both.
106	* ''Film/JeremiahJohnson'': "The only thing that's changed[...] is that a few ineffectual people have died." That just about sums it up.
107	* ''Film/TheKiller1989'': The protagonists bring down the Triad boss Hay Wong Hoi, but the protagonist Ah Jong dies before he can reach his goal, to raise enough money for the eye transplant of the singer Jennie, who he blinded in the movie's first shootout. Not only that, his Plan B of having her use his eyes falls flat when that's where Wong Hoi shoots him. And in a sense of PyrrhicVictory, the other protagonist, the CowboyCop Li Ying, is arrested by his fellow officers when he finally guns down Wong Hoi to avenge his friend and keep the villain from [[ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney getting away with it all]] because he had done so right in front of them in cold blood after Wong Hoi had surrendered to them, so he can't use the money to have Jennie's eyes fixed either. When John Woo piles on the tragedy, he piles it ''on''.
108	* ''Film/{{Knowing}}'': John's (Cage) obsession with the numerical code, and later, his attempts to save his son and Abby. Further, Diane, Abby's mother, dies while attempting to rescue the children from the Strangers who are actually able to save them, and who were planning on doing so without the interference of either parent. Also, the Earth [[ApocalypseWow is burned to a crisp]].
109	* ''Film/LegendsOfTheFall''. Several ineffectual people end up dying, including most of the Ludlow family and the tragic heroine Susannah Fincannon. The protagonist, Tristan Ludlow, goes down fighting a bear at the end in exile and old age. "It was a good death."
110	* ''Film/Life2017'': Despite all the effort and sacrifice the ISS crew puts into stopping Calvin, the voracious alien life form that is the main threat of the film, they all die horrible deaths without even slowing the creature down. The film ends with four crew members plus two reinforcing {{Red Shirt}}s dead, the remaining two assured to die fairly soon as well, and Earth's entire biosphere, and all of humanity with it, circling the drain now that Calvin has made planetfall safe and sound.
111	* ''Film/LivingDeadSeries'':
112	** ''Film/NightOfTheLivingDead1968'': Despite his valiant efforts, Ben fails to protect any of his fellow survivors from the ZombieApocalypse. In the morning, as the sole survivor, Ben is unceremoniously shot by a ragtag band of zombie hunters that doesn't bother to look very closely at their targets.
113	** ''Film/NightOfTheLivingDead1990'' goes out of its way to avert this by having Barbara survive by simply leaving the house and walking past the zombies, which she [[ChekhovsGun suggested early in the movie]] only to have both Harry and Ben [[CassandraTruth shoot the idea down.]]
114	** ''Film/DawnOfTheDead2004'': At the end of the movie, it appears that the few remaining protagonists' struggles have paid off, and they're finally able to sail into the sunset to find an island they can start a new life on. Guess what? Island zombies, is what. How do you like them coconuts? (Although the characters aren't actually ''shown'' dying.) This ending was tacked on after test-audiences griped about the original, far more ambiguous, version.
115	%%* ''Film/TheLoveWar'' pretty much defines this.
116	* ''Mad City'' (starring Creator/JohnTravolta) has an ending like this. Sam Baily spends the whole film trying a desperate (but admittedly stupid) move to get his job back. In the end, it not only doesn't work, but he commits suicide to boot.
117	* ''Film/{{Memento}}'': Leonard's wife already died years ago from an insulin overdose administered by Leonard himself. His quest for revenge is based on a lie that has left numerous innocent (if not necessarily 'clean') people dead. Teddy, the only person who still had some hold over Leonard and who revealed all of this to him, ends up getting a bullet to the head for his troubles by Leonard using himself as a hitman.
118	* ''Film/TheMist'' has [[ExaggeratedTrope an extreme example]]. Near the end, David, having lost nearly all his friends, his wife, and any hope of surviving, kills everyone in his car, including [[OffingTheOffspring his young son Billy, to keep them from being killed by the monsters of the mist before turning the gun on himself and discovering that it's empty. To make matters even worse, the military step in to clear the mist and the monsters, rendering everything David just did absolutely pointless]]. The original short story by Creator/StephenKing ended with a BolivianArmyEnding, leaving it likely they would die since the mist had spread all the way across New England, but allowing room for optimism.
119	* ''Film/MoreDeadThanAlive'' fits very nicely into this trope. The entire movie focuses on a guy known as "Killer Cain" trying to settle down with an honest living after spending 18 years in jail for a string of murders he committed prior to the movie. Being an ex-criminal, it's hard for him to find work. The only job he can keep is one at a shooting show. However there, he has to put up with an insolent young co-worker of his. To make things worse, he's made plenty of enemies in the past. By the end of the movie, he not only gets the ranch he wants, but he gets to marry the woman he loves in a classic Western movie fashion. But then one of his old enemies (apparently the guy's father was one of Cain's victims) shows up and guns him down.
120	* ''Film/{{Munich}}''. "In the end, did we really accomplish anything?"
121	* ''Film/OddsAgainstTomorrow'': The heist the plot centered around is a total failure, and all three would-be robbers die; the first [[BetterToDieThanBeKilled committing suicide rather than being caught by the police, and the last two getting into a shoot-out with each other that ends up with them performing a MutualKill]].
122	* ''Film/TheOmen1976'': Everybody dies, except Damien TheAntiChrist.
123	* ''Film/OpenWater'' is two hours of people stranded at sea waiting for a rescue that will never come.
124	* ''Film/OsloAugust31st'': The entire film is watching a suicidal man who has given up on life and finds no point in trying to start fresh. He bungles or is detached from basically every interaction he has, the two women he wants most to contact him refuse to talk to him, he relapses from sobriety quickly and by the end he shoots up in his old childhood home, not caring if he overdoses and dies.
125	* ''Film/PansLabyrinth'': [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane If you follow the interpretation that the magic isn't real.]] Then the film is the story of a traumatized young girl using fairytales as a coping mechanism for the horrors of The Spanish Civil War. She is abused by her father, a fascist thug named Vidal, her mother dies, and then she is murdered by her father trying to protect her baby brother from him. The only bright spot in the ending -- that Vidal dies at the hands of the rebels and Mercedes takes the baby -- [[ForegoneConclusion is undercut by the fact that]] the Republicans are going to lose the war and Franco's regime will stay in power for decades, so Mercedes and the baby remain in danger if they are found.
126	* ''Film/TheParallaxView'' ends with not only the protagonist, Frady, failing to publicly unmask the true nature of the Parallax Corporation and also failing to stop another assassination of a senator carried out by them, but is also killed at the scene trying, and on top of that is falsely accused of being the assassin solely responsible by the official investigation committee for the senator's death. The protagonist in all his efforts essentially accomplished nothing but getting himself and those associated with him killed, with his memory tarnished by the committee, and the Parallax Corporation able to continue its murderous operations unscathed.
127	* ''Film/PlayDirty'' follows a British special forces squad out to destroy a Nazi fuel depot during the North African Campaign. The depot turns out to be a decoy, but they find a real one nearby in Benghazi and attempt to destroy that one; one of them trips an alarm, and the entire squad is killed except for the two commanding officers. Then it turns out that while they were on their mission the German lines collapsed and the commandos made it to the city less than a day before the actual British Army, rendering the entire mission pointless. Then the surviving officers get gunned down by a British soldier in an accidental UnfriendlyFire incident. Roll credits.
128	%% * ''Film/ThePledge'': See the entry under DiabolusExMachina.
129	* ''Prison Song'' paints such a grim, hopeless picture of inner city life for black males, it makes ''Series/TheWire'' look relatively cheery in comparison. The protagonist, Elijah Butler, loses his father to police brutality prior to the film's opening, then gets an extended HumiliationConga - his step-dad gets arrested by police harassing him over his photography business not being licensed, he and his childhood friend get arrested when they fool around with a laser pointer near police, and his mother was declared insane (and then heavily sedated) after she tried to break him out of prison. He gets a brief HopeSpot due to getting admitted to a good college, but has to drop it when he can't pay off the tuition. He then gets accused of murder because (in self-defense) he pushed a man attacking him onto subway tracks, thus electrocuting him. Elijah gets twenty-five years to life as a result, and ends up having to deal with a prison with corrupt guards and abuses, only to attempt a prison break...where he fails miserably, and gets blown away by the guards after the getaway car leaves without him.
130	* ''Film/{{REC}}'': Nobody survives the mysterious virus. And Angela gets dragged into darkness at the end to be either infected or feasted on, or even BOTH.
131	* ''Film/RiversEdge'': Feck's execution of John made all of Layne's efforts to protect him worthless. Nothing else really happens or gets resolved at the end, except for the teens attending two funerals for two dead friends.
132	* ''Film/RosemarysBaby'': All of Rosemary's attempts to escape her husband and the Satanic cult he's allied with before she gives birth fail completely, and she gives birth in their clutches. Not that it would've made the slightest bit of difference if any of her escape attempts had succeeded since her baby is Satan's child, TheAntiChrist. For all the difference it made, [[ItMakesSenseInContext Rosemary might as well've wolfed down the entire chocolate mousse the night before her baby's conception, and been a blindly trusting idiot afterwards]] (not that she really is a blindly trusting idiot, mind you, it just would've made no difference if she was). Ira Levin eventually wrote a sequel, ''Literature/SonOfRosemary'', which averts this when Rosemary's now grown son, in order to prevent the apocalypse, sacrifices himself to perform a CosmicRetcon that sends Rosemary back to before she and her husband had moved into the building the cult is based out of, with her memories of what happened intact and allowing her to avoid falling into the cult's hands in the first place.
133	* ''Film/RocketAttackUSA'', a 1960s propaganda piece featured on ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000''. The heroes manage to infiltrate a Soviet missile base, but the missile launches anyway (with ''hilariously'' awful special effects) and wipes out New York. "We cannot let this be... THE END."
134	* ''Film/TheRuins''. One of the Americans, Amy, survives, makes it to the jeep and presumably gets back to society... while being infected of the same malevolent vine that has killed all her friends (you can see the spores growing on her clothes), and now is poised to do the same to the world at large. Meanwhile, the friends of the Greek associate of the Americans happen upon the eponymous location, presumably doomed to the same fate. The book didn't have this problem, as everyone died and the vine was contained. An alternate ending makes this even more explicit, showing Amy's eye filling with blood and the vine appearing under her skin, and then the flowers of it growing on her grave.
135	* Both {{downplayed\|Trope}} and PlayedForLaughs in ''Film/RushHour'' when Creator/JackieChan spends part of the climactic fight both going fist-to-fist with one of [[BigBad Juntao's]] men and trying to save a PricelessMingVase. He finally takes out the {{mook\|s}} and stabilizes the vase on its display pedestal--and a stray bullet destroys it.
136	* Minor example in ''Film/SavingPrivateRyan''. During the bloody Omaha Beach assault, some medics expend a lot of effort and medical supplies to stabilise a badly injured soldier, only for a single random bullet to ping through the poor sod's helmet and extinguish his life immediately. They react... poorly.
137	-->'''Wade''': "We stopped the bleeding! We stopped the- ''ding'' ... FUCK!! JUST GIVE US A FUCKING CHANCE, YOU SONS OF BITCHES!!"
138	* The films of the ''Franchise/{{Saw}}'' franchise often end with a major character becoming mutilated or even dying, whether or not they actually learned anything or accomplished whatever goal they were given. Below are the two biggest examples:
139	** The most heartbreaking example is poor Adam from ''Film/SawI''. A genuine NiceGuy who was only put into the bathroom trap because he became embroiled in Lawrence's life; he bore witness to Lawrence's infidelity when he secretly tailed him and took pictures of him throughout the day because Tapp, who suspected Lawrence of being Jigsaw, paid him to. Adam is a photographer and he follows people and takes pictures of them, usually for suspicious spouses, only because he needs to feed himself. Jigsaw tries to make it sound like Adam's in the trap because he's too apathetic to appreciate his own life, but it's obvious that he's only there as a means to an end to test Lawrence. Adam goes through hell to try and escape with Lawrence, demonstrating along the way that he's empathetic, intelligent, and has a hell of a will to live -- he even [[PlayingPossum plays dead after Lawrence shoots him]] so he can [[ExtremeMeleeRevenge save Lawrence's life by beating Zep to death with a toilet tank lid.]] After cutting off his foot to get out of his chain, Lawrence promises to bring someone back for Adam, who's still chained, and crawls out. Suddenly, the supposedly dead man on the floor rises, reveals himself as Jigsaw, and tells Adam that the key to his chain was in the bathtub he woke up in; it went down the drain with the rest of the water when Adam jolted awake. ''Film/SawIII'' reveals that this was Amanda's fault; when setting up the trap, she was supposed to have tied it around his ankle, but forgot and just tossed it on his chest. Amanda was later [[ConscienceMakesYouGoBack consumed by guilt]], went back, and [[MercyKill suffocated him.]] Adam is a major EnsembleDarkHorse in the fanbase, which has led to much of the fanfiction being FixFic in which he escapes the bathroom.
140	** ''Film/SawVI'' : William obviously learns his lesson that a human life and its value can't be boiled down to net worth and cost-risk analysis, demonstrates along the way that he was never a total bastard at all and does indeed care deeply about other people, and by the end, it's clear that he's going to have a different outlook on life and a newfound compassion for other people's circumstances once he survives. Only he's not, because it turns out that this wasn't actually his test at all. The test is actually for the surviving wife and son of a man he denied coverage to who died shortly thereafter, to see whether they will accept his growth as a person and show him mercy. The wife almost pulls the trigger on his trap but can't bring herself to go through with it, but the son [[YouKilledMyFather tells William that he'll die for condemning his dad]], and activates the mechanism that [[CruelAndUnusualDeath boils William from the inside out with acid.]] You can see that he immediately regrets it, however, as he shares the same look of horror that his mother and William's sister wear as William dies in agony.
141	* ''Film/{{Se7en}}'' comes pretty close. Detectives David Mills and William Summerset achieve exactly nothing, and indeed are an essential part of the serial killer's master plan. John Doe kills Mills's wife, prompting Mills to kill him, leading to Mills being arrested. [[RayOfHopeEnding And yet there's a ray of hope]]: "Ernest Hemingway said: 'The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part."
142	* ''Film/{{Shaft 2000}}'' has the eponymous character spending most of the movie trying to put a killer in prison, only to have the victim's mother shoot the killer in public on the day of the killer's trial. Since he gets OffOnATechnicality ''twice'', first by escaping to Switzerland after posting bail, and then is allowed to ''re-post'' bail upon returning despite being a ''proven'' flight risk, it's quite likely he was about to get off ''scot-free''. VigilanteExecution was likely the ''only'' way he was going down.
143	* ''Sha Po Lang'' (''Killzone'' in the US) is a Hong Kong police movie that ends with all of the cops dying. Including the badass and TheCaptain.
144	* ''Film/TheShining'' spends several scenes following Dick Hallorann who, following a psychic premonition of the peril at the hotel, travels all the way from Florida, making his way through the storm of the century until, after against all odds finally reaching the remote, snowed-in hotel...where he gets about ten feet past the front door before taking an ax in the stomach and being instantly killed. This differs from [[Literature/TheShining the book]], where Hallorann manages to rescue a seriously-wounded Wendy and Danny and escape the hotel. Of course, it wasn't completely pointless, as Dick did in fact provide Wendy and Danny a means of escaping the hotel by bringing his snowcat along.
145	* ''Film/ASimplePlan'', along with a CrapsackWorld and a DiabolusExMachina, literally shoots the helpless underdog, when Hank Mitchell finally shoots Jacob, his unwitting, lower-functioning brother. It's made even worse by the fact that the plot is rendered meaningless in the film's final frames, where it turns out the money that all of the movie revolved around is marked, and has to be burned.
146	* ''WesternAnimation/{{Sintel}}'' spends the entire film searching for her pet baby dragon Scales, who was taken from her by an adult dragon. After finding her way to a dragon's lair and slaying the owner, Sintel sees an identifying scar on the dragon's wing, revealing that she'd [[NiceJobBreakingItHero just killed Scales]].
147	* ''Film/TheSkeletonKey'' ends with the protagonist, Caroline, suffering exactly the same fate as [[AndIMustScream the mute, crippled Ben]], as the evil Violet--actually Cecile, [[GrandtheftMe having made herself immortal by possessing innocent victims']]--successfully performs a voodoo ritual to switch bodies with her. Because of the nature of the spell, Caroline will live out the rest of her life bedridden in a nursing home, knowing that Violet has successfully stolen her life. And she can never tell anyone about it. Ouch.
148	* ''Film/SonOfSaul'': After all the trouble Saul goes through to escape from [[UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust Auschwitz]] and to give his son a proper Jewish funeral, the rabbi he finds is revealed to be a fraud, he loses the corpse as he swims down a river, and then is captured and killed by the SS.
149	* ''Film/SorryWrongNumber'' and the radio play it's based on. In the end, Leona fails to prevent her own murder. And this is based on an episode of a radio show where the rule was almost always to make sure the bad guy ''loses''. (Oddly enough, it was also their most popular production...)
150	* In Alexei Balabanov's ''The Stoker'', the protagonist desperately tries to construct an ethical system of good and bad in chaotic CrapsackWorld of UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia, fails horribly, and his following of morals ruins his life. He ends up commiting suicide.
151	* ''Film/TheStrangers'': The eponymous villains overpower and kill the lead characters. The opening of the film states that it is based on actual events, and that the "brutal events that took place are still not entirely known." They imply in the beginning that the protagonists will all die! Then again, the ending at least implies the wife could survive.
152	%% * ''Film/SympathyForMrVengeance''. The other films of Korean director Creator/ParkChanWook's "Vengeance Trilogy" aren't so bad (which is not to say they're "good"), but for this one, he sets his dog-shooting gun to full automatic and doesn't let up on the trigger once.
153	%%* ''Film/{{Threads}}''. It's a film about a fatal nuclear war, what did you expect?
154	* ''WesternAnimation/{{Up}}'': Muntz's life becomes this. He starts off as a brilliant inventor and famous explorer, goes to this paradise and brings back a skeleton of an exotic creature, only to be called a fraud, be stripped of his title, and when he goes to clear his name, he gets stuck there for decades, loses a lot of his dogs, goes completely nuts, and when he finally has a chance to bring back proof he ends up getting killed. And even if he did succeed, everyone he was trying to prove himself to would be long dead, and the modern day community would condemn him for killing or capturing an endangered species, and for his antiquated GreatWhiteHunter tendencies.
155	* ''Film/Utoya22Juli'' is a reenactment of the Breivik Massacre (which happened [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin on the island Utøya on July 22, 2011]]) from the perspective of the victims. The main heroine, Kaja, attempts not just to survive but also to help others. Unfortunately, the film doesn't give her a single success, as all her heroic attempts are for nothing. She stops to help a wounded girl and bandages her wound - but the internal bleeding continues and the girl dies. She directs a small boy into the forest - but near the end she finds out he's been murdered. Finally, she leaves her hiding place to search for her sister, then hesitates when there is an opportunity to escape the island by boat - and is shot and killed mere moments before the boat arrives and her sister is there. The only result of her selfless actions is getting herself uselessly killed. To top it off, even the POV camera betrays her in the end - rather than concentrate on her in her last moments (as was the case with every other victim before), we switch over to the PluckyComicRelief character who safely escapes by boat, with the film showing no more consideration for her.
156	* ''Film/TheWarlords''. The three main characters (and a woman that two of them fought over) die in vain, as it is revealed they were only being used as pawns by corrupt politicians to do their dirty work. TruthInTelevision, considering it is based on historical figures.
157	* ''Film/WithoutWarning1994'': Mankind's efforts to protect itself from apparent annihilation only makes the aliens decide to do it for real. This does not shoots the shaggy dog, it literally performs a ColonyDrop on the poor thing.
158	* ''Film/TheWomanInBlack'': So, we watched Arthur have death and misery follow him around for a few hours, only to have him and his child die horribly. So what if he's with his dead wife now? He's dead. And the woman in black is still killing kids, even though she's now got hers. What the hell was the point of this movie again?
159	* ''Film/{{Z}}'''s ending narration reveals that a military coup led to all the conspirators being released from prison and their sentences being canceled, wiping out all the work the prosecutor (who has also been removed from the case) did to get those convictions.
160

Context ShootTheShaggyDog / Film