Live-Action Films / Death By Irony

In Antebellum, Politically Incorrect Villain Elizabeth has been running a plantation staffed by kidnapped slave labour so she can live life as it it were the antebellum South. She dies while being dragged behind Veronica's horse and he head slams into the base of a statue of General Robert E. Lee.
In Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos used the Infinity Gauntlet and a Badass Fingersnap to reduce half the universe to dust. In Avengers: Endgame, Tony Stark does the exact same thing to reduce a past version of Thanos (and Thanos' army) to dust. This is a running theme with him;
- In Endgame, Thanos removes the Power Stone from the Gauntlet to punch Carol, which gives Tony the idea to steal all of the Stones. Once again, he's Hoist by His Own Petard.
- Thanos left Thor for dead, and left Eitri psychologically defeated, and unable to work his own forge. Between them, Rocket, and Groot, they're able to make a weapon that nearly kills Thanos. Both Thor and Eitri were only motivated to do that by what he did to them, instead of killing them out of hand. He almost literally made a rod for his own back. Except it was his chest, and it was an axe.
- Loki is a literal trickster god and master of manipulation. Thanos sees through Loki's guise and uses his own word choice against him. Even says that it may not have been the best place to use the word “undying.”
- The fate 2018 Thanos brings to Loki in Infinity War is the same he receives in Endgame: unceremoniously killed off in the beginning of the movie by a blow to the neck with little further discussion later on. For bonus points, Loki dies alongside his kingdom, and the friends and family he grew up with. But thanks to the actions of Loki and other Asgardians, like Heimdall sending Hulk to Earth, 2018 Thanos dies alone because none of his Black Order was even left to mourn him.
- The Children of Thanos all die in some ironic way;
  - Ebony Maw — a pompous windbag with telekinesis powers and magic — dies because Spider-Man and Iron Man, two of the quippiest and most technological characters in the MCU, distracted him with words and got him sucked into deep space by simple physics, depriving him of air.
  - Corvus Glaive dies on his own glaive, at the hands of the being he spent the whole movie trying to kill. Moreover, Vision kills him in the same way Corvus Glaive opened the fight in Edinburgh: surprise backstab through the heart.
  - Cull Obsidian, the big, tough brute, gets out-thought by someone weaker than him and dies slamming into a shield that's even tougher than he is. He lost his hand earlier, and dies by the hand he removed from the Hulkbuster armor, which "replaces" the lost one. He liked using his grappling hook to pull people around, and dies because something pulled him around. And he's The Big Guy of Thanos' Children, fighting who is normally The Big Guy of the Avengers, but owing to Thanos' smackdown of Hulk at the beginning of the film, Cull has to settle for Banner... and probably wishes he hadn't.
  - Proxima Midnight is killed when Wanda throws her into the path of one of the very threshers she ordered onto the battlefield as a distraction specifically to draw Wanda out. Adding to this, Wanda's powers come from the Mind Stone that Proxima and her husband Corvus Glaive were sent to retrieve. Much like her husband's death at Vision's hands, Proxima is killed by the very individual she spent the whole movie trying to kill, who also happens to be Vision's lover. And Wanda survived (both attacks) because she had unexpected backup.
  - Gamora said in the first Guardians movie that having lived her life surrounded by people who hated her, she would be honored to die in the company of friends. Here, Gamora learns that her adoptive father did indeed love her in the worst way possible. On top of that, she ends up Dying Alone on a distant world and not even the audience can hear her scream.
  - Nebula symbolically and literally kills who she used to be to save the sister she spent most of her life hating, the sister she kept trying to beat and kill. Oh, and they're only in the situation because Thanos — who doesn't lie — decides to send 2014 Nebula as a Trojan Horse, a form of deception. Which is what gets him killed too. Bonus points because Nebula has been The Unfavorite, and the one time he treats her nicely, it turns out to be bad for both of them.
- Tony "Iron Man" Stark is "the Futurist who sees all and knows all", who acted in the name of the greater good. Dr. Strange, who really can see the future and know all^note, manipulates Tony into performing a Heroic Sacrifice in the name of the greater good of stopping Thanos and saving the universe. The great Control Freak of the MCU who tried to anticipate and prepare for every possibility became a victim of fate. Also, the last act of defiance of the Great Tony Stark was a cheap trick and a cheesy one liner.
Barbarian: Andre, who doesn't even get to finish his spiel about how the Mother hasn't found his hiding place in fifteen years and isn't about to before he's violently slaughtered by her.
The last thing the Joker says in Batman (1989) before his Disney Villain Death is, "Sometimes I just kill myself!!" Batman anchors Joker's leg to a gargoyle with his harpoon gun, the gargoyle detaches from the building, and the weight of the gargoyle drags Joker to the ground. And he wouldn't have died in the first place if he didn't call a chopper for pickup. The chopper he needed because he dropped a bell on Batman, which destroyed the staircase down. He also tries to trick Vicki into falling with a detachable fake hand, and make Batman and Vicki fall from the ledge by kicking it, which showed the stonework was in poor condition.
The Cabin in the Woods. After Hadley spends the entire film wishing he could see a merman, a merman enters the control room and chews Hadley's face off. His last words are "Oh, come on!"
In Collateral, Vincent will talk at length about the need to change, adapt, and roll with whatever life throws at you, yet he shoots entirely by rote. He always uses the Mozambique Drill: two shots to the chest and one to the head. The police note he uses the same misdirection tactics to frame innocent patsies for his murders. In the climactic shootout at the end of the film, which takes place in a blackout and aboard a subway train, not a single one of his shots hit Max. They all plunk dead-center into a set of sliding metal doors. Max fires randomly and kills Vincent with a lucky shot.
- Vincent tells a story about a guy who died on the train, and it took six hours for anyone to notice. He dies on the exact same train, and references the story, recognizing the irony.
- Vincent spends most of the movie sitting behind Max in a taxi, as a passenger who's really in control, via threats. He dies sitting in a mass transit vehicle controlled by someone else, facing Max as an equal, peacefully, after Vincent lost control of the situation.
Constantine (2005): Two characters are killed by The Dragon in an ironic way.
- Beeman is obsessed with insects. He's killed by being infested with flies.
- Hennessy drinks a lot to drown out the voices he hears due to his psychic ability. He's killed by being made to drink himself to death.
Coroner Creek: While trying to escape from Chris, Younger Miles falls off a ladder and dies when he lands on the same knife that Chris's fiancee had used to commit suicide after being raped by him.
Dawn of the Dead (2004): It's impossible to know that there is a Zombie Apocalypse going on yet, but Anna's neighbor keeps a loaded gun and tells bloodied people to stay away from him. He's run over by an ambulance.
Koba in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is killed by being thrown from a massive height after pleading with his enemy Caesar to spare his life — the exact same way he killed Big Bad Jacobs in the previous movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
In DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story, it's lampshaded with Patches O'Houlihan's death by the "Luck o' the Irish" sign.
Count Dracula is always known for biting his victims' necks and then either kill them or turn them into vampires. Guess how he finally dies in Dracula III: Legacy.
Female Agents: Jeanne was sentenced to death by hanging, but spared so she could join the SOE. She creates a diversion through killing a soldier, goes to Ravensbruck, and is hanged there instead.
In The Final, Parker, the Vietnam veteran, gets hit by a double-dose of this when he's taken out by a punji stake trap. First, this was a notorious trap employed by the Vietcong against American soldiers. Second and, more importantly, earlier in the film he'd given tips to Dane on how to improve the traps he was laying around the ranch to catch runaways. (However, he manages to crawl away from it and kill two of the guards, and his ultimate fate is uncertain.)
The first victim in Final Destination 4 is a white supremacist who attempts to burn a cross on a Black man's lawn. His death involves him getting dragged behind his truck and set on fire as it rolls away — a known (if uncommon) method of lynching, as seen with the murder of James Byrd, Jr. For bonus points, his truck's stereo starts playing War's anti-racism anthem "Why Can't We Be Friends?" before it explodes.
Full Metal Jacket: Gunny Hartman. More emphasis on this in the book than in the movie. In the book, when he gets shot, before he dies, he says "Private Pyle, I'm so proud." He's glad that was finally able to make him a killer which he had been struggling to do all through boot camp.
Ghosted (2023): Right after "God" the bounty hunter says his senses are honed to great heights, he gets run over by a car that he'd not seen or heard coming.
In Girl House, the voyeuristic murderer Loverboy is killed by Kylie when she beats him to death with one of the cameras in GirHouse that allowed him to watch the girls.
In The Godfather, in some ways, the Corleone men all died in a manner befitting of how they lived.
- Vito, a man devoted to his family and benevolent to the people around him, died relatively peacefully in his home with a loved one present.
- Sonny, whose explosive temper often got him into trouble, died in an extremely violent manner.
- Fredo, the weakest and most incompetent of his siblings, died passively and pathetically.
- Michael, a man who chased his loved ones away due to his brutal methods, died alone and broken.
Godzilla is famous for his radiation powers. He died after absorbing so much radiation he suffered a meltdown/heart attack in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah.
- In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), lots of Monarch's people are awestruck by the Kaiju that they study, so it's especially tragic that a lot of those people are massacred by those very same creatures when King Ghidorah awakens them all and they fall under his thrall. One of the most ironic deaths in the movie is that of Serizawa, established in Godzilla (2014) to be a Hiroshima survivor: in this film, he dies in the blast of a nuclear bomb that he manually primed in order to save Godzilla so that the latter could save the world, representing Japan finally coming to terms as a country and people with nuclear power and the atomic age.
In the Bond film GoldenEye, a key enemy for Bond is Xenia Onatopp, a sadistic and sexy Georgian assassin whose favorite method of assassination is seducing her victim and then crushing them to death with her Murderous Thighs. Bond disposes of her by shooting her helicopter while she is in the middle of crushing him, causing it to crash while her harness is still strapped to it. She is flung several feet in the air and crushed to death against a tree. Bond, famously never letting a moment like this go by unmarked, quips "She always did enjoy a good squeeze."
Guns, Girls and Gambling: Multiple characters comment on the irony of Gay Elvis being shot to death while sitting on the toilet.
In Halloween Kills, Big John and Little John use Michael's story to scare some trick-or-treaters. Then Michael comes home and they meet their end.
In Heathers, J.D. is responsible for killing several other teenagers throughout the film and sets the murders up to look like suicides. After failing to blow up the school, he commits suicide by blowing himself up with his own bomb.
Subverted in Hot Fuzz. Simon Skinner kills a guy with a church steeple and in the climax gets impaled on a model steeple. He does not actually die, however.
In The Hunger Games, Head Gamemaker Seneca Crane revokes the both-can-win rule, meaning that only Katniss or Peeta can survive. But instead, they almost commit suicide with poisonous berries, until they are declared the winners to prevent this. As punishment for this unprecedented screw-up, he is locked in a room with... the same kind of poison berries.
- In the The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, the good guys defeat and depose President Snow. His replacement Alma Coin lets Katniss execute him. Earlier, Coin said that the revolution will make the Capitol leadership's children participate in the Hunger Games, instead of the Districts'. Katniss has also learned that Coin (possibly accidentally) killed Katniss' little sister in a False Flag Operation. Katniss realizes she's pointing her bow at the wrong dictator, and shoots Coin, at Coin's moment of triumph. As the crowd surges forward to rip Snow apart, he can only laugh at the irony of his worst enemy choosing not to kill him. Especially after Coin's last words.
Coin: May your aim be as true as your heart is pure.
The villains in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Walter Donovan wanted the Holy Grail so he could become immortal. However, Elsa Schneider selects a fake grail for him to drink from in the secret chamber. He dies by aging rapidly to death - exactly the opposite of what he expected to happen. This death is made even more ironic by the fact that earlier in the movie, Walter Donovan told Indy not to trust anybody, and then chose to trust Schneider when he made it clear he had no way of choosing the correct grail. Schneider’s own ironic death comes moments later. Refusing to heed an obvious warning by the grail’s guardian, she triggers a Cataclysm Climax by attempting to take the grail anyway. Indiana saves her from falling in a chasm but when she spots the grail below, she irrationally pulls a hand free to reach it, even though Indy tries to convince her otherwise. Her obsession to reach the cup that gives eternal life results in her falling to her death. ^note
In Jurassic Park (1993), it happens less so than in the book, but it does happen:
- Denis Nedry shut down the park's security systems, everything from surveillance, to the electric fences so that he could steal some frozen dinosaur embryos and deliver them to his contact as soon as possible. While trying to deliver the embryos, he crashes his car and gets eaten by a Dilophosaurus that got out after the electric fences were turned off.
- Donald Gennaro, the lawyer that left Lex and Tim to their fate when the Tyrannosaurus got out and hid in a nearby bathroom stall so that he could not get eaten. After the T.rex chases Malcolm, it destroys the bathroom stall, and eats most of Gennaro.
Land of the Dead does this with the electric fence. Zombies are shown in one scene getting fried on the electric fence that borders the city of Pittsburgh, while humans on the other side of the fence laugh at them. Later on, that same electric fence ends up becoming a deathtrap as a large group of refugees trying to escape end up trapped between it and the zombies.
In Machete Kills, El Chameleon is an assassin who specializes in Latex Perfection disguises to get close to his targets. He gets the drop on Machete by disguising himself as a Mexican, but while chasing him, he runs into a bunch of racist rednecks who threaten to shoot him for being a Mexican. While pleading for his life, he removes his fake mustache, talks in his regular accent, and says he is from Ontario, only for the rednecks to say they hate Canadians too and shoot him anyway.
In Miss Nobody, Sarah Jane started her malicious, serial killing ways by accidentally killing the executive she worked as a secretary for. She dies when her own secretary accidentally serves her the drug-tainted water she had prepared for Ormsby.
Although it doesn't stick, in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children the pyrokinetic Olive is frozen to death.
Mulholland Falls culminates with the bad guy being tossed off the plane, the same way he murdered his victim.
In A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, one of Freddy's teenage victims is a tough girl who is afraid of bugs. He slowly and painfully transforms her into a helpless cockroach and then he crushes her to death in his hand.
In The Rise of Skywalker, Kylo Ren regains his senses as Ben Solo, and ultimately sacrifices his own life force to save his love interest Rey. Just like his idol Darth Vader, who regained his senses as Anakin Skywalker and ultimately let himself be fatally electrocuted saving his son Luke.
In The Seventh Seal, Death chops the tree an actor is hanging on. "But I have a play tomorrow!" "The play will be canceled due to the main actor's death".
Used to surprisingly good effect in The Asylum's version of Sherlock Holmes (2009). The factory owner who put bars on the inside of his windows to keep his illegal workers in? Can't get out when the monster comes to eat him.
In Snakes on a Plane, one character throws a small dog to a snake to try and escape. However, when the others gasp at his brutality, he stops to chastise them saying "Oh what, you'd have done it too!" But this is just long enough for the snake to eat him alive... and in the end, his corpse gets sucked out of a window into the engine. The moral of this story: if you kill a puppy, God kills you.
In Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Nuclear Man dies when Superman drops him into the reactor of a nuclear power plant (having knocked him out). Of course, this should have revitalized him if the movie obeyed its own rules.
Terminator:
- At the end of The Terminator, the titular antagonist - a relentless, unstoppable machine - is ultimately crushed and destroyed by another relentless, unstoppable machine (in this case, a hydraulic press).
- In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the antagonist is the liquid metal T-1000 that proves capable of regenerating from anything the heroes throw at it. It's destroyed when it's blasted into a pool of molten steel.
- Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines the T-X is stronger, faster, and better than the classic Terminator in just about every way. It even has an energy weapon. So how does the agent of Skynet (an Air Force program) and "Anti-Terminator-Terminator" die? The T-850 hits it with a helicopter^note. And then stuffs his battery into her mouth. Bonus points for holding up a heavy hydraulic blast door at the time. ^note
Most of the victims in Theatre of Blood, most notably George Maxwell, a pompous egotist who is killed in the manner of Julius Caesar (and who wouldn't have even been present at the murder scene if he hadn't allowed his vanity to override his common sense); Oliver Larding, The Alcoholic, who is drowned in a barrel of wine in the style of Clarence in Richard III; and Chloe Moon, a vain woman who ends up electrocuted at her hair salon.
The Wizard of Oz had an incident where Margaret Hamilton was seriously burned by the pyrotechnics used when her character, the Wicked Witch of the West, teleports out of the Munchkin village. When she returned to the set, she insisted on no more fire. How does the Wicked Witch of the West die? She melts after Dorothy accidentally douses her with water after she sets the Scarecrow on fire.
In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Judge Doom, who plans to obliterate Toontown and all Toons with the Dip, is revealed to actually be a Toon himself. Guess what Eddie Valiant ultimately uses against Doom to vanquish him for good?
In The Wolfman (2010), Dr. Hannigan claims that Lawrence will no more likely change into a werewolf than he is likely to sprout wings and fly out the window! He doesn't sprout wings at any rate...
X-Men: First Class: Sebastian Shaw. Magneto kills him to avenge his mother's death. This is made possible because Magneto had taken Shaw's helmet that was manufactured to protect Shaw from telepaths like Charles Xavier. Ironically, this is what prevented Charles (who could not release the dangerous Shaw from his telepathic grasp) from stopping Shaw's death at the hands of the newly-helmeted Magneto.
- In X-Men: Apocalypse, Angel, whose power is to fly, is killed in a plane crash.

Death By Irony / Live-Action Films

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