History Main / DeathIsDramatic

** [[Spoiler:She wasn't dead.]]

[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]

Naturally, this is TruthInTelevision; since death tends to impact us in direct proportion to how close we were to the deceased in real life.

* Played straight and subverted on ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer''. Joyce and Tara's deaths come out of nowhere. Jenny Calendar's death scene left her fate in doubt until the last second. Buffy's HeroicSacrifice, on the other hand, is much more dramatic - though even that has barely two minutes of buildup.

->''Margaret Sullivan was a star whose deathbed scenes were one of the great joys of the Golden Age of movies. Sullivan never simply kicked the bucket. [[FinalSpeech She made speeches]], as she lay dying; and she was so incredibly noble that she made you feel like an absolute twerp for continuing to live out your petty life after she'd ridden on ahead, to the accompaniment of the third movement of Brahm's First Symphony.''
-->-- '''Creator/GoreVidal''', ''F. Scott Fitzgerald's Case''

->''Margaret Sullivan was a star whose deathbed scenes were one of the great joys of the Golden Age of movies. Sullivan never simply kicked the bucket. She made speeches, as she lay dying; and she was so incredibly noble that she made you feel like an absolute twerp for continuing to live out your petty life after she'd ridden on ahead, to the accompaniment of the third movement of Brahm's First Symphony.''

* Played straight and subverted in ''Film/{{Serenity}}'', with the deaths of Book & Wash, respectively.

* In David Wingrove's ''ChungKuo'', this trope fits the final moments of Wang Sau-Ieyang, T'ang of City Africa

* ''Regarding Henry'': in which the titular character, finding himself face-to-face with a convenience store robber, is shot (with a small-caliber pistol) in the chest and remains standing, more confused than alarmed. He pleads with the shooter, "hey, wait a minute..." He is then shot in the forehead, but continues to plead, still confused, stumbling out onto the street before collapsing.

* This is basically the reason why most fans refuse to believe that April Ryan died in the end of ''{{Dreamfall}}''. Getting stabbed in the stomach with a plain spear and drowning in a swamp? How is that supposed to be dramatic for a person who single-handedly [[SaveBothWorlds saved two worlds]]?

* ''ChildrenOfMen'' is disturbingly realistic. {{Averted| Trope}} to the point of a TakeThat against the trope. [[AnyoneCanDie Anybody can get shot]] at any time, no {{Final Speech}}es allowed, please fall down and stop moving, the remaining characters will be busy running for their lives. You realize how melodramatic, glamorized, ''fake'' most other movie violence is.

* Averted in ''NationalTreasure'': After a distinct lack of frivolous deaths for the entire movie thus far, when one of the villain's mooks takes one wrong step and dies in the endgame, it has a ''lot'' more impact.

* Subverted by ''NoCountryForOldMen'', which oddly kills off most of the numerous RedShirts in a relatively graphic if unspectacular fashion onscreen without shying away but has all of the main characters, including the DecoyProtagonist, killed offscreen and in increasingly undramatic ways.
* Averted with ''TheDeparted'', which kills one of its three leading actors [[BoomHeadshot instantly]] with no warning whatsoever.
* In ''Film/TheMatrix Revolutions'', Trinity and Neo both receive exaggerated death scenes. Trinity is impaled by metal beams after she crashes a ship into the Machine City, and spends more than five minutes saying her goodbyes to Neo before dying, and as for the title character himself, he is carried away on a metal platform, while other machines look on, because he finally managed to destroy the entire Agent Smith program.

* ''PayItForward''. [[spoiler: The main character]] gets stabbed at the end of the story. Once. With a knife that was ''at most'' two inches long. The wound was on his left side near the bottom of his rib cage. Cue SlowMotionFall and then cut to the ER doc telling the family he's dead.

* Exaggerated hilariously in ''VideoGame/RedDeadRedemptionUndeadNightmare'' with the infamously dramatic death of a random racist shopkeeper at the hands of zombies:
--> ''Herbert Moon'': You can't kill me!! [[MemeticBadass I'm HERBERT MOOOOOOOOOON!!!]]

* ''TheEvilThatMenDo''. The hitman played by Charles Bronson hurls a knife into his target's throat. He pulls it out and staggers across the room after Bronson, backing him into the toilet before passing out from blood loss.

* Extremely clear at the end of ''The Road To Perdition'': the main character is shot in the back by a rival assassin, multiple times. Despite the fact that both are supposed to be experts at dispatching people, he has the time to stay alive for several more minutes, during which he shoots his rival when he threatens his son ''who collapses instantly'' and has a little heart to heart with his son before succumbing.

* Lampshaded and subverted in ''Alcatraz and the Scrivener's Bones''. In the parts where Alcatraz is writing from the narrator's point of view, he talks about why authors love to kill off important characters and mentions that a certain character will die. Then, just as it looks like said character is about to bite the dust at the climax, they end up just fine, aside from a broken rib and a bit tongue. He then comments (as himself) that if he writes his memoirs when he's older, that the story will "seem really boring because nobody was narratively dynamic enough to get themselves killed." The character is then killed on the last page of the book, but not really.

* ''Xena'' Xena and Gabrielle's [[DeathIsCheap many, many deaths]], but the [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr9lNHhH0Jg Crucifixion]] in stands out.

* Averted in Band of Brothers. Characters who are established beginning in the first installment are at times killed off abruptly and without ceremony. Although much of the drama of the miniseries centers on the effects these deaths have on the survivors, there is often little attention paid to the deaths as they happen because the other characters seldom have the time to dwell on them.

* Subverted in ''Clive Barker's Jericho''. Your 7-man squad (each member of which is a fairly developed character) spends the entire game fighting through a nightmarish hell without any casualties. Just before the final battle, the BigBad blows up two of your squad members without any fanfare or build-up. Plus, they were pretty much the ''only'' two squad members who weren't complete and utter {{JerkAss}}es.

* Most of ''ReservoirDogs'' is spent watching Mr. Orange slowly bleed to death from a gunshot wound to the gut.

* ''TrainingDay''. When Roger (the Scott Glenn character) gets hit in the chest and abdomen with a shotgun blast moments after a completely friendly chat with the main character, he heaves and sputters in pain and shock for several long moments as he is cruelly mocked by his shooter.

* ''HarshTimes''. [[spoiler: Jim, Christian Bale's character]] is hit violently with a blast from a shotgun while escaping the scene of a drug deal gone bad. The blast absolutely rips the entire side of his head and face apart, and he ends up crying and begging his friend to end his life for a few minutes.

* ''TheBrothersBloom'': At the end, after Stephen gets shot in the run down theater, he manages to get up and convincingly trick Bloom into thinking that it was all a big con and that he was just fine. He even pulls off the 'Greatest card trick in the world'. After Bloom leaves, Stephen (in obvious pain) has just enough strength to pull a chair onto the stage and sit down in it before passing on.

** Many creatures in {{Harryhausen Movie}}s get this (others die Mook Deaths). Ray tried to give most of his iconic, major characters a bit of pathos as they died, and it often worked.

* ''TheLordOfTheRings'' does the same thing again, to the same actor even, when Saruman, who had been the antagonist for the better part of the previous two movies, is disposed of rather unceremoniously at the beginning of the third. On the other hand, the entire point of the scene in the book, which is likely what the movie was trying to recreate in a somewhat briefer fashion, is that Saruman has been completely defeated by this point, and has no real power left except trying (and failing) to sow dissent among his foes (it's a bit more complicated than that in the book, but we are talking about a movie that was already over three hours long). I suspect it was sort of trying to show just how far he's fallen by that point.