Roaring Rampage Of Revenge / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

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• There are at least two film subgenres dedicated completely to this trope: exploitation revenge, and Rape and Revenge.
  • One of the classic examples of the former is Rolling Thunder, in which William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones play soldiers returning from Vietnam who hunt down the killers of Devane's character's family.
  • The most notorious example of the latter is I Spit on Your Grave, in which Camille Keaton's character exacts violent revenge on several men who brutally gang-raped her.
• 2020 Texas Gladiators: A group of post-apocalyptic vigilantes topple the authoritarian settlement that killed a former member for protesting against them.
• 22 Bullets: A former mobster goes after his old gang after they try to assassinate him.
• 24 Hours to Live: A hitman goes after his employers when they resurrect him and decide to kill him again.
• Both Major Henry West and Jim from 28 Days Later have some degree of this. After he and his two female companions get brutalized by a squad of soldiers, normal joe Jim gets dangerous and goes on a cathartic rampage, gouging out one soldier's eyes with his thumbs. Major West, seeing what's become of his "boys," loses what precious little sanity he had left.
• In 300, when the Captain's son gets beheaded by a charging Persian cavalryman, he cuts a swath through the Persian assault to reach his son's corpse. The other Spartans drag him back behind their lines before he can get himself killed. It's something of a literal example, since his cries are said to terrify the Persian horde.
• American Justice: Jack Justice is framed for murder by a bunch of dirty cops, so he proceeds to kill them all over the course of the film.
• And God Said to Cain...: A recently-released prisoner goes after the former friend who framed him.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger goes on a few:
  • John Matrix in Commando (1985) goes on one of these when his daughter is kidnapped. "Remember when I said I'll kill you last? I lied."
  • Raw Deal (1986), on behalf of his friend.
  • Collateral Damage.
  • True Lies after his daughter is kidnapped. Bonus points for him stealing a fighter jet to pull it off.
  • Conan the Barbarian (1982). "Crom, I have never prayed to you before; I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought or why we died. No, all that matters is that two stood against many. That's what important. Valor pleases you, Crom, so grant me one request: grant me REVENGE. And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you!"
• Assault on Wall Street: After their dealing ruin his life, Jim shoots a bunch of Wall Street brokers, culminating in massacring an office.
• The Assignment (2016): After learning what was done to him, Frank goes after the criminal employees of gangster "Honest John" who helped Dr. Jane to do this, killing them off before he gets John himself, then both Jane and her mooks after this. Jane survives, but is left stuck in a mental institution.
• Baahubali: A deposed prince goes after the tyrant who overthrew his parents.
• In Bad Day For The Cut, a mild-mannered farmer and his mother live quietly on their farm in Ireland, until one night she's brutally murdered and assassins try to take his life, only for him to turn the tables on them, killing one and keeping the other alive for information. The rest of the film is him embarking on a bloody mission to find out why they would kill a gentle old woman, and to take revenge on her murderers and anyone who stands in his way.
• Bad Reputation: A high school girl is gang raped, and butchers the rapists after the authorities don't believe her.
• Billy Jack series:
  • The Born Loser: Billy goes on one when Vicky is kidnapped by the bikers a 2nd time.
  • Billy Jack: When Billy finds out that Bernard raped Jean and murdered Martin, he goes after him in revenge.
• Black Angel Vol. 1: kko, the six year old daughter of a yakuza gang boss witnesses the brutal slaying of her parents and is only saved from sharing their fate by an underground hitwoman who goes by the nom-de-guerre of "Black Angel." Years after escaping to America, Ikko returns to Tokyo as a young woman. She adopts the name "Black Angel" and is out for revenge.
• The Black Six: A motorcycle gang full of veterans destroy the bikers who killed their leader's brother in a racist hate crime.
• Blastfighter: A cop guns down the criminal who killed his wife and is arrested. Eight years later, he's released, only for a group of poachers to harass him because he disapproves of their actions and rape and murder his daughter. Immediately afterwards, he kills all of them but their leader, who has been his Friendly Enemy for years and had nothing to do with his daughter's death.
• In The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, the MacManus brothers have been living peacefully in Ireland for several years, until words reaches them that their old priest in Boston has been murdered by a gangster trying to goad them out of hiding. Their response? "Every last motherfucker who had anything to do with it is going to die."
• In The Bravados, Crusading Widow Jim Douglass has spent six months hunting the outlaws he believes raped and murdered his wife. When he catches up with them, they are already in jail awaiting execution. When they escape, he chases them all the way to Mexico in order to kill them.
• Such a rampage forms the basis of François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968), in which the eponymous bride systematically murders every one of the men who caused the death of the groom on her wedding day. Sound familiar?
• Gregoire de Fronsac, protagonist of Brotherhood of the Wolf, goes on one of these when Mani is killed by gypsies. Fronsac proceeds to enter the gypsies' stronghold and kill all of them in an Unstoppable Rage — without saying a word. At one point, he kicks someone through a wooden wall.
• After Craddock is murdered in The Car: Road to Revenge, his soul comes back inhabiting his car to take revenge on those who killed him. He is, however, none to careful when it comes to collateral damage.
• The famous prom scene from Carrie (1976) (and its 2002 and 2013 remakes), described in more detail under Literature.
  • Likewise with the party scene in The Rage: Carrie 2. Rachel Lang finds out that her boyfriend Jesse only slept with her as part of a sex game where he and his football teammates competed to see who could sleep with the most and hottest girls. Rachel's friend Lisa had also been part of this game, and killed herself when she found out. Mark and Chuck rub it in her face in front of dozens of classmates at the Wild Teen Party they're at, complete with them showing a sex tape her and Jesse on the big-screen TV. Rachel, who is Carrie's half-sister and shares some of her Psychic Powers, proceeds to murder them all.
• Ralphie in a A Christmas Story goes on one on the neighborhood bully Scut Farkus after having enough of his treatment of him. He beats him up while crying and unleashing a stream of profanities.
• In the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when Peter sees the White Witch stab his brother, he immediately slashes his way through the enemy to get to her.
• Clint Eastwood westerns often revolve around this trope
  • In Hang 'Em High, Eastwood's character only wants to bring the men who almost killed him to justice,^note Though that may well kill them but most of them fight back, turning his quest into a bloodbath.
  • Pale Rider
  • High Plains Drifter implies that Eastwood's character is a dead man's ghost returned for revenge on the town that betrayed him.
  • In Unforgiven, Eastwood's character reverts to his murderous ways to avenge a friend's death.
  • The Outlaw Josey Wales joined the Rebel Bushwhackers of the American Civil War to avenge the murder of his family by pro-Union Jayhawkers. It's what the damned Yanks do after his band tries to surrender that really sets off Josey's RRR.
• Cold Pursuit: After his son's death, Nels Coxman is ready to commit suicide. However, when he learns that Kyle was murdered, he changes his mind and begins a roaring rampage of revenge: working his way up the chain towards the drug lord Viking, whom he holds ultimately responsible.
• Colonel Kill Motherfuckers: A soldier who was just discharged for homicidal mania is killed in self-defense and comes back as a zombie to finish the job.
• In Confessions (2010), Moriguchi Yuko decides to get revenge for death of her daughter that occurred due to two students.
• Crazed: A cop with special forces training moonlights as a vigilante to take down the Human Traffickers who killed his daughter and regularly torture his wife.
• Creature with the Atom Brain: A gangster uses zombies to annihilate the people responsible for his deportation.
• The Crow franchise is built around spirits of the dead who cannot rest in the afterlife until they return as an unstoppable revenant and kill those responsible for their and loved ones' deaths. The original creator of the comic series, James O'Barr, conceived of the idea out of his own desires to get revenge on the drunk driver responsible for the death of his fiancée. He later regretted making revenge so appealing.
• In Cry Blood, Apache, Vittorio returns from a hunting trip to find his entire tribe has been slaughtered. He buries his family and then sets out to hunt down and kill the men responsible.
• Daimajin: A god is summoned to slaughter the usurpers of a daimyo's throne.
• The final act of The Dark Knight has Harvey Dent embarking on one of these after Rachel is killed by the Joker and Harvey himself ends up with half a face. He kills everyone who had anything to do with Rachel's death before ultimately trying to punish Gordon by killing his son.
• The Darkman films are based on this trope, with the titular character returning to take revenge on the mobsters that very nearly killed him.
• Dead Heat: After a cop is killed by a zombie and resurrected, he and his partner bust up the organization that killed him.
• In Dead in Tombstone, Guerrero comes back from Hell to extract revenge on the six gang members who betrayed and murdered him. And he has 24 hours in which to do it.
• A major plot point of Deadpool (2016) involves the titular character going on a roaring rampage of revenge because the villain tortured him, disfigured him, and then wanted to sell him off as a mutant slave. Then it escalates to include because the villain kidnapped his ex, but it's still mostly about his disfigurement.
• Death Rides a Horse: A young man who had has family murdered and an older man who was framed for robbery by the same gang team up to take down their mutual enemies.
• The premise behind Death Wish, in which a regular Joe played by Charles Bronson goes on a vigilante killing spree after his wife is murdered and his daughter raped by three punks.
  • The first sequel, Death Wish II, fits more into this trope than the others, with Kersey hunting down and killing five gang-punks who rape and kill both his housekeeper and his daughter.
  • Death Wish 3 sees the vigilante unleashed again when Kersey's old war buddy is shot by more gang punks, and intensifies when he fails to save two more women.
  • Death Wish 4: The Crackdown has Kersey going after two drug gangs after his girlfriend's daughter dies of an overdose.
  • Death Wish V: The Face of Death has Kersey trying to settle down with another girlfriend until the bad guys she's trying to testify against disfigure her and later shoot her in the back.
• In Deewaar, Vijay goes on one of these when he finds that Samant has tortured Anita to death. He starts by kicking in the door to Samant's office and shooting his lackeys before they have time to react, and ends it with throwing Samant out of a high-rise window.
• The Deserter: After his wife is raped and killed by the Apache, Kaleb shoots his commanding officer, deserts the US Army, and starts a one man war against the Apache.
• Eddie Lomax has a bloody one in Desert Heat that begins because a gang shot him, stole his motorcycle, and left him for dead. It's taken up to eleven when they kill his best friend Johnny Sixtoes and Lomax ultimately decimates two rivaling gangs, saving a local town in the process.
• The Mariachi from Desperado takes on an entire town full of bad guys, including no fewer than two Bad Guy Bars, in order to get to Bucho, his own brother and apparent boss of the murderer of the woman he loved.
• Wikus during his Last Stand in District 9. He goes berserk with a prawn mech and fights back the MNU mercenaries, slaughtering the majority of them. The colonel gets away and is very close to killing Wikus... only to be butchered and devoured alive by vengeful prawns.
• In Django Unchained, the titular character, having seen his friend killed in front of him, a man torn apart by dogs in front of him, and his wife brutally mistreated in front of him goes on a classic one of these. Complete with tricking his way out of slave chains, breaking into the slavers' stronghold and killing the trackers who set their dogs on the guy who got ripped apart (including a fantastic Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: D'ARTAGNAN MOTHERFUCKERS), delivering a "Reason You Suck" Speech to the selfish house slave who foiled their plans, and rounding it off by very much watching the slave plantation explode at his hand.
• John Preston goes on a calmer version of this trope in the final scenes of Equilibrium after the woman he loves is executed by the Librian government and he is suckered into leading the resistance into a trap.
• In Even Lambs Have Teeth, Katie and Sloan escape from their abductors, and then return to extract bloody vengeance on everyone involved.
• Faust: Love of the Damned: John Jaspers makes a Deal with the Devil for demonic superpowers so he can track down and kill the criminals who raped and murdered his girlfriend.
• Ken in A Fish Called Wanda gets his revenge on Otto (after Otto beat him up and ate his pet fish) by running him over with a steamroller. While repeatedly yelling "Revenge!"
• The Bruce Lee movie, Fist of Fury (aka The Chinese Connection) deconstructs revenge. Lee's character Chen Zhen returns home to Shanghai in the early 20th Century only to discover his martial arts teacher Huo Yuanjia has mysteriously died. He discovers a conspiracy involving the local Japanese power structure and a rival karate dojo. Chen gets mad, and goes out for revenge, but his rampage only escalates the violence, and then his whole family falls victim to it. Even though he kills the main villain, he's lost everything and ends up getting killed by the police.
• In The Fury Of Hercules Hercules (Brad Harris) curb-stomps a band of evil brothers for murdering the Queen, who had been manipulated by an evil counselor, after she tried to save Herc from a poison pit. You know the bad guys are in trouble when Herc bellows "Zeus! Put all your strength in my arm!"
• Galaxy Quest: After Quellek gets shot, Dane states his previously-despised Catchphrase with utter sincerity, then goes after the perpetrator in a berserk rage. When we see him again, he's still fighting his way through the mooks — and, from the look of things, winning.
• In 1978 version of Game of Death: After an unsuccessful murder attempt against him, Billy Lo returns to plan his revenge against the syndicate. He kills every single member of it.
• Gang of Roses: After his sister is killed by Little Suzie, Rachel renounces her pacifist ways and straps on her guns again to seek revenge.
• In Get Carter, Michael Caine plays a vicious, sociopathic London gangster who investigates the suspicious death of his brother and turns his hometown into a bloodbath as he uncovers the truth.
  • Sylvester Stallone plays another version of the character in the remake.
• The Godfather: Sonny Corleone is killed by a rival gang, in a There Is No Kill Like Overkill ambush that's clearly meant to send a message. Unfortunately for said rivals, Michael basically responds with: "You want a war?! You got it!" and proceeds to take out his enemies without mercy.
• God's Gun: A gunfighter returns to his hometown to slaughter the outlaws that killed his preacher brother.
• In Godzilla (2014), upon witnessing her babies erupt into flames and deducing that a nearby Ford Brody did it, the female Muto gets pissed off, to say the least. She even starts directly attacking soldiers instead of doing so accidentally, and once she sees the killer of her babies again, she is clearly filled with rage.
  • Then in the 2019 sequel Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). Godzilla was filled with rage in his Burning Godzilla form against King Ghidorah upon the death of his friend Mothra after King Ghidorah hit her at full force all of his gravity beams at point blank range. What does he do after that? Oh ho boy, this is gruesome yet cathartic. He incinerates King Ghidorah with three nuclear pulses the first of which melts King Ghidorah's wings, another melts his 2 side heads, and the last destroys the rest of King Ghidorah's body to nothingness. Then came daybreak, Godzilla gobbles up Ghidorah's last head and atomizes it into absolute ash with his standard atomic breath in order to ensure it is dead completely.
• Most of the plot to Goemon revolves around this, when the titular character plots to assassinate Hideyoshi. It becomes a very literal rampage of revenge when Hideyoshi boils his childhood friend Saizou, and his son, ALIVE, and he becomes the most epic One-Man Army in recent movie history. He then tops himself shortly after by fighting two armies by himself, taking out one with relative ease, and only stopping on the second after his former master slowed him down, as well as his decision to withdraw his killing blow on the general when he got his chance.
• After a career featuring many such movies, Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. When a gang of thugs harass Walt's (Eastwood) friend Thao and rape his sister Sue, the audience (and Thao) are expecting some Old Testament retribution. Instead, Walt (a Shell-Shocked Veteran who understands the trauma of taking a life) tricks the thugs into murdering him, thus getting them all sent to prison.
• Hannibal Rising: The young Lecter is on a quest to bring terrible deaths to all of the men who had killed his beloved baby sister Mischa.
• In Harry Brown, Michael Caine's eponymous Harry and his best bud Lenny spend their time sitting in the pub, lamenting the fact that their neighborhood has gotten so bad, especially given that Harry's wife has just died. After Lenny goes to confront the street gangs with a bayonet and winds up killed, Harry decides to take matters into his own hands with some not-quite-forgotten Royal Marine skills.
• Hazmat: When Jacob discovers his friends have set him up to be pranked on a Reality Show, he snaps, dons the mask of the scare actor's mask, and goes on a killing spree.
• Hold the Dark subverts the trope. It seems like Vernon Slone is on a rampage of revenge to find his murderous wife, even going as far as killing the police looking for her so that he can kill her himself, but once he finds her he strangles her for a few moments, and then they have sex and run off into the wilderness together. It's implied that they're under some sort of shared psychosis about their part in the darkness of the world.
• Near the end of Mexican drug-dealer film El Infierno (Hell), our protagonist, Benny, goes into one, attacking his former associates. To elaborate, Benny learned that his brother, El Diablo, had not died in a shootout against rival drug dealers, but had been castrated and tortured to death by his boss, Don José Reyes, because he had slept with his wife. He also learned that one of his friends, El Huasteco, was planning on giving away to Don José that Benny's nephew was El Diablito, a member of a rival gang. Terrified, Benny gave his nephew money so he could take a bus to the frontier and escape to the United States, and went to confess his crimes to the local policemen. Unfortunately, they were Dirty Cops working for Don José, so they beat him up, and after Benny tries to trick them into letting him go by bribing them with drugs and money he had stashed inside his brother's grave, they shoot him and leave him for dead. He didn't die, so Benny returned to his home to find that they had murdered his girlfriend. Benny then goes to his mother's house, and spends some time in an Angst Coma before picking up his AK and driving to Town Square, where Don José is being made the mayor, with various of his men as bodyguards. Benny walks up to the front row, and shoots dead Don José, his wife, the former mayor, and José's men, before finally succumbing to Death by Despair, with his only consolation being that his nephew escaped from the hellhole that is being a Narco. Except that the film ends with a shot of Benny's nephew shooting some drug dealer with an AK, having become a Narco himself
• Louis in Interview with the Vampire goes on a doozy of one after Claudia is executed by sunlight by Armand's vampires. He (complete with a dead-eyed stare) pours a flammable liquid (likely kerosene, given the era) around them and onto the coffins while they sleep, then throws a lit candelabra stand down, lighting the Théâtre des Vampires up with flames. He then murders anyone who emerges alive with a scythe, starting by decapitating the first one when she screams for help and ending by bisecting Santiago before he escapes.
• After Master Liu is killed in Ip Man, the titular pugilist goes on a short-lived one of these. He calls for ten judoka to fight and Curb Stomps the lot. Even the last one, who's clearly unwilling to fight on, goes down hard. After Ip Man's done, you can see him trembling slightly as he comes out of Tranquil Fury. You get the feeling that if he thought he had a chance he would have gone after the murderer himself. The Japanese fighters' apparent Mook Chivalry may be justifiable if you believe that martial artists can sense intent, as Ip Man's state of mind would have given him enough violent intent to make his opponents hesitant about bumrushing him.
• The 2010 Korean film I Saw the Devil is in some ways a deconstruction of the protagonists of these sort of films and their Pay Evil unto Evil revenge plots. The Hero is a cop whose fiancé is murdered by a sadistic serial killer. After discovering the identity of the killer, after brutally torturing three possible suspects who are ultimately innocent of the crime, he decides to make the killer's life a living hell following him around beating him up, letting him go and then beating him up again later hoping to make the man suffer just as much as he has. This is all well and good except that along the way several innocent people are harmed because of the hero's refusal to just kill the villain and the killer ultimately snaps and proceeds to torture or kill the hero's loved ones. This in turn leads to the hero making sure the killer dies in front of his innocent parents and son which ultimately brings the hero absolutely no solace and arguably makes him as much of a monster as the villain.
• James Bond:
  • Almost the entire plot of Quantum of Solace, since it focuses on Bond's desire to bring Vesper's killers to justice. However, he does NOT kill the one who is the most responsible, demonstrating either that his objective was truly the movie title and not revenge, or simply that he handed down a Fate Worse than Death.
  • Licence to Kill features Bond throwing out the rule book (of MI6 and the franchise) to seek revenge on the drug lord who brutalized his good friend, destroying his entire operation in the process.
  • Skyfall: Raoul Silva was tortured for five months to the point of breaking his Cyanide Pill, only to have it fail and disfigure him. He sets out to humiliate and kill M for abandoning him, and it actually works.
  • The opening sequence of Diamonds Are Forever has Bond hunting down Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who killed Bond's wife Tracy at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
  • Die Another Day concerns Bond's hunt for the traitor responsible for his imprisonment in North Korea.
  • Melina goes on one to avenge the murder of her parents in For Your Eyes Only. She succeeds in killing the assassin, but decides to spare the man who ordered the hit so that he can be properly brought to justice, only for someone else to kill him moments later.
  • No Time to Die: The Big Bad Safin's parents were murdered on Blofeld's orders, leaving him permanently disfigured. Years later, he hires Russian scientist Valdo Obruchev to program his DNA-targeting bio-weapon to target every member of SPECTRE, completely wiping out the organization. Even Blofeld himself, imprisoned by this point, is killed off when Bond inadvertently exposes him to Heracles.
• Jennifer's Body: After discovering that she has gained some of the demon's powers, Needy uses them to escape the prison psych ward, so she can track down and murder all of Low Shoulder.
• Life has not been good to ex-hitman John Wick. His beloved wife Helen has died of a terminal illness, but he can't just shoot cancer to take the edge off. However, Helen has left him an adorable puppy in her absence and he's still got his cool car, so it could be worse. Unfortunately, the asshole son of a Russian mob boss jacks the car, beats the shit out of him, and kills the dog out of spite, so John finally snaps and ends up waging a one-man war against an influential crime syndicate just to put that spoiled brat in the ground.
  • The sequel has John finally ready to pack it in (for good, this time). He's adopted a new dog, got his car back (more or less), and the primary targets of his recent tribulations are out of the picture... Until an old acquaintance shows up to cash in a debt John owes him, after hearing about his recent escapades. Hoping for One Last Job, John kills his target, but due to pettiness of his client and the Continental Hotel's policies regarding his target's position, John ends up hunted by every assassin in New York, leaving him to cut another bloody path of revenge against his betrayer.
• Josie: The title character is hunting and murdering everyone who was involved in the execution of her father for a crime he didn't do.
• Kate sees the protagonist lethally poisoned, kicking off her quest to murder the parties responsible in the time she has left.
• Keoma: The climax of the film has Keoma going on one against his brothers, who have spent their entire lives tormenting him for being racist and eventually crucify him.
• Big Daddy in Kick-Ass has turned his entire life (and that of his daughter) into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. This is quite different in the graphic novel.
  • After Big Daddy is himself killed, Hit-Girl and Kick-Ass embark on their own Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Kill Bill:
  • The main protagonist goes on a rampage upon seeing anybody who betrayed her at her wedding rehearsal.
  • Surprisingly, Kill Bill is not the Trope Namer. Tarantino used the phrase in a Shout-Out to the 1972 film Bury Me An Angel, which has the tagline "A howling hellcat humping a hot steel hog on a roaring rampage of revenge!" Whether the film actually lives up to this tagline is another matter (one review suggests it doesn't).
  • Kill Bill was inspired by the film and manga series Lady Snowblood, which is about Oyuki, a female assassin on her own Roaring Rampage Of Revenge for the murder of her mother's family and the rape of her mother. The mother gives birth to Oyuki in prison after killing the first of her four tormentors and being caught by the police. Before dying, she charges her daughter with taking vengeance on the other three.
    • The character of O-Ren Ishii, as an Expy of Lady Snowblood, has also gone on one of these to avenge her parents, who were murdered by Yakuza... at age eleven. This led to her recruitment under Bill.
  • Another inspiration for Kill Bill was the Joshuu Sasori (Female Prisoner Scorpion) series, which features an ordinary woman imprisoned after botching her attempt at revenge. What keeps her going is her desire to wreak vengeance on her rapists and on the detective she loved, who set the rape up purely in order to catch her rapists. Most of the film deals with the run-up to her roaring rampage, but she doesn't mess about once she starts.
• An absolutely epic one in The Last House on the Left. After discovering that their daughter has been raped and tortured, and her friend murdered, John and Emma Collingwood don't hesitate to go after their attackers. No matter what your stance is on capital punishment, you will cheer at the Collingwoods' brutal slaying of Krug, Weasel, and Sadie. That goes double for Krug's death in the remake, a moment so awesome, they decided that they couldn't top it and ended the movie there. And to top it all off, the father is a surgeon and uses his medical knowledge to both save his daughter and physically destroy the rapists/murderers.
  One of the villains: You wanna hear what I did to your daughter?
  John: I wanna hear you beg for your life.
• Chingachgook goes on one of these in The Last of the Mohicans after Uncas is killed by Magua. He and Hawkeye plow through Magua's mooks, and Magua himself doesn't stand a chance against Papa Wolf.
• In Law Abiding Citizen, Clyde Shelton's "people to be killed horribly" list includes the two guys who killed his wife and daughter. And their lawyer. And the judge from the trial. And the D.A. And most of the people in the D.A.'s office. And the Mayor, City Council, and police brass of Philadelphia.
• The Limey is an homage to this trope and Get Carter in particular, as an English ex-con seeks the truth behind his daughter's death in L.A., only to discover he and the culprit are Not So Different, leading him to stay his hand.
• Honorary mention goes to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, where Ents begin their rampage with a BIG ROAR. And they go about it methodically: they destroy the walls, stomp the orcs, and finally flood the whole thing while the walking trees finish off the orcs on their way back from Helm's Deep.
• The Losers (1970): A biker gang hired to rescue a prisoner of war decide to make it a revenge mission after one of their own is killed.
• Lovely But Deadly: A cheerleader who knows martial arts busts up her brother's drug dealers after he overdoses.
• Mandy (2018): The entire last third of the film concerns Red hunting down and brutally killing the demonic biker gang and cultists who burned his wife to death.
• In Man of Steel, Zod goes on one after his plan to Terraform Earth is foiled and his crew are banished to the Phantom Zone. Zod vows to personally kill every last human being on Earth just to spite Superman. Being a Flying Brick, he has the power to do it to. Clark is forced to kill him to stop him carrying it out.
• Man on Fire has Denzel Washington's character systematically torturing and murdering everyone who is even tangentially related to the kidnapping of his young ward. Amazingly, this is a toned down version of the book.
• The Man Who Came Back: After escaping prison, Reese Paxton returns to Thibodaux determined to kill everyone who was involved in the lynching, his Kangaroo Court, and the death of his family. He proceeds to cut a swathe through corrupt townsfolk in the space of a few days.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Iron Man Tony goes on one against the Ten Rings using the Mark III suit after learning they're being supplied weapons under the table by his own company. The fact that they kidnapped and tortured him (along with killing Yinsen) probably made the whole process pretty cathartic for him.
  • Ivan Vanko's reason for being, in Iron Man 2.
  • Loki in The Avengers (2012), driven by jealousy of his brother Thor, decides to subjugate the entire population of Earth. In doing so, he establishes himself as the Big Bad and pisses off a lot of heroes.
  • In Captain America: Civil War, the Winter Soldier ends up the target of two: T'Challa spends the majority of the film trying to kill Bucky due to mistakenly believing he killed his father. At the climax of the third arc, Tony targets him for actually murdering his parents.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: After Taserface stages a mutiny against Yondu and kills all the Ravagers still loyal to him, he makes the mistake of leaving Yondu himself alive. Yondu eventually breaks out of the brig with help from Rocket and Groot, and proceeds to kill all the mutineers.
  • Thor's role in Avengers: Infinity War can be summed up as this after Thanos kills at least half the Asgardian refugees on his ship, including his little brother Loki, swearing to claim Thanos's life for what he did. Sure enough, he comes very close to keeping his word; had he aimed just a little higher...
    Thor: BRING ME THANOS!
  • Avengers: Endgame:
    • Clint Barton/Hawkeye went on one as a vigilante against the entire criminal underworld during the five year Time Skip, enraged that lots of criminal scum were spared by Thanos, but his family wasn’t.
    • 2014 Thanos is making a break for the Infinity Gauntlet... only for an extremely pissed off Scarlet Witch to intercept him, his 2018 counterpart's murder of her lover Vision fresh in her mind, complete with glowing red eyes. Cue one of the few times that Thanos is completely outmatched, as she delivers a telekinetic No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, culminating in her breaking his sword, levitating him in the air, and slowly crushing him in his armor like a tin can. It's so vicious that he has to call down an orbital bombardment that decimates his own forces just to survive.
• Max Payne has the titular character trying to avenge the death of his family at the hands of drug addicted felons. However, he doesn't go on an actual rampage until the last half hour, when he finds out the true identity of his family's killers.
• Mel Gibson loves this trope. (Or at least loves making money off of it. Probably both.)
  • Mad Max, Gibson's very first starring role, is based on a disenchanted cop who wants to retire with his family until they are slaughtered by a biker gang. He comes back to kill every one of them.
  • Payback is about a dirty rotten scoundrel who goes on a rampage after being cheated out of his share of a heist. The amount? $70,000. One of his future victims upon finding out: "Hell, my suits are worth more than that!"
  • Braveheart, inspired by the (possibly mythical) rampage of revenge of William Wallace. Legend has it that his wife Marron was killed by the English. (In Real Life, reliable historical records of Wallace are few, and it's not known whether he ever married, much less what his hypothetical wife's name was or how she might have died.)
  • The Patriot (2000) features Gibson's character as well as his eldest son inspired to slaughter every British soldier in sight for the death of a family member. As if that wasn't enough inspiration, Gibson's rampage is kicked into overdrive when his eldest son is also killed by Tavington, the same damn British soldier.
  • Lethal Weapon 2. Riggs slaughters a bunch of dirty South African drug runners for drowning his love interest. The Dragon also reveals that he killed Riggs' wife years earlier, though he meant to kill Riggs.
• Initially Oak's plan in Mohawk is to escape and meet up with her family. However, after Holt and his men kill both Calvin and Joshua, it becomes personal and she will not rest until she has slain all the Americans.
• Ms. 45 has a mute woman going on one of these rampages after being brutally raped twice. Thana ultimately loses herself, starting to target innocent men, and is ultimately killed.
• The title character of Murphy's War (1971) is the Sole Survivor after a U-Boat sinks his ship and machine-guns the lifeboats. He becomes obsessed with trying to destroy the U-boat which is resting up in a nearby river, first teaching himself to fly a floatplane and trying to bomb it with improvised firebombs, then trying to ram it with a floating crane even though Germany has already surrendered. Murphy is eventually able to destroy the vessel, but gets trapped and dies himself in the process.
• Navajo Joe. When a group of lowlife renegade cowboys kill and scalp his whole tribe, including his wife, let's just say it doesn't turn out very good for 'em. (And it leads to Awesome Music in Kill Bill Vol 2!)
• Night of the Templar: A knight returns from the grave to kill the reincarnated souls of his murderers.
• In Now You See Me,all of the tricks are ways to get back at those that had destroyed Dylan Rhodes' father.
• Oblivion (1994): A sheriff's son returns to his hometown after his father is killed by a gang of outlaws.
• One Man's Justice: A US Army drill instructor takes down the corrupt cops and arms dealers who killed his wife and daughter and put him in a coma.
• The titular killer whale in Orca: The Killer Whale lives up to the killer part after whalers kill his mate and calf. Fear the Papa Wolf whale rage!
• The Moorwen in Outlander wants to kill every Human Alien in the universe for the genocide of its species.
• Much of Peppermint is about Riley North working her way through the local Cartel branch to kill all responsible for her family's death.
• Pistolera: After their parents are murdered by Raffaello's goons, cousins Angel and Rico return as adults to cut a swathe through Raffaello's operations to reach the main man himself.
• Point Blank (1967), based on a novel by Richard Stark, directed by John Boorman, and starring Lee Marvin. The film was the original inspiration for Payback. In fact, Gibson even uses a large-frame Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver like the one Marvin used in the 1967 version. Of course, in that one, the amount of money Walker (Marvin) wanted was a lot smaller (inflation, you know).
• In Posse, Jesse Lee carves a bloody path across the west, hunting down the men who killed his father.
• Subverted in The Professional. Mathilda Lando has trained with the hitman Leon Montana. By chance, she learns of where the people she wants her revenge on work. She arms herself, sneaks in successfully, hunts down Norman Stansfield in the bathroom, and is promptly caught and very nearly shot dead by the same person who murdered her family including her 4 year old brother until Willi Blood informs him about the death of his second in command Malky by Leon.
• Prom Night (1980) has an unknown figure cutting through four teenagers who killed a young girl years ago and covered up the crime. This killer is revealed to be the little girl's brother, who targeted them to avenge her death.
• In Pumpkinhead, Lance Henriksen summons the eponymous demon of vengeance after some teens accidentally run over his son. The demon is so brutal that Henriksen quickly has a My God, What Have I Done? moment.
• In Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge, the titular revenge is carried out by Andre Toulon, using his living puppets to hunt down and kill all the Nazis involved, directly or indirectly, with his wife's death.
• The Rambo series is rife with this trope.
  • In First Blood, John Rambo spends the first half of the movie pursued by crooked cops and the National Guard. He spends this portion of the movie camping in the woods, far out of reach of his enemies and plotting to escape them. However, once they barricade him in a mine shaft and leave him for dead, he escapes, hijacks a truck, and heads back into the town, where he takes out the entire main street with an M60.
  • In the sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part II, he starts out on a mission into a prison camp where he was held to rescue POWs. His partner on the mission is a Vietnamese woman named Co. In the course of the journey they fall in love, and just after they decide to go back to America together as husband and wife, she is brutally shot down. Rambo goes fucking insane. In the first half he only killed when necessary, but after his love is killed, he hunts down and brutalizes every mook he can get his knife in. His memento is a headband fashioned from her dress. An already personal mission is made even more personal, and he completes it after killing every single mook.
  • In Rambo IV, he does this at the end of the film in a way that would have made Dr. Richard Gatling proud.
  • In Rambo: Last Blood, the second half of the film has Rambo taking revenge on a group of Human Traffickers after Gabrielle is put through hell and dies from a drug overdose.
• In Red Hill, Jimmy breaks out of a maximum security prison returns to Red Hill to wreak vengeance on those who he thinks have wronged him. And it turns out he has some very good reasons for wanting vengeance.
• Red Sun: A samurai teams up with an outlaw to pursue the gang who stole a precious sword from the former and betrayed the latter.
• Subverted in, of all things, Repo! The Genetic Opera. Nathan Wallace figures out Rotti's plan to take his daughter away and gets off to a great start, taking out several machine-gun-toting cops with only his scalpels, and then is promptly taken down by Luigi Largo and the henchgirls. This is about the point he realises that he is in deep shit (and Rotti got upgraded from manipulative to magnificent.
• Revenge for Jolly! is about a man and his cousin searching for the man who killed his beloved dog, killing several people with every lead they follow.
• The Revengers, as might be guessed from the title. When his family is killed by a band of Indians and Comancheros, John Benedict devotes his life to hunting down their leader Tarp and killing him.
• Patrick Swayze does this at the end of Road House (1989). The lesson? You can mess with a man's bar. You can threaten his life. But kill his mentor and father figure? Buy your cemetery plot now and save time.
• RoboCop (1987): Police officer gets murdered by sadistic thugs, returns to life and unfortunately for them, remembers the whole thing quite well. He tracks them down and is understandably a little pissed off about it.
• In Rolling Vengeance, the drunken rednecks who work at the local brewery kill the hero's mother and sister, then put his father in the hospital by throwing a cinderblock off an overpass into the window of his rig, causing him to wreck. They get away with both crimes. The hero decides to convert his monster truck into a mobile death machine and slaughter them in some vehicular mayhem.
• Savaged: After being raped and murdered by a gang of racist rednecks, a woman bonds with the ghost of an Apache chief who was killed by the leader's grandfather. Using her newfound knowledge of the chief's brutal war tactics, she guts and scalps her way through the gang.
• A Score to Settle: After spending 19 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, Frankie plans to use the time he has left to extract vengeance on the surviving members of his gang.
• Sergio Leone liked to use revenge as a theme in some of his spaghetti westerns.
  • In Once Upon a Time in the West Charles Bronson plays a nameless drifter who obviously has a serious beef against Henry Fonda's Frank, going as far as to protect him from his other enemies just so he can have the privilege of killing Frank himself. In the end, we find out that he's avenging his brother, who Frank killed in one of the most unforgivable fashions possible when Harmonica was just a little kid.
  • Lee Van Cleef played the avenger role alongside the Man With No Name in For a Few Dollars More. Here, his target is El Indio, a notorious outlaw who gunned down his sister's lover and then raped her, leading to the sister taking her own life.
• In She-Devil, Roseanne Barr plays Ruth Patchett, a woman abandoned by her husband for a beautiful, wealthy, successful woman (played by Meryl Streep). Her response? To systematically destroy every part of his life bit by bit taking everything he has until he is left broken, alone, and in jail. Seriously, she has a to-do list. While she's at it, she adds a layer of delightful hell to the woman who he left her for as well in the process.
• In Short Circuit 2, Johnny Five goes for this after Big Bad Oscar and his goons beat Five to Hell and back.
• Skin Trade: A cop's family is killed by a human trafficking gang he's pursuing, so he quits his job and dismantles them without the restrictions of due process.
• In Silent Hill, Dark Alessa strikes a bargain with Rose that helps her rescue Sharon, in exchange for hitching a ride on her soul to bypass the church's defenses against her. Once inside, Alessa herself arrives and brutally slaughters The Order for what they did to her.
• In Snatch., gangster Bricktop has secured Irish Traveler and bare-knuckle boxing champion Mickey's cooperation in a rigged fight by having his mother's caravan set on fire while she's still in it. It occurs to Mickey's allies that he appears to be cooperating rather mildly, under the circumstances... until the night of the fight. When it's revealed that as well as putting money on himself to win the fight and winning it, thus ripping Bricktop off completely, he and his fellow Travellers have arranged an ambush in which they bloodily wipe out pretty much all of Bricktop's organisation, including Bricktop himself. As Turkish notes: "For every action there's a reaction. And a pikey reaction is quite a fucking thing."
• Solomon Kane in the movie goes on a pretty epic Roaring Rampage of Revenge about halfway through the movie after the kind family he was traveling with is brutally massacred by a pack of Malachi's bandits. Kane does not take this well. At all.
• Star Trek has a number of examples.
  • Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Khan launches one against Kirk the moment he escapes Ceti Alpha V.
    Khan: I've done far worse than kill you, Admiral, I've hurt you. And I wish to go on... hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me, as you left her: Marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet, Buried Alive... Buried alive.
  • In Star Trek: First Contact, several out of character moments make it clear early on that Picard views the situation as an opportunity to launch his Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the Borg^note Assimilated as Locutus, he had commanded the Borg attack against the Federation at the battle of Wolf 359. Fans of TNG, who are used to the rational, diplomatic, compassionate Jean-Luc Picard, are shocked to see him shoot a partially assimilated crewman who was begging for help, and show near-psychotic rage in machine-gunning two drones. Lily actually has to stop him from beating the corpses with the butt of his rifle.
  • Lily, who has known Picard for all of ten minutes, actually calls him on this later in the movie.
    Picard: We've made too many compromises already, too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. Not again. THE LINE MUST BE DRAWN HERE, THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER! And I will make them pay for what they've done.
• In Star Trek Into Darkness, John Harrison is out to take revenge on the entire Federation for Admiral Marcus's actions: taking (and, for all he knows, killing) Harrison/Khan's crew. After Kirk dies, Spock goes on one of his own.
• Star Wars has its share.
  • In Attack of the Clones, Anakin goes on one of these following his mother's death. He butchers an entire encampment of Tusken Raiders - including children - and goes down in their legends as a vengeful desert spirit. And while they may have had it coming, the massacre serves as a quite obvious hint at where Anakin's character would eventually end up.
    • At around the same time, Qymaen jai Sheelal (later known as General Grievous) devastates an entire empire after his partner is killed.
  • In The Force Awakens, after Kylo Ren kills Han Solo, Chewbacca goes berserk, shooting Kylo and several storm-troopers with his bowcaster before setting off the charges he and Han set around the Starkiller's oscillator.
• The trope name also appears in the trailer for 1977's Sudden Death, which is filled with alliterative phrases.
• In Sugar Hill (1974), Sugar's husband is murdered by mobsters, so she sets out to kill all the men responsible in various painful ways, with the help of Baron Samedi and a group of zombies.
• The title character in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, after failing to kill his intended target, Judge Turpin, has an epiphany that "they all deserve to die" and starts cutting throats indiscriminately.
• Taken:
  • In the first film, Liam Neeson issues the page quote. The bad guy is less than impressed by this Badass Boast, to his great misfortune. This film also defined the Roaring Rampage of Rescue, combining it with this trope as Neeson is decidedly less than merciful with the bastards who sold his daughter to the slavers.
  • In the sequel, the family of the now-deceased bad guys tries to go on one against Neeson. It backfires horribly, in large part because it involved doing the exact same thing that the original bad guys did to piss Neeson off in the very first film.
  • And in the final movie, this trope is played very, very straight, as Neeson is out to avenge the death of his wife, rather than the Roaring Rampages of Rescue he went on in the previous films.
• Tank Girl. After DeeTee is killed, the other Rippers attack and slaughter large numbers of Water and Power troops.
• In Ten Dead Men, Hart and his cronies destroy Ryan's new life, murder his girlfriend Amy, shoot him and leave him for dead. Ryan survives and comes back to kill all ten of them.
• In Terror at Black Falls, Juan Avila's son is lynched for stealing a calf. At the scene of the lynching, Sheriff Cal shoots him in the hand, which needs to be amputated. To avenge both his son and his hand, Juan takes a saloon hostage and shoots a person every ten minutes until Sheriff Cal shows up to confront him.
• Terror Train: A young man slashes his way through the pranksters who caused his mental breakdown.
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 climaxes with Lefty — the uncle of two of the characters from the first movie — tracking the Sawyers down to their hideout and goes berserk, tearing the place apart before confronting the Sawyers themselves and facing Leatherface in a chainsaw duel.
• James Caan in Thief, after his quasi-partner Leo reneges on their deal regarding some diamonds Caan's character Frank helps to steal from a safe. Frank then goes on a rampage and destroys Leo's business and finally guns him down. Could also be said to overlap with Despair Event Horizon, as Frank also forsakes his wife in the process.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except: A war veteran calls up his old buddies to destroy a cult that killed his girlfriend and her dad.
• The western Tombstone, in which Wyatt Earp swears to wipe out an entire band of outlaws who ambushed his brothers. This was based on a Real Life feud, though the actual story was not as black and white as the movie (and Earp) would have us believe.
  Wyatt Earp: All right, Clanton, you called down the thunder, well now you've got it! You see that? It says United States Marshal. Take a good look at him, Ike, 'cause that's how you're gonna end up. The Cowboys are finished, you understand? I see a red sash, I kill the man wearin' it. So run, you cur. Run! Tell all the other curs the law's comin'. You tell 'em I'm coming, and Hell's coming with me, you hear? Hell's coming with me!
• Gypsy and Helen tear through about 40-some-odd vampires in The Twins Effect, after Reeve is turned into a vampire and staked.
• In the backstory of The Usual Suspects, semi-mythical criminal mastermind Keyser Soze is faced with other gangsters who try to take over his business by threatening to kill his family. Instead, he kills his family himself, then the gangsters, then their wives, children, friends, and anyone else even tangentially associated with them, and then vanishes into legend.
• Valentine: Jeremy Melton, alias Adam Carr, is intent on killing four young women who framed him for sexual assault as a boy.
• Chan-Wook Park's Vengeance Trilogy does not share any plot or characters, but are all based on roaring rampages of revenge, ultimately displaying their futility.
  • Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance features two rampages colliding after a well-intentioned kidnapping results in tragedy.
  • Oldboy (2003) features a man trapped in a hotel room for 15 years, only to be released without explanation. As he starts his roaring rampage to uncover the culprit, he learns that his imprisonment was itself motivated by revenge.
  • Sympathy for Lady Vengeance features a woman who carefully orchestrates vengeance on a murderer who betrayed her and caused her to be imprisoned for a crime she did not commit.
• The last twenty minutes of Wanted.
• The Witches Hammer: A vampire huntress pursues the apocalyptic cult who slaughtered her entire organization.
• X-Men Film Series
  • Pretty much the whole point of X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
  • In X-Men: First Class, Erik's initial mission was to hunt down and kill Shaw and his Nazi underlings.
• Zombie Cop: A cop returns from the dead to battle the voodoo priest who killed him.

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