Laser Guided Karma / Live-Action Films

Laser-Guided Karma in Live-Action Films.

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• 10 to Midnight: Just after Stacy wins the botched hearing and rubs it in Kessler's face, the latter decides to get revenge by posting the morbid pictures he stole from Stacy's apartment at his workplace, causing him to lose his job.
• In 11:14, Eddie is peeing out the window of Mark's van when the van runs into Cheri, because Mark is distracted telling Eddie not to pee out the window and hitting him. Eddie's penis is severed in the accident.
• The final outcome that awaits Carter Burke in Aliens is this in spades. After ditching everyone else behind a locked door, he runs into one of the very creatures he wanted to capture and weaponize. It isn't a pretty fate.
• In Andhadhun, Murli dies as a result of his involvement in the organ harvesting scheme, and when asked to save him the doctor says that the only thing that can be done is to donate his organs.
• Anger of the Dead: Rooker, after having Ben killed, locks his daughter in a room with a zombie. While trying to escape after Alice from a zombie, she seals him in the vents and leaves him to be Eaten Alive by it.
• A very literal use of this trope is utilized in Austin Powers in Goldmember, specifically in regard to the film's titular villain. To put it simply, Goldmember betrays Dr. Evil (who, surprising for his name, undergoes a Heel–Face Turn when he learns that he is actually Austin Powers' long-lost brother and that Nigel Powers is his father) and attempts to fulfill the plan which Dr. Evil nearly started: the destruction of the planet with a Golden Meteorite dragged onto the planet by the Preparation H tractor beam. He also kept a spare of the master key (hint: it's his gilded groin) after losing the original Master Key into the shark tank. Dr. Evil, now Dougie Powers, manages to reverse the polarity of the tractor beam, which causes the tractor beam to backfire on Goldmember, electrocuting him. He is then arrested and going by his comments, is most likely going to await execution.
• The Avengers (2012): Loki spends much of the movie belittling Bruce Banner/Hulk, basically describing him as a mindless uncontrollable subhuman to anyone within earshot, even to his very face. Loki even manages to use Banner's more vicious side to steamroll over S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers. No prizes for guessing who gets to ram a thick, humbling slice of marble and concrete-flavored pie down his slimy gullet in the denouement!
  Hulk: [after beating Loki to a pulp] Puny god!
• The main plot of the kung-fu film, The Bells of Death. The bandits who kills the family of an innocent farmer For the Evulz, ends up getting killed by the farmer five years later, when the farmer became a warrior and assassin after learning kung-fu from an old hermit and subsequently went on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge that have more than 60 bandit mooks slaughtered, including the three bandits responsible for killing his family, before executing their leader in a one-on-one confrontation.
• Bitter Moon has a very interesting example. Throughout the film, Nigel has been slowly falling in lust with a Frenchwoman named Mimi, and considers cheating on his wife Fiona. Fiona warns him that anything he can do, she can do better, and flirts with a handsome Latin man. In the film's climax during a party, Nigel tries and fails to seduce Mimi by dancing with her. Fiona witnesses his bungled attempt and proceeds to make good on her warning. She then joins Mimi in a highly erotic Mating Dance which culminates in a passionate kiss, to the enjoyment of the other partygoers and to Nigel's blue balled humiliation. After a few hours of drinking and feeling sorry for himself, he finds them again in bed, naked and passed out in each others' arms, completing the karmic event.
• Black Lightning (2009):
  • Dima is initially so ashamed of his Volga, he parks it right after getting it as a gift and tries to take a bus. He misses a bus by chance and is late to university. If he just accepted the gift by his parents, he wouldn't be mocked in class and would be less influenced by Kuptsov.
  • When a woman begs Dima to call an ambulance, he tells her to call it herself. When he sees the ambulance stopping right behind the corner, he runs to see his dad being picked up and already dead.
• The Bling Ring has a rather embarrassing example. What did Nicki expect when she burglarized the home of a regular lawbreaker?
• The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: A tragic example. A commander of a concentration camp happily partakes in the murder of Jews. His own son is inadvertently gassed.
• Bumblebee: Tina cruelly mocks Charlie by calling her car (Bumblebee) ugly and that her father should get her a better one. Later on, Bumblebee has her car obliterated.
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Harvey Logan challenges Butch, the leader of their gang, to a Knife Fight in the hopes of scoring a Klingon Promotion. Butch inquires what the rules are, and Logan responds that There Are No Rules — and promptly gets a kick in the nuts and a quick knockout for his trouble.
• Cannonball has Coy Buckman and Cade Redman battling throughout the race. Just before their final showdown, Redman kicks his passengers out of his car, smashing the guitar of one of them in the process. Buckman finally eludes Redman by jumping his car over a gap in an overpass under construction. Redman tries to follow him, but realizes he can't get going fast enough to make the jump. He tries to stop, but the brake pedal won't depress. He looks down and sees that one of the pieces of the guitar is caught under the brake pedal. He goes off the overpass, crashes, and dies.
• Early on in Carrie, instant karma hits a boy on a bicycle who dares to mock Carrie as they cross paths. His bicycle goes off the path and crashes almost at once, implicitly because of Carrie.
• Cleo Leo: Leo is a womanizer and sexual harasser. He reincarnates as one of his former prey.
• Cloud Atlas: Occurs repeatedly, both for good actions (such as Ewing saving Autua's life, and then being saved by him) and bad (as when Smoke shoots a woman's dog and is later killed by her). Plays heavily into the theme that our actions create our own future.
• The Dark Knight Trilogy:
  • Batman Begins:
    • A Smug Snake crime lord named Falcone, who is implied to have caused a lot of poverty and corruption in Gotham, eventually gets confronted by Batman during a drug shipment, and chained to a searchlight for the police to find. That's not all, though; in prison, there's a scene where Falcone's talking to a corrupt psychiatrist named Jonathan Crane, and trying to resort to blackmail against him. Crane sprays fear toxin in Falcone's face in response to this, forcing Falcone into an intense panic attack that leaves him permanently insane.
    • Crane uses his fear toxin on Batman in their first encounter and has a grand old time taunting him as the Scarecrow before setting the Caped Crusader on fire. In their second encounter, Batman sprays Crane with his own fear toxin ("Taste of your own medicine, Doctor?") and tries to intimidate information out of him while Crane freaks out thinking that Batman is some kind of monster before an irritated Dark Knight bashes his head in.
  • The Dark Knight:
    • Coleman Reese is about to use his information on Lucius Fox as a means of extortion but backs off when Lucius calls his bluff by pointing out a few theoretical flaws in his strategy. Getting off with a warning might make him seem like a Karma Houdini, but then later in the movie, he is apparently considering revealing Batman's identity so as to appease the Joker. The Joker goes back on the idea and threatens a terrorist act if Reese isn't killed by any random person within an hour, and crowds of people in the streets try to kill him. Before he can even resort to appeasement, he ends up being the victim of others' appeasement. It would be too cruel an irony if not for the fact that Reese was, conveniently, an extortionist.
    • Another crime lord, The Chechen, is ordered to be put to death by the very same psychopath he had no qualms about hiring earlier in the picture. As an added layer it's implied that he's cut up and fed to his own hungry dogs, which he threatened someone else with near the beginning of the movie.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Man of Steel: Clark gets back at a rude trucker who was harassing a waitress by smashing his truck instead of fighting him.
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Lex Luthor gets what's coming to him big time at the end of the film. After blowing up a Senate hearing, kidnapping Martha Kent, manipulating Superman and Batman into trying to kill each other, and creating Doomsday, Lex is arrested, and his use of an Insanity Defense to avoid jail time backfires when Batman arranges for him to be sent to Arkham Asylum.
  • SHAZAM! (2019): When the title Billy Batson finally locates his long lost mother and finds out that she abandoned him all along. He then proceeds to abandon her to her minimum wage job, subsidized apartment, and possibly abusive boyfriend.
• Happens in Deconstructing Harry as the payoff for a short story written by the protagonist: borrow a sick friend's apartment, pretend it's your bachelor pad, use his name to introduce yourself to a High-Class Call Girl... hey, that's The Grim Reaper at the door. And he won't believe you're not the guy.
• The Die Hard franchise:
  • In Die Hard, Dick Thornburg endangers Holly by inadvertently revealing her relation to John on television, resulting in her being taken hostage. When he requests a live interview, she appropriately punches him in the face.
  • In Die Hard 2, Dick acts like a smarmy ass on the plane, and later causes a panic at the airport by revealing and embellishing the terrorist plot, impeding John from taking down the terrorists and possibly injuring hundreds. Holly tases him.
• Doctor... Series:
  • Doctor in Distress (1963): Sir Lancelot refuses to let an ambulance overtake him when he is driving to Hampden Cross Hospital, even though the ambulance man is clearly desperate to get through. When Sir Lancelot gets trapped in his own parking space by cars that are too close for him to open his doors, that same ambulance parks behind him, while the ambulance man retorts that he'll have to wait for them now.
  • Doctor in Trouble: If Dr. Burke never got Dr. Houston to believe that he had come down with Hepatitis Africonia, it means that Dr. Houston would've still been fit to work and be the one sent over to the Drobny, meaning that he wouldn't have been able to marry Ophelia before Dr. Burke.
• Downfall: Hitler is dining and elaborates about being The Social Darwinist, how compassion is an evil sin, to feel empathy for the weak is treason to nature, and how Hitler had always chose the most reasonable path: to destroy the weak inside and outside Germany. Just then, he gets a report about Himmler surrendering to the allies. Himmler just had Screw This, I'm Outta Here and, reasonably, is abandoning the weak (Hitler) to join the strong. Of course Hitler fails to see the irony and begins yet another Villainous Breakdown.
• Dumb Money: The ending text states that Robinhood had the worst public debut for an app and that it is now worth less than what it originally was, making its founders lose their billionaire status. This is after Vlad Tenev (one of the founders of the app) helped put a stop to buying GameStop shares. Meanwhile, Gabe Plotkin's company Melvin Capital, which was doing the short squeeze, was ultimately put out of business altogether.
• Played for Laughs with the gassing of the Nazi radio tower during the climax of Escape to Athena.
• What happens to Rodmilla de Ghent and Marguerite in Ever After. They verbally and emotionally abuse Danielle and Jacqueline and also mercilessly bully the servants, punishing them for "stealing" household goods when they themselves are secretly selling off those same items to buy jewelry and other fripperies. So it's a glorious comeuppance at the end when Danielle — now Princess Danielle — and her royal in-laws enact a lavish spectacle to humiliate the pair in front of the court, then banish them to work in the palace laundry. The karma runs in the other direction too; Jacqueline, the stepsister who always treated Danielle with kindness, gets to live in the palace with her and (it is implied) marries the Prince's personal guard, and the servants who raised and loved Danielle all her life likewise get to live with her in the palace.
• In The Fly (1986), Seth Brundle's Godzilla Threshold plan to reclaim some of his humanity turns out to involve genetically fusing himself with his lover Veronica (and their unborn child), figuring that if nothing else he'll have "the ultimate family". He comes very close to pulling this off since in his One-Winged Angel Brundlefly state she isn't able to stop him from tossing her into one telepod while he climbs into the other... but Veronica's desperate ex-lover Stathis, who's just lost a hand and foot to Seth's corrosive vomit (which itself is an example of this trope, as it was his meddling with Seth and Veronica's relationship that was indirectly responsible for Seth's transformation into Brundlefly), manages to shoot out the cables connecting her pod to the others with seconds left on the countdown. With his Tragic Dream thus denied him, Seth/Brundlefly has a Villainous Breakdown and smashes open the door of his pod to at least get back at Stathis... but can't get out before the countdown ends, and as a result, the computer controlling the pods merges him with the wreckage of the pod that ends up teleported with him! This leaves him a pathetic Clipped-Wing Angel, and though unable to speak, he manages to communicate to the now-free Veronica that he wants her to finish him off with Stathis' shotgun, and she tearfully obliges.
• Frankenhooker: At the film's end, protagonist Jeffery gets killed when the pimp Zorro chops off his head. His fiancée Elizabeth, the titular Frankenstein's Monster, uses his notes to revive him... in a form that consists of his head on a female body assembled from the spare parts of the prostitutes Jeffery murdered. As he increasingly freaks out over the realization that he's now an undead woman, Elizabeth "consoles" him by declaring his formula only worked on female tissue, loudly explaining over Jeffery's increasing Sanity Slippage that he ought to be "grateful" for his resurrection, using the same arguments he made when she was properly revived.
• Freaks (2018): Nancy the neighbor, after being controlled by Chloe's power, calls 911 on Chloe and her family to get them killed. Chloe uses her powers to make the government agents think she's the Abnormal and kill her.
• Fury (2014):
  • The SS Officer at the bank, who had Hitler Youth soldiers hanged for trying to surrender to the clearly-winning Americans and then shamelessly tries to surrender to American soldiers himself. Questioning the town's Burgermeister, Wardaddy finds out and promptly orders a subordinate with a Thompson to summarily execute him.
  • Norman gets a positive example of this trope in action. He tries to show mercy to a surrendering German soldier, and is forced to execute him by Wardaddy (who is determined to beat the Honor Before Reason tendencies out of him). After the final stand of Fury and her crew which leaves everyone but him dead, he hides under the tanks remains and is discovered by a young German soldier... who just turns the light off and walks away.
• In The Fury Of Hercules, the mute warrior Kaldos kills the Queen by throwing a spear at her, stabbing her in the back. Shortly thereafter, a pissed off Hercules kills Kaldos by breaking his neck with a spear.
• The Godfather:
  • The first film starts with Don Vito sending Clemenza and some "people who aren't going to be carried away" to demonstrate lex talionis by beating up two young men who had escaped justice after violently violating family friend Amerigo Bonasera's daughter and beating her to the point that "she will never be beautiful again", having decided against outright executing them ("We're not murderers, in spite of what this undertaker thinks").
    • The book actually shows the beating, and it's clear that the young men aren't going to be pretty again anytime soon, either. They're already experiencing a bit of karma before the Corleones' men even get to them, as word of what they did has gotten around, and unsurprisingly, women don't want to go anywhere alone with them anymore.
  • In a deleted scene from The Godfather Part II, Michael is told that his treacherous bodyguard Fabrizio has been tracked down. The man is seen leaving work and getting into his car, which promptly explodes, killing him exactly the way he murdered Michael's first wife Apollonia.
  • In The Godfather Part III, Michael's daughter is murdered by one of his many enemies, and he dies a lonely, broken-down old man.
• Godzilla (2014): Albeit with both parties unaware of the fact: Right when Godzilla is being pinned down by the MUTOs, Brody sets fire to the nest and draws the female's attention, giving Big G an opening to stand up and regroup. His assistance is rewarded when, just as the female MUTO is about to kill him, Godzilla appears out of nowhere to bite on the MUTO's neck and let Brody get away.
  • In the sequel, the main human antagonist sets King Ghidorah free, thinking he will reduce the human population and reverse its effects on nature. Not only does Ghidorah become even worse than any human catastrophe, by the end of the movie he kills her.
• Goodbye Charlie: As a man, Charlie was a notorious womanizer. He is resurrected as a woman.
• In The Grey Zone, during the revolt, one of the Nazi officers overseeing the mass incineration of the Auschwitz victims is himself loaded into one of the burning ovens by the Sonderkommandos.
• In The Grudge series, Vanessa is the very pretty and popular Alpha Bitch of the Tokyo International High School who unwittingly unleashes the grudge curse and is infected by it after bringing the unpopular Allison to the burnt down Saeki house to humiliate her. She is tormented by the curse and gradually deprived of her beauty, and loses her status as one of the popular and pretty students.
• Hang 'Em High has a rancher's murderer, who frames an innocent man for the crime and nearly gets him lynched by vigilantes. He himself is hanged for his crime onscreen shortly afterward, with his exonerated would-be victim being treated to the sight from the sheriff's office. As for the vigilantes, most of them (save for the Big Bad) are killed by their intended target, who turns out to be a former lawman from a different town and was appointed deputy so he could personally deal with the vigilantes without himself committing a capital crime for real.
• The Hangover Part II: Alan is committed to an insane asylum after using drugs with malice aforethought in the previous film.
• In Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, the sports enthusiasts and racist cops are all arrested in the end.
• An implied case exists in the first part of the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, where, after Harry Potter manages to deactivate Umbridge's Patronus keeping a hive of Dementors at bay, she and the court are engulfed by them.
• In Holiday on the Buses, Blakey lies to Luigi that Stan shagged his sister Maria to get Stan beaten up by him, however, when Luigi learns that Blakey lied, and therefore he is the one who ruined Maria's reputation, he turns on him instead.
• Effectively a hobby for Indiana Jones, as every single main villain is brutally killed by the artifacts they sought out.
• In An Innocent Man, the two dirty cops who framed the main character James get sent to the same prison, on the same block at the end (although in Real Life they likely would be put in protective custody).
• The Jurassic Park franchise:
  • Jurassic Park (1993):
    • In that scene we all know, Asshole Victim and Amoral Attorney Donald Gennaro abandons Tim and Lex during the Tyrannosaurus attack. He subsequently gets eaten by the dinosaur after Ian Malcolm unintentionally leads her over to where Gennaro is hiding, thereby ironically getting killed by the very thing he abandoned the children to.
    • In another well-known scene, an Asshole Victim and the guy who caused the whole mess by being a greedy amoral dick (computer programmer Nedry) gets blinded and mauled by a dilophosaurus. Nobody cried, many cheered.
  • In Jurassic World, Hoskins is killed by Delta, one of the Velociraptors he wanted to weaponize. After invoking the Godzilla Threshold, Hoskins was able to manufacture a situation that justified releasing the raptors into a combat zone, only to learn first-hand just how effective the Velociraptors are.
  • Jurassic World Dominion sees this at its slowest but absolute finest. Lewis Dodgson, the Greater-Scope Villain who hired Nedry in the first film, got off Karma Houdini for 29 years. When he finally returns in Dominion with the most sinister plan of any villain in the series, his Karma Houdini Warranty expires spectacularly. First, he trapped Alan, Ellie, and Maisie in the hyperloop tunnel containing carnivorous dinosaurs; later, during his escape attempt (which would have been successful), he himself ends up trapped in the hyperloop tunnel. Second, this happens due to Claire and Ellie diverting power from the hyperloop to the Aerial Deterrent System, which they only had to do because Dodgson had shut the latter off in an attempt to get Owen and Claire killed on their way to the Biosyn base. Third, he is alone with no one to protect him, as the building had just been evacuated due to the forest being set on fire in his failed attempt at covering up his plan. Lastly, and perhaps most poetic of all, the dinosaurs that ultimately eat him are dilophosaurus, the same dinosaurs that killed Nedry.
• In Kidulthood, the film begins with a group of vicious bullies, including the show's antagonist Sam, beating up and humiliating an innocent girl, leading to her suicide. This doesn't come back at him until during the movie's climax, when he meets the girl's big brother. Who happens to have a gun. He is forced to the ground, obviously crapping his pants, before the protagonist manages to talk the brother out of pulling the trigger. Granted, Sam doesn't die, but the sheer humiliation of having to beg for his life in front of a majority of his school still make this a memorable moment.
• About as literal as it gets without actually involving lasers in Kingsman: The Secret Service: Valentine is able to fill an entire Elaborate Underground Base with world leaders and one-percenters who support his scheme, as well as similar ones throughout the world — and gives them all Explosive Leash implants that protect his secrets and protect them from the Hate Plague. Eggsy and Merlin set them off — all of them — during the Final Battle. As there were numerous similar individuals who didn't support him imprisoned on the base without implants and thus spared, global politics have taken a massive step forward — the only ones left are the ones who find attacking their citizens repulsive enough to be imprisoned rather than do it. Last time something like that happened, the Kingsmen were created.
• In Little Big Man, the Seventh Cavalry ride into a Cheyenne village at Washita and rape, kill, and destroy everything in their path, with the mad Custer roaring encouragement. In the background, musicians are playing the regimental march, Garryowen. Indeed, the faint distant strains of Garryowen are the first sign that the cavalry are coming. The next time we hear Garryowen, the Seventh are riding to their death and destruction at the Little Big Horn.
• Men in Black II: The mugger at the beginning of the film grabs the main villainess, who's taken the form of a lingerie model, and drags her behind some bushes, clearly planning to sexually assult her. She easily overpowers him before she swallows him alive while he screams in pain, fear and confusion.
• The Mortuary Collection: The entire theme of the movie is that every evil deed will be repaid, but particularly laser-guided is the fate of Jake in the "Unprotected" segment. Jake likes to commit Contraception Deception, removing the condom as soon as he can get his partner to look away. He finally does it to the wrong girl, and suffers the fate he almost certainly inflicted on one or more of his sixty-seven victims: pregnancy (and symptoms of an STI, but that's the least of his problems). It's not as certain that any of them suffered Death by Childbirth as he did, but that was always a risk, and he was happy to let them take it. Not so happy to take it himself.
• Most Wanted: Braddock, established as a rapist early on who assaulted a teenage girl, gets tased in the groin by Dunn later.
• Muppet Treasure Island: Long John Silver disposes of Mr. Arrow by setting him adrift, after convincing him that the ship's lifeboats may be in bad condition and need to be tested. By the end of the film he attempts to escape justice with a share of the treasure in another one of the ship's lifeboats, only for Arrow (who survived because the lifeboat he tested turned out to be in perfect working order) to point out that the lifeboat Silver stole was in horrible condition. Sure enough, it sinks and maroons Silver on Treasure Island.
• In No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh murders the innocent wife of the protagonist even after she argues with him that he has no reason to kill her. As soon as he drives off, he gets hit by a car. The laser was slightly off that day; Chigurh gets through the car crash with a broken arm, but it is made clear that was more because of pure luck than anything else.
• Office Christmas Party: Drew and Tim are always hacking into people's personal information to seduce girls under fake pretenses or find fodder for insults. After the party, someone accesses their browser history and writes embarrassing stuff from it (penile enlargement, cheap penile enlargement, etc.) on the wall bar where they're passed out.
• Office Space: Initech is burned down by the very man they mistreated.
• In OtherLife, Sam forces Ren to reenter her virtual confinement so that he can figure out how she did it. When she escapes again, she forces a dose on him in return with a heavy implication that the scenario will also trap him for more than a year as it did her.
• In Plunkett & Macleane we get a pretty vicious example of this. General Chance, who is quite fond of eye torture, ends up with a bullet through the eye whilst he's about to gouge yet another person's eye out.
• In the movie Polar Storm, a soldier refuses to believe (including turning off the generator) that Cynthia Mayfield (who has received information) knows how to survive the EMP blast and tells her to get out and to not show the map again, with only two people believing and going with her. A few minutes later, the EMP activates, the generator short-circuits and a bolt of electricity goes inside the church, killing everyone. In the same vein, a robber hijacks their car and gets killed by the EMP blast seconds later when he starts it.
• Raising the Wind:
  • Even after Sir Benjamin orders him to leave, the cab driver remains in the concert hall shouting at him. He ends up regretting this, however, when Malcolm accidentally kicks a bass drum loose from the orchestra, which rolls down the stairs and crashes into him, knocking him down.
  • When Malcolm, Alex, and Jill are trying to get Mervyn drunk so he can write more tunes, he pours his drinks into Malcolm and Alex's glasses which makes them sink. Jill teaches him a lesson by forcing a triple brandy down his throat, claiming he deserved it for what he did.
  • Chesney mocks Mervyn for conducting his orchestra too fast, before insulting the orchestra as a whole. When it's time for him to conduct, they play much too fast indeed and make him look an utter fool.
• Subverted in The Rape of Richard Beck (also called Deadly Justice): A cop who is flippant and insensitive in his dealings with rape victims is assaulted himself, but as the message of the film is that no one deserves or "asks" to be raped, his attack is not portrayed as karma so much as a terrible experience that he eventually turns into a useful lesson.
• Redwood Massacre Annihilation: Max has been bringing people right to the Redwood killer to server as his next victims, and so Max can watch them, as they seem to fascinate him. Near the end of the movie, he becomes one of the Redwood killer's victims.
• Rise of the Scarecrows: Sheriff Howard has been stranding people in the town of Adams, Massachusetts and sending them into the woods to be killed by Scary Scarecrows for years. In the end, Sheriff Howard meets his end at the hands of those very same scarecrows.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World:
  • Stacey, with a big smirk, tries to manipulate the conversation so that Ramona and Knives discover that Scott is dating them both. A moment later, Wallace steals her boyfriend.
  • Later in the movie, Gideon kicks Ramona down a flight of stairs during the climax, and gets his ass promptly kicked soon after by both Scott and Knives.
• In Skyfall, James Bond's boss M gets a heart-wrenching version of this. Having given up one agent to save six others in the past, years later she can only watch helplessly as the same agent exposes five others to certain death.
• In the movie Snakes on a Plane, an absurdly, cartoonishly snooty bald guy tries to throw a small dog at the snakes to cover his escape. This is after he insulted a woman and her child for simply sitting next to him and genuinely being a tremendous douche from scene one. His plan ironically fails because he stops to gloat about it afterward, allowing the snake to eat both him and the dog. Oh but wait, that's not all: Afterwards he and the snake eating him are both sucked out of the plane as it crashes. In keeping with everything else, it's a borderline Humiliation Conga with fatal results.
• The plot of Snatch. centers around a stolen diamond that most of the other characters are trying to steal so that they can profit from it... except for Turkish and Tommy, two hapless boxing promoters who don't even know the diamond exists and are doing nothing more morally or ethically questionable than trying to survive a rigged boxing match organised by a psychotic gangster. They end up finding the diamond and profiting from it, while everyone else either dies, gets arrested, or loses out.
• In Sorry, Wrong Number, Henry is being arrested right after Leona is murdered.
• Spider-Man gives a triple dose.
  • First, Bonesaw McGraw's booker short-changes Peter Parker on the money he was supposed to win thanks to Exact Words: "You had to stay in there with him for five minutes, and you pinned him in two." When Peter protests, saying he needs the money, the booker replies "I missed the part where that was my problem." Immediately afterwards, a burglar steals the booker's money, and Peter lets him get away. "I missed the part where that was my problem."
  • Unfortunately, the Laser-Guided Karma hits Peter immediately afterwards, since the burglar's escape ends up resulting in his Uncle being shot and killed.
  • Near the end of the movie, Norman Osborn/The Green Goblin is begging Spider-Man for mercy, while at the same time trying to set up his Goblin Glider for a sneak attack. Unfortunately for him, Spider-Man senses it coming and leaps over it, resulting in the Green Goblin killing himself.
• Star Wars:
  • In A New Hope, Grand Moff Tarkin uses the Death Star to destroy Princess Leia's homeworld of Alderaan while she helplessly watches. Her people's deaths are felt in the Force. When Tarkin refuses to evacuate the Death Star when it's moments away from destroying Yavin IV, Luke Skywalker uses the Force to guide him and blows up the entire Death Star with Tarkin on it.
  • Return of the Jedi:
    • When Luke, Han, Chewbacca, and the droids are surrounded by the Ewoks, Luke insists on a non-violent surrender instead of attacking. By sparing the Ewoks and later winning their confidence, the Rebels gain valuable allies in the coming battle. The Ewoks are the Spanner in the Works making it possible to destroy the Death Star II's shield generator and defeat the Empire. Behind-the-scenes set footage of Mark Hamill, George Lucas, and director Richard Marquand reveals that this trope was intentional.
    • After Luke disarms Vader, the Emperor tells Luke to kill Vader and take his place as the Emperor's apprentice. Luke refuses, so the Emperor attempts to kill Luke instead. Negative Laser-Guided Karma strikes the Emperor as Vader grabs him and throws him down the Death Star II's reactor shaft. Luke receives Positive Laser-Guided Karma because his earlier refusal to kill Vader leads to Vader saving Luke.
• In the Laurel and Hardy film Swiss Miss, Stan and Ollie are having dinner at a fancy hotel in Switzerland. Ollie orders an apple pie for dessert, but is informed that there is none available, whereupon he insists on having the chef brought out and goes on an over-dramatic, entitled rant lambasting the man and threatening to get him fired. Not a minute later, however, when the boys try to pay their bill they learn that the only money they have is fake, and the manager angrily insists that they will have to Work Off the Debt... and sets them to work under the chef they had just insulted, with the added caveat that they would work an extra day for any dish they break. The chef immediately instigates them breaking two dishes, marks two extra days on a chalkboard, and smugly promises them, "By the time you leave this place, the gray hairs of your beards will be trailing on this kitchen floor."
• In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a guard at a mental hospital commits a rather squicky sexual assault on Sarah Connor, and is also seen harassing sleeping mental patients by banging on the doors with his nightstick. Needless to say, viewers don't feel much sympathy for him about two scenes later, when Sarah escapes from her cell and gives him a teeth-shattering wallop around the face. He's even worse in the extended cut, making his comeuppance that much sweeter.
  
  It's even better in light of this out-of-universe tidbit: In the earlier scene where orderlies subdue the raging Sarah Connor, that particular orderly's actor had been pulling his punches, which resulted in the need to reshoot numerous times. Linda Hamilton was not happy about this. For the scene where she gets violent revenge on the deviant orderly, the beating she inflicts is 100% real. And, as a result, Hamilton nailed it on the first take.
• Downplayed in Titanic. Cal is a thoroughly unpleasant fellow who attempts to control Rose and frames Jack for stealing the Heart of the Ocean. It may thus come as a surprise when he ends up surviving the sinking. However, as far as he knew, both Rose and the diamond, which he described as "the two things most dear to him," were lost forever. In addition, the full dose of karma comes years later, when he loses all of his money in the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and then kills himself.
• Trading Places:
  • Louis Winthorpe III, a racist and an elitist, gets a black man arrested for accidentally bumping into him — although to be fair, Winthorpe honestly thought he was being attacked and Billy Ray Valentine had already caught the police's attention as a con beggar (pretending to be a blind, disabled veteran). Over the course of the movie, he gets his job, home, and social life taken away from him, and ends up a street hustler himself, thinking that the very man he sent to jail stole it from him. Ultimately, he gets better and loses his old habits.
  • That's more than you can say about his bosses the Duke Brothers, who not only caused his fall from grace but planned to leave him there, and Valentine as well, all over a one-dollar bet. Valentine and Winthorpe, whom the Duke Brothers trained in commodities trading, give them theirs by sending them a fake crop report, causing them to bankrupt themselves while attempting to corner the frozen orange juice market.
• The main antagonist of UHF, RJ Fletcher, has his plan to buyout U-62 and shut it down thwarted, his TV station gets its' license revoked by an FCC official (after not only being late in renewing their license, but also having his real opinion on the denizens of their city broadcast over-the-air), and he gets a Groin Attack from an old lady. He winds up crying on the shoulder of the bum who he'd given a rare coin to and inadvertently laid the groundwork for his own defeat.
  • On the DVD Commentary, Weird Al notes that he hates it when a movie's villain pulls a Karma Houdini, so he went out of his way to avert the trope.
• The entire plot of Unfriended is Laura's vengeful spirit haunting and killing her "friends" to find out who posted an explicit video of her that resulted in her humiliation and suicide. At the end of the movie, Laura hacks into Blaire's Facebook account, posting the extended version of the video, revealing it was Blaire who posted it, finding amusement at Laura's expense. This is immediately followed by Blaire's Facebook followers seeing the video and becoming disgusted with Blaire for causing Laura's death, resulting in all of them denouncing their friendship with her. With Blaire's dark secret revealed for the world to witness, Laura finally appears before her, jumping her upon closing her laptop, presumably killing her.
• Valentine: Dorothy Wheeler, with the help of three of her friends, framed Jeremy Melton for sexual assault when they were in middle school, leading to him being beaten by a Gang of Bullies, sent to reform school, and later a mental institution. Years later, Jeremy, acting under the guise of Adam Carr, goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge that claims the lives of her friends. The pièce de résistance is putting Dorothy in his costume and throwing her at his girlfriend Kate, who was the only one of the friends who didn't participate in the Frame-Up years ago, and knocking them both down a flight of stairs. When Dorothy tries to get up, "Adam" kills Dorothy and unmasks her, pinning all his crimes on her.
• In Vertigo, Judy meets the same fate as her sham Madeleine persona, after getting the real deal killed.
• Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings: Kenia convincing the others to spare the cannibals not only causes others to be killed by them, but also herself.
• In X-Men: First Class, Erik kills Shaw with the very same coin that "Dr. Schmidt" killed his mother over. Very slowly.
• In Youth in Revolt, Jerry screws over a trio of sailors by selling them a car that immediately breaks down. They respond by disassembling the car, and reassembling it piece by piece in his living room.

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