Mercy Kill / Film

Examples of Mercy Kill in film.

---

• 6 Underground: President Rovach Alimov angrily demands this from One when he sees the Six are going to drop him in a refugee camp where everyone wants him dead. He doesn't receive it and is beaten to death by an angry mob instead.
• This appears frequently in the Alien franchise, often by victims of facehuggers, although in a deleted scene from Alien Ripley finds two of her crewmates (who have all been attacked and either killed or dragged off by the titular alien) cocooned to the walls of its lair and the line is uttered as a request for euthanasia rather than to prevent the alien from reproducing.
• Amen: The Doctor is shown complaining over the fact that the Catholic Church is ignorant about euthanasia after Bishop von Galen helped get Aktion T4 halted, and justifies having gassed mental patients on this basis.
• At the start of Before I Hang, Dr. John Garth is on trial for murder after performing a mercy killing on an elderly friend. He is found guilty and sentenced to hang.
• Barbarian: The Mother lived quite a hellish upbringing and a horrific life under the watch of Frank. When Tess points a gun at her head, she seems to gladly accept it to end the pain.
• Black Death:
  • Wolfstan gives one to Griff when he reveals that he's got the plague. Characters also discuss the use of misericorde at the battlefield.
  • Osmund does this to his lover Averill when he finds her insane and suffering. It is later revealed by Langiva that Averill's appearance of insanity was merely a temporary effect caused by drugs, rather than the result of being unnaturally brought back to life... maybe. This pushes Osmund over the edge.
• Played for laughs in Black Dynamite, when the titular characters asks a friend who has consumed tainted malt liquor that shrinks a man's genitalia whether he wants to keep living. The friend says no. Boom, Headshot!.
• The Black Stork is a pro-eugenics film that believes that disability is a Fate Worse than Death, and so disabled or deformed infants should be put out of their misery as soon as legally possible.
• Blackthorn: In flashbacks to those days when he and the Sundance Kid rode together, Butch Cassidy recalls how his partner, being wounded and near death, asks for Butch to "do it," and so Butch regretfully and lovingly takes the life of his best friend.
• In Blade II, one of the Blood Pack is bitten by a Reaper, and is quickly mutating into one of them. The others demand he be put out of his misery, so he's shot twice in the chest. However, he's mutated far enough that the silver bullets won't do the trick. Then a guy cuts half his head off, which also fails. Blade finally shoots a hole in the ceiling so sunlight will do the job.
• Coupled with Fridge Brilliance in Cleopatra. One of Cleopatra's ladies-in-waiting serves her a poisoned drink and begs for forgiveness. Cleopatra says "I forgive you" and orders her to drink the poison. It's a Mercy Kill because being poisoned is likely to be a much more quick and effective death compared to what the servant might have gotten as punishment for trying to assassinate the Queen.
• BJ does this to Tucker in the Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake.
• Done in The Dead 2 when Nicholas Burton is unable to save a mother and her daughter from the approaching undead horde.
• Dead Presidents: Anthony gives D'ambrosio an overdose of morphine after he's been disemboweled by the Viet Cong and begging to die.
• In the German Holocaust drama Der letzte Zug, a severely dehydrated Erika Friedlich stops lactating, and suffocates her baby son rather than allow him to slowly starve to death.
• The Deserter: After finding his wife raped and skinned alive by the Indians, Kaleb puts a bullet in her head.
• In The Descent Sarah finds Beth with an open wound in her throat (caused by an ice-pick) and ends her pain by smashing her head with a rock rather than leaving her to the Crawlers. She is understandably reluctant to kill her friend, but tearfully relents after Beth begs her to do it.
• Invoked in Edge of Tomorrow, where the heroine insists that the hero should kill himself (or let himself be killed by somebody else) if he is K.O., crippled, or otherwise incapacitated. This is because doing otherwise might result in him being given a blood transfusion or just bleeding out, which would rob him of the time-warping power.
• Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore: Albus Dumbledore's sister Ariana was revealed to be an Obscurial (a young witch/wizard with a magical parasite, Obscurus, created from repressed magic). As the Obscurus grows and becomes more powerful and destructive, it causes its host constant pain and illness until it eventually kills them; Ariana is only 1 of 2 Obscurials that managed to live past the age of 10. After hearing how Ariana was accidentally killed in the fight between her two brothers and Grindelwald, Newt tries to comfort Albus by suggesting her death may have been this trope, since she died fast and painlessly rather than a gradual, horrific, painful death at the hands of the parasite. Dumbledore doesn't feel anymore at ease.
• Fatherland: Pili is taught that people with disabilities should be killed on this basis. Xavier gently seeks to dispute this with a story of a disabled man who's revealed to really be an angel. This is the first sign that he's not on board with the Nazis entirely, and would be horrified at the Holocaust.
• Tragically used at the end of David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986). The only thing Brundlefly can do is crawl miserably along the floor and point the end of the heroine's gun at its own head.
• The hero of The Fly II had no choice but to mercy kill a poor dog. Why? The condition of the dog was a result of an experiment that turned the dog inside out, thus deforming it both physically and psychologically.
• In Full Metal Jacket when the sniper girl has been shot and is begging the soldiers to shoot her again. Joker is the one to finish her off, and the Marines around him congratulate his cold-blooded killing, when the look on his face shows it was not a cold-blooded kill at all.
• Parodied in Funny People, when Adam Sandler's character tells Seth Rogen's, who is working for him at the time, that he has an almost certainly fatal disease and asks him to shoot him, for a fee. When Rogen replies that he needs time to think about it, Sandler replies that he was just kidding and that Rogen is sick for even considering it. He DOES still have the deadly disease, though, so that part wasn't a joke.
  • Chevy Chase is offered a similar deal in Fletch, although the man who requests it doesn't really have bone cancer and is trying to use Chevy as an Unwitting Pawn.
• Galaxy Quest: Defied Trope, and a huge Kick the Dog act as a result: Sarris abducts the previous leader of the Thermians and tortures the information on the Omega 13 out of them, and when the leader is out of info to give:

  Thermian Leader: I have told you all I know. If you have any mercy left in you, let me die.
  Sarris: When I grow weary of the noises you make, you shall die!

• In The Gatling Gun, Lt. Malcolm shoots one of his men through the head after the Apaches turn him into a Man on Fire.
• In the 2002 Korean Film "H", a police officer executes her kneeling partner on the beach in front of their hire up. He had solved a serial killer case and the knowledge he gained tormented him.
• Neil in Heat mercy kills one of his partners in crime after the guy has been tortured and is dying.
• In Hellboy (2004), the undead clockwork assassin Kronen kills Professor Bruttenholm with a single stab to the back of the neck on Rasputin's orders, sparing him the pain of dying from what is implied to be a brain tumor or having to experience the End of the World as We Know It that Rasputin is trying to summon.
• The Hunger Games: In the film, Cato actually screams "Please!" to be mercy killed by Katniss. And his ordeal didn't last 20 hours, unlike the book.
• Nonhuman case in I Am Legend: After Neville's dog Sam is infected with the vampire virus, Neville chokes her to death. Borderline in that it's also self preservation, because Sam is already becoming hostile.
• Island of the Fishmen: Claude slices open Jose's chest upon discovering him in Professor Ernest Marvin's lab.
• The French film I've Loved You So Long is about a woman who was in prison for murdering her son. In the end it is revealed that he had terminal cancer, and he got so sick and in pain that she killed him out of mercy, after spending one last day with him doing everything he loved.
• Jennifer's Body: Jennifer was basically a walking dead person after getting possessed and so Needy killing her, while done out of revenge, pretty much put her out of her misery.
• The director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven has a brief arc involving Sibylla's son, who is discovered to have leprosy just weeks after Sibylla's brother succumbed to the same illness. Having watched her brother decline and die from this illness, Sibylla knows all too well what awaits her son, and so chooses to poison him to give him a quick and painless death. The depiction of the moment makes it very clear that this is by far the hardest and most painful thing she's ever done.
• In Land of the Dead, the protagonist shoots a woman who's being bitten in the neck by a zombie right between the eyes to spare her either being eaten alive or reanimating as a zombie.
• The Last of the Mohicans: Hawkeye gives one to Heyward towards the end.
• Left for Dead: On their way into Amnesty, the gang finds a Bounty Hunter who has been gut shot by Mobius and buried up to his neck in the graveyard. Clem puts a bullet in his brain.
• The Light at the Edge of the World: A shipwreck survivor is captured by pirates who took over the island of the eponymous lighthouse, tied to a sail and flayed alive with harpoons. Will Denton, the lighthouse keeper and the Spanner in the Works for the pirates, takes a rifle and shoots him dead from afar so he won't suffer anymore.
• Liz in September: Liz asks Dolores to euthanize her before the pain of her cancer is too bad, making her promise. Dolores however can't go through with it, so Eva does instead.
• Lust, Caution: When we first see Mr. Yee, he orders an underling to now finish off a prisoner who he has just finished interrogating, on the grounds that the Japanese didn't specify they wanted him alive. He says "give him a quick one" implying that by killing the man now they are saving him from more torture at the hands of the Japanese, who would eventually kill him themselves.
• March Or Die: After El Krim removes the eyes and tongues of some archeologists, Major Foster shoots them.
• Monsieur Verdoux: It is hinted that the titular anti-hero, a fired banker who marries and murders wealthy widows in order to support his invalid real wife and their toddler son, may have mercy-killed his loved ones after losing everything in a stock market crash.
• The events in Morgan are set up by Morgan coming across a badly injured deer while out in the woods with one of the scientists and breaking its neck.
• Most Likely to Murder (2018): Lowell killed his mother on her request. Her Parkinson's had now progressed to the point where she couldn't walk or feed herself, and she didn't want to be dependent on others.
• Attempted by Ken in Nightmare at Noon. After his wife Cheri is contaminated with a substance that turns her into a mindless killer, Ken goes to the cell where she's being held to shoot her, but Riley pulls him away and talks him out of it.
• The Ninth Gate: After Balkan's Deal with the Devil goes horribly wrong and he catches on fire, Corso shoots him to put him out of his misery.
• The Odd Angry Shot: During the assault on the bridge, the lieutenant kills the burning Viet Cong with a single shot to the head.
• In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Chief Bromden smothers McMurphy with a pillow after the latter is lobotomized.
• In One True Thing, Kate (Meryl Streep) requests this to her daughter Ellen (Renée Zellweger), because she has terminal cancer and is in excruciating pain.
• Pan's Labyrinth: Dr. Ferreiro, who is supposed to heal a captured rebel for another torture session at the hands of the thuggish Captain Vidal, kills him with a morphine overdose instead. This costs Ferreiro his life when Vidal finds out.
• Passion in the Desert: When Augustin's horse collapses from dehydration, he shoots it in the head.
• As the Kraken attacks the Black Pearl in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Mr. Gibbs delivers an offscreen mercy kill at the request of a pirate who was grabbed in one of its tentacles.
• The Predator has two characters who have been mortally wounded; one impaled on a tree, the other with a massive hole blown through him. So they draw their pistols and shoot each other.
• Prometheus: Requested by Holloway, and granted by Vickers. Death by flamethrower doesn't sound merciful, but given what was happening to Holloway, believe us.
• Purgatory: Blackjack's brother is wounded in the initial shootout. Blackjack wants to just leave him to die slowly once he can't stay ahorse, claiming he can't spare the bullets to put him out of his misery. Sonny does it for him.
• An unusual modern film usage features at the climax of Quantum of Solace when Bond prepares to shoot Camille, as they are trapped in a burning building and she is reliving her childhood trauma of being trapped in a burning house. Subverted when he finds a way of escaping their situation.
• Double Subversion in Resident Evil (2002). Rain gets infected by the zombie virus and tries to get the rest of the group to kill her before she turns, but they refuse and try to find a cure. Later on she becomes a zombie anyway and has to be killed.
• Averted in The Return of the Living Dead, when two survivors are cornered in an attic. Knowing these zombies can't be killed by bullets, the male survivor covertly aims his pistol at the back of his teenage companion's head, rather than let her be eaten alive by her own undead boyfriend. Averted because the place gets nuked before he can pull the trigger.
• In Ring 0: Birthday, when Akiko and Etsuko are cornered by Sadako with no chance of escape, Akiko shoots Etsuko through the head before turning the gun on herself.
• Frank from The Rocky Horror Picture Show tries to brush off his murder of Eddie as a mercy killing. The audience may feel free to call him on this.
• The Sand Pebbles: Holman shoots Po-han to spare him being tortured to death.
• At the end of Savaged, Dane finds Zoe, now Half The Woman She Used Tobe but still unable to die, feebly trying to bury herself. To release her tortured soul, he incinerates her remains.
• In Saving Private Ryan, they give The Medic an overdose of his own morphine because he cannot survive his wounds. Inverted earlier in the movie, when an unnamed soldier orders the others not to mercy kill Germans who have been doused in flames.
  Soldier: Don't shoot! Let them burn! ^note This could also be seen as ammo conservation or wanting to keep advancing forward.
  • At one point the Germans use a 20mm automatic cannon that is used normally for shooting down aircraft against infantry. The poor bastards who aren't immediately killed by the man-reaper are left crawling around for a few moments screaming with blown-off limbs and shredded insides before some Germans walk up and finish them off.
• In Saw III, Amanda does this to Adam as shown in a flashback. Adam was left in the bathroom to die at the end of the first movie, and Amanda, unable to detach herself emotionally like Jigsaw does, suffocates Adam with a plastic bag so he dies quickly instead of starvation or disease. It may have been more guilt on Amanda's part. In the flashback where she and Jigsaw are setting up the bathroom trap, it shows she failed to secure the key that would have freed Adam properly (Jigsaw told her to tie it around his ankle — she just placed it in the tub and it wound up going down the drain). If she had done what Jigsaw told her, Adam would have survived.
• In a French 1974 film Les Seines de Glace (Icy Breasts), adapted from Someone Is Bleeding by Richard Matheson, Marc shoots Peggy, an incurable psychotic man-murderer he is in love with, to spare her from the asylum. This is decidedly different from the original novel, where they just elope together... only for her to perform Off with His Head! on him.
• Serenity:
  • Mal shoots a man he had pushed off his hover-jeep who then gets dragged away by Reavers. Later, Zoe acknowledges it: "That was a piece of mercy."
  • In the same film (minutes after the Mercy Kill described above), Jayne gets skewered in the leg by the Reavers, and is hanging off the back of the mule, prompting him to make Mal promise to shoot him if the Reavers take him. Mal quickly takes aim, prompting Jayne to shout, "Don't shoot me first!" before Mal shoots through the rope tying him to the Reaver ship instead.
  • Also attempted (as seen on tape) by a woman on herself as the Reavers are breaking in. She fails. The tape continues to record.
• In Silent Night (2021), Bella stabs Alex after realizing that Alex has vomited up her suicide pill and otherwise faces a painful and drawn out death.
• In TheSettlers the three main characters have murdered a small native tribe, except for one woman. Two of them have raped her, and their leader insists that the third one, name Segundo, has to rape her as well. Segundo strangles her to death while the other two aren't watching.
• In Sister Cities, the sisters' ailing mother Mary, who's suffering from ALS, asks her second-oldest daughter Austin to do this by crushing up pills and putting them in her applesauce and drowning her in the bathtub.
• In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun's mum Barbara gets bitten by a zombie, so Shaun is tasked by David to put her down. After a long argument, Shaun does go through with it, leaving him devastated.
  Shaun: (in tears) Sorry, mum.
  (a long moment of silence ensues after he shoots her)
  David: Well, I think we all agreed you did the right thing there.
• In Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the protagonists come across Shangri-La in the Himalayas, but find out that it has been taken over by Totenkopf, and its inhabitants used as slaves and test subjects in the irradiated mines. They find this out from the last survivor of Totenkopf's experiments, a disfigured old man who asks but one thing for all his answers: "Kill Me." It is unknown if they fulfilled his wish.
• Nathan Fillion is no stranger to the Mercy Kill. In Slither, he doesn't hesitate in delivering a headshot to a friend whom the mutated Rooker-beast has infected.
• In Solace, this is actually the modus operandus of the killer. His victims are all terminally ill people to whom he grants a painless death. This is subverted by John Clancy who points out that most terminally ill victims would prefer to live just a little bit longer. However it turns out he's a hypocrite for saying so because he performed euthanasia himself on his terminally ill daughter, who was in great pain.
• Soylent Green: A lot of people choose euthanasia ("going home") which is completely legal and freely available in special clinics. With the state of the world, it isn't difficult to see why.
• Starship Troopers:
  • In the film, Lieutenant Rasczak shoots one of his men who is badly wounded and captured. He then tells his troops that he expects them to do the same for him if it is ever necessary. It is.
  • In the book when a man who went AWOL during basic training murdered a little girl the rest of the recruits had to go and make sure he was hanged, because he was their man right or wrong. Rico begins to think whether or not they should try to cure him of his insanity, in his mind one would have to be crazy to kill a child for no reason, but then decided that living with the knowledge of what he did would be worse than death. So he kinda views hanging the guy as a mercy killing, or at least mercy for every other little girl he might have come in contact with.
• Star Trek: First Contact:
  • When the Borg start assimilating crew members, it's Picard who takes it upon himself to vaporize, Tommy gun, or otherwise euthanize every affected crew member he can, because he knows what it's like.
    Picard: You may encounter Enterprise crew members who have already been assimilated. Don't hesitate to fire; believe me, you'll be doing them a favor.
  • Of course, when he got turned, they certainly had to save him. Picard believed that the only reason it was possible for him to be rescued at all was because the Borg Collective deliberately left him some degree of autonomy, to act as an interlocutor, while he saw the redshirts as being unsavable.
    Picard: There was no way to save him!
    Lily: You didn't even try!
  • Justified because while Picard was saved, it was a long and tedious process that nearly killed him and the remaining crew have neither the time nor the resources to replicate the procedure (for example the Borg have started draining all the electrical power from every deck except for their stronghold on the Engineering deck).
• In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Bones relives one of his most painful moments, where his father is dying and suffering from an incurable disease. He begs Bones to stop treatment so that he can finally die. Bones does so. And to twist the knife even further...
  Bones: Not long after, they found a cure. A GODDAMN CURE!
• Averted in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, when Obi-Wan leaves Anakin's mangled, triple-amputated, horrifically burnt body on Mustafar. Killing him would've been a mercy at that point, though we know that, logically, that could never happen. The novelization makes his thought process on why he doesn't do it explicit.
  He was not feeling merciful. He was feeling calm, and clear, and he knew that to climb down that black beach might cost him more time than he had. Another Sith Lord approached....In the end, he was still Obi-Wan Kenobi, and he was still a Jedi, and he would not murder a helpless man. He would leave it to the will of the Force.
• Stonehearst Asylum: It turns out this was Lamb's motivation in the "incident" which landed him at the asylum.
• In Street Fighter, Guile's first reaction on seeing his friend Charlie mutated into a beast is to try a mercy kill. Dhalsim is able to talk him out of it.
• The Suckers: Following the final fight, Vandemeer is badly wounded and dying. He asks Baxter for a final favour: from one hunter to another. Baxter says he would do the same for any wounded animal, and puts a bullet in his head.
• Suitable Flesh: During the climax of the film, Beth ends up trapped in Asa's body after the body-stealing entity permanently switches places with her. Which would be bad enough on its own, but Asa's body has been heavily mutilated by Beth's prior attempts to kill the entity, leaving her only able to crawl on the floor in agony. She ends up begging Dani to kill her, and she reluctantly complies, shooting her twice in the head to finish her off.
• Surrounded: Clay catches on fire while fighting Tommy and Mo. She shoots him to end his pain.
• In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) remake Erin comes across a dying Andy in Leatherface's "workshop" she puts him out of his misery by stabbing him with a knife.
• According to the director, Harry Lime's death in The Third Man is one of these.
• The Thirsty Dead: While suffering Rapid Aging after crossing the 'Circle of Age', Baru asks one of the pursuing guards who have caught up with him to kill him. The guard obliges by stabbing him with a spear.
• Thor: The Dark World: Loki uses this to snark at Odin during an unpleasant conversation with him at his trial.
  Loki: If I'm in for the axe, then for mercy's sake, just swing it. It's not that I don't love our little talks, it's just...I don't love them.
• In Tiger House, Shane describes to Kelly how he smothered Callum's father with a Vorpal Pillow when the other man was dying of cancer.
• Discussed in Tora! Tora! Tora! when Admiral Kimmel, watching the attack on Pearl Harbor, gets hit with a spent and harmless shell casing: "It would've been merciful had it killed me."
• Happens in the horror film Train. Alex and Willy find their friends Sheldon and Todd locked in a torture car, both horribly mutilated. Sheldon can still walk, but Todd is barely alive, missing his eyes and unable to move. He begs his girlfriend Alex to finish him. When she tearfully refuses, Sheldon does it, cutting him with an axe.
• Subversion in Transcendence. Martin, the first victim saved and hybridized by the nanomachines, is captured by RIFT so they can gain access to Will's code and engineer a virus to shut him down. In the process, they have to shoot him several times and isolate him in a Faraday cage so Will can't network with him. His wounds are severe enough that he dies on the table, since without the network connection the nanites can't heal him. They later rationalize this to Evelyn as giving him back his humanity, even though the whole time he was begging them to let him go so he could survive.
• In Universal Soldier: The Return, Luc is horrified to learn that his partner Maggie has been killed trying to protect his daughter Hilary and has been revived as a Uni Sol to serve S.E.T.H.. Though Luc manages to free Maggie by destroying S.E.T.H., Maggie states that she finds the idea to be living as a killing machine to be unbearable, so she tells Luc to leave with Hilary and destroy the Uni Sol building with herself and the other Uni Sols inside. Understanding what Maggie has been through and that the other Uni Sols are marching out to war, Luc reluctantly honors her wishes after bidding her farewell.
• The Western Ulzana's Raid has a brutal example. Hostile Apaches menace a white woman and her child on a stagecoach. A cavalry officer arrives and, fearing the woman's about to be raped, shoots her in the head. Then, when the Indians turn on him, shoots himself for good measure.
• Violet & Daisy: The Guy thinks of his own murder as this, given that he's dying of cancer. It's also discussed by Violet and Daisy, with them coming to his view. Daisy shoots him in the end.
• The Voices: After mortally injuring a deer, Fiona and Lisa, Jerry kills them all out of mercy. He also did this to his mother in the past, at her request
• In Warcraft (2016), Llane orders Garona to kill him so that he might avoid getting his soul sucked out by Gul'dan, and so that she may gain respect among the orcs, which would give her a chance to forge peace between them and humans.
• Wheels Of Fire: After Scourge's men tie Bo to a jeep and drag him through the desert, he's still alive. Trace puts him out of his misery by shooting him.
• In The Whisperer in Darkness, Professor Wilmarth encounters the disembodied brain of Henry Akeley, who asks him to do this. In a subversion, Wilmarth cannot bring himself to carry out the request.
• Done multiple times in The Wild Geese — the mercenaries don't have the time or resources to carry their incapacitated comrades, lest the Simbas arrive and overrun the whole company; given the Simbas' notorious reputation for brutality and butchery, a shot to the head is kinder than being captured.
• Logan, to an injured and poisoned grizzly bear in The Wolverine.
• The Woman Hunt: After Madga is Impaled with Extreme Prejudice on Tony's Booby Trap, Spyros kneels over her and puts a bullet in her head.
• You Dont Know Jack follows the career of assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian, otherwise called "Dr. Death", who helped dozens of people with incurable diseases painlessly kill themselves, and eventually euthanized a disabled man at his request, leading him to be incarcerated (after winning numerous acquittals before).
• Z for Zachariah: John shot a teenager who begged him to, and he thinks this may have been Ann's brother.
• Zombieland: Double Tap has Columbus being tasked by Wichita and Tallahassee to kill Madison after the latter apparently got bit by a zombie. He fires twice, supposedly killing her. Subverted when Madison is later revealed to alive, as it's revealed that A) Columbus only shot near a tree to scare her away since he didn't have the heart to go through with killing her, and B) Madison only suffered an accidental Self-Induced Allergic Reaction to almonds in her trail mix.

---