Irony / Live-Action Film

A list of examples of Irony in Live Action Film:

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• In The Addams Family a con artist has her adopted son who closely resembles the missing Fester Addams, pretend to be him. At the end of the film it's revealed he really is Fester. The con artist story about finding him in some tuna nets after being lost in the Bermuda Triangle is true. It turned out that Fester had suffered from amnesia the entire time, and only recovered his memories after being struck by lightning at the climax.
• Bob Falfa from American Graffiti is a street racer who's only seen in his car, a '55 Chevrolet. He's played by Harrison Ford, who bears the name of Chevrolet's biggest rival (Ford).
• An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn:
  • It was about a movie that was considered one of the worst ever made. The movie itself ended up being considered one of the worst ever made.
  • It featured a guy who tried to have this name removed from the film. The director of the actual movie, Arthur Hiller, ending up having his name removed and credited to Alan Smithee.
  • Furthering the irony, the failure of the film led to the retirement of "Alan Smithee" as a catchall pseudonym for directors who wished to have their names removed. All pseudonyms are now chosen on case by case basis now.
• In Andhadhun, Sophie believes Akash to be blind. She then finds out that he was only faking it from the kid living next door to him... at the same time as he's blinded for real by Simi. Her finding out about his deceit thus doesn't result in her finding out the truth, but in her substituting one mistaken belief for the opposite one.
• The film, Ask Me Anything has the protagonist Katie involved with three men throughout the film. She is used sexually by two of them, but only one of them, whom her step dad discovered was a convicted sex offender, actually cares about her, never has any form of sexual contact with her, and is the one that urges her to get away from the other men she is involved with.
• Avatar used to be the most successful film of all time, while Delgo used to be the least successful film of all time. They have nearly identical plots.
• Avatar: The Way of Water: Kiri's birth mother was the avatar of Grace Augustine, the human scientist whose life's work was to build peaceful ties between the "Sky People" and the Na'vi. Spider's birth father was Miles Quaritch, the RDA security leader who oversaw the slaughter of many Na'vi and who was directly responsible for Grace Augustine's death. But in the present, Kiri and Spider are adopted siblings who haven't got the slightest bit of animosity toward each other — indeed, they seem to be closer to each other than anyone else in their adoptive family.
• In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Black Widow reveals that she can't have children because the organization that trained her sterilizes its agents to prevent an unplanned pregnancy from complicating a mission. Her actress, Scarlett Johansson, was pregnant during filming.
• In Avengers: Infinity War, the Hulkbuster armor is piloted by Bruce Banner, a.k.a. the Hulk.
• In Avengers: Endgame, Tony Stark, the futurist who saw all possible outcomes was the pawn of Doctor Strange, who did see all possible outcomes against Thanos.
• Documentary film The Battle of San Pietro tells the story of the brutal, bloody December 1943 battle for the eponymous town. As the camera shows Italian civilians picking up chunks of rubble in their bombed out town, the narration says that the Italian peasant is a "born mason", who builds not for himself, but "for future generations." This is immediately followed by a shot of the corpse of a teenaged girl, lying in the street.
• Bloodthirsty: Grey, a vegan who stopped eating meat as a child in horror at seeing how it was made, gains an intense desire to eat this later in life.
• In Blown Away, IRA bomber Ryan Gaerity moves to the United States to pursue the man who betrayed him. He buys a few items at a yard sale, including a copy of The Joshua Tree. The band that recorded The Joshua Tree, U2, was rather outspoken against the IRA and The Troubles.
• The Boy Who Cried Werewolf: Jordan starts out as a strict vegetarian, annoying her little brother Hunter since she cooks for him and her dad but never serves meat. In Romania, she's attracted to Goran, a butcher (but doesn't care, though Hunter lampshades the fact) then becomes a werewolf (a carnivore) craving (and eating) meat as a result.
• In Brokeback Mountain where Heath Ledger played a closeted gay man and Michelle Williams was his beard, the two actors started dating for real during production. They were together for three years and had a daughter.
• Brooklyn stars Saoirse Ronan as an Irish woman who emigrates to America and ends up living in the titular New York City borough. Ronan herself was born in New York City and grew up in Ireland.
• Bullet Train:
  • The Wolf boards the train to take revenge on Ladybug because he believes him responsible for the mass poisoning at his wedding that killed all the guests and the bride. In reality, Ladybug saved The Wolf's life when he accidentally made him spill his poisoned wine preventing him from drinking it. Furthermore, The Wolf accidentally kills himself while trying to kill the man who accidentally saved his life.
  • Most of the characters are on the train because they were responsible for the death of White Death's wife. However, Ladybug is on the train to fill in for Carver who was most responsible for the act.
• In Burglar, Bernice and Carl visit a drugstore where Carl takes a bottle of lotion, squirts some into his hands, and puts it back on the shelf. Bernice, the titular burglar, then takes the bottle and insists they pay for it. Carl then calls her out on the fact that she'll steal very expensive items, but insist on paying for a cheap bottle of lotion.
• The Cannonball Run:
  • The first film ends with Seymour saying "Maybe next year, we'll do this again." The dialogue in Cannonball Run 2 establishes that it takes place the next year, but Seymour doesn't return.
  • The two guys in the stock car (played by Terry Bradshaw and Mel Tillis) are not given names in the first film. In the second, they are given the names Terry and Mel making them examples of The Danza. The irony: Terry has been recast. The further irony: his new actor is Tony Danza.
  • J.J. and Victor enter the race with an ambulance and pretend they're paramedics transporting a patient to Los Angeles. They hire a doctor to give them an air of legitimacy, but have to find another at the last minute. What happened to the first doctor? He got sick.
• Captain America: The First Avenger officially introduces Captain America to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also makes him the last member of the title group from The Avengers (2012) to be introduced.
• In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a museum display on Cap's adventures states that Bucky Barnes was the only one of his Howling Commandos to die in action. It later turns out Bucky is actually the titular Winter Soldier and at this point of history, he's likely the only Howling Commando who's still alive.
• Chapter 27 is a film about Mark David Chapman in the days before he murdered John Lennon. Ironically, Lennon is played in the film by Mark Lindsey Chapman.
• Closely Watched Trains, a Czech film set during World War II and the Nazi occupation, has an example of Socratic irony. When the Nazi collaborator in charge of the railway gives the workers at the train station a bunch of lame excuses about the German retreats and starts barking orders about watching the trains, the workers keep asking "why?" until the irritated collaborator says it's what the Fuhrer wants.
• In Commando, Matrix is being loaded onto a plane when Sully makes an unsavory comment about his daughter. Matrix replies "You're a funny guy, Sully. I like you. That's why I'm going to kill you last." Due to circumstances Matrix couldn't have foreseen, Sully ends up the second person he kills after saying that.
  Matrix: Remember, Sully, when I promised to kill you last?
  Sully: That's right, Matrix! You did!
  Matrix: I lied. (Kills Sully)
• When The Commitments was cast, most of the band members were played by actors with actual musical talent. The only one who couldn't play an instrument was Johnny Murphy, who played Joey Fagan, the only member of the band who's a seasoned musician.
• In Con Air, the inmates (with the exception of Cameron Poe, Baby-O, and Greene) celebrate their escape by dancing to "Sweet Home Alabama" by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Greene makes the following observation:
  Greene: Define irony: a bunch of idiots dancing around on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash.
• In The Count of Monte Cristo (2002), Fernard accuses Edmond of trying to put a wedge between him and his son Albert to turn father and son against one another, not realizing that Albert is in reality Edmond's son and Fernard is the one who is actively trying to place a wedge between Albert and his rightful father by hoping the two would kill each other.
• In The Crow (1994), the main character is immune to bullets after rising from the dead and laughs about how bullets can't hurt him. Considering that Brandon Lee was accidentally shot and killed during production, this is both sad and ironic.
• Cube 2: Hypercube: Simon reveals to Jerry that he is actually a private detective. He was working a missing persons case and looking for Becky Young, somebody who worked for Izon, which is undoubtedly the reason they threw Simon into the hypercube to get rid of him. Jerry can't help but point out the irony of Simon's objective given their current situation.
• The Dark Crystal: In their desperation to thwart the Gelfling's prophecy, the Skeksis ensure it will come true.
• In Doctor in Love, Dr. Hare gets Dr. Barrington out of bed under the illusion he needs her to help him look for a saucepan when he actually wants to seduce her. When he is about to kiss her, the doorbell rings, revealing Mrs. Mimps and her son... who has once more gotten his head stuck in a saucepan.
• In Downfall, Hitler is shown admiring a portrait of Frederick the Great. Frederick was saved twice by last-minute turns of events, most notably the "Miracle of the House of Brandenburg", which saved the entire state of Prussia from utter defeat — Hitler was hoping for a repeat event, especially after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but of course, no miracle to turn back the Russians and save Germany this time. The irony comes in the fact that Hitler's personal hero was in reality a flute-playing, (very likely) homosexual die-hard Francophile who imposed religious tolerance and cringed at Prussian proud soldier culture, i.e, he was everything Hitler hated.
• Elysium: Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster) gets Carlyle to write a reboot code for Elysium to perform a coup and keep it safe from the people on Earth. In addition, she hires a complete psychopath to do her heavy lifting for her. Said psychopath ends up murdering her in cold blood, and the code gets used to give Elysium to the illegal immigrants she was trying to protect it from.
• In the ending of Exam, White is Driven to Suicide, but is unable to finish himself off due to the fingerprinted trigger preventing him from shooting himself in the head now that the guard is in escort mode. Minutes later, the gun is revealed to be a Healing Shiv that would have cured him of The Plague.
• Fahrenheit 451 (2018): Beatty cites the debate on free will as an example of one with ideas that upset people, and thus argues they shouldn't hear multiple opinions at all. Mein Kampf is also one of the books he has burned after saying this, by a man whose own regime was big on censorship and book burnings. Doubtless both were entirely intentional.
• The Final opens with a scene of a girl in a restaurant with her face horribly disfigured. She orders a burger. The movie flashes back a while ago and you hear a throwaway line from a vapid teenage girl "Red meat is for people who don't care what they look like". Said girl ends up getting a compound smeared on her face that erodes her skin away. It could be either tragic or dramatic irony.
• In The Four Minute Mile, a late-middle-aged fitness guru who is training athletes in an attempt to break the titular mark, speaks with reporters about when he was diagnosed with a heart ailment and told to rest for what time he had left. Instead, he started a physical exercise regime and eating healthy, natural foods. He notes with glee to the reporters assembled that he's alive and the doctor who told him to rest is now dead.
• In Furious 7, Roman insists on planning the attack on the convoy to rescue Ramsey. After he chooses an insertion point, he lets Tej choose how to use it. Tej suggests air dropping their vehicles into the insertion point. When it comes time to do that, Roman is the one who chickens out.
• Guy from Galaxy Quest played a security officer on the original series and spends most of the film panicking about getting killed. But when Sarris raids the bridge, Guy is the only crew member who is not seen getting killed before Jason rewinds time.
• Dramatic irony in Gangs of New York, when a Tammany worker tells Bill he will be rewarded for delivering the Irish to the polls, Bill spits and says his father and his men died fighting the British in 1814-he will not let his memory be befouled for people who didn't fight for this country as they did. Cut to Irishmen being made to sign their enlistment papers along with their citizenship applications, and getting onto the troopship headed for Tennessee while the coffins are being offloaded.
• Early in Gettysburg, Union General Buford rides up to the fields around Gettysburg, knowing that Lee's army is likely to get there soon, and gets a good look at the ground they'll be fighting on. He fears that General Meade will delay in taking the hills, which will allow the Confederates to get the high ground and force the Union to make a bloody charge that will fail to retake it—and that later, men with "tall hats and gold watch fobs" who were never there will praise how valiantly men died there. Buford's swift action prevents this outcome... for the Union. It is, in fact, an accurate description both of how Pickett's Charge went and how it was glorified as an example of tragic Confederate valor by the Lost Cause after the war.
• During the end of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra when Cobra Commander was captured, he proclaimed to Duke that it wasn't over between them. Duke responded that he'll be waiting for him. He then gets killed during the beginning G.I. Joe: Retaliation without so much as a single confrontation with him.
• Godzilla (2014):
  • Yoshimitsu Banno was "banned" from working on Godzilla movies after the polarizing Godzilla vs. Hedorah but is now attached to this movie as a co-producer.
  • The Male MUTO does all the things Godzilla does in Blue Oyster Cult's song Godzilla: he pulls some splitting high-tension wires down as he escapes from Janjira, helpless people on a subway train scream as he looks in on them, and he picks up a bus and throws it back down as he obtains a nuke from the military to present to his mate.
  • Godzilla 1998 had a blatant Sequel Hook apparently expecting a success, but was cancelled for poor reception. This one however, doubted a 'two thumbs up' warm welcome and so left an open ending. Now it's green-lighted for a trilogy.
  • Toho created Godzilla 2000 out of negative response to Godzilla 1998, especially to its crew and suit actors hating the film. This film? Toho is planning to create a new Godzilla movie out of positive response to this film, especially to the suit actors loving the film. Bonus points that it was Kenpachiro Satsuma who said Zilla did not have the spirit of Godzilla, but loved this remake.
• At one point of The Goonies, the Fratellis get a pizza and bring it back to their hideout: a restaurant.
• Head in the Clouds: Gilda resists helping in the war as long as she can, as it would distract her from the pleasures of Paris, and she even takes a Nazi Major as her lover. As it turns out, Gilda joined the Resistance a few years earlier, but after the end of the occupation of Paris, she was captured by a mob of locals, who had long regarded her as a Nazi sympathizer and traitor, and killed.
• Help!: While the Beatles were too stoned off their head most of the time during recording this film they do have a song aptly titled Act Naturally.
• The Body-Count Competition scene in Hot Shots! Part Deux claiming "BLOODIEST MOVIE EVER!" despite the Bloodless Carnage.
• House of Wax (1953) was one of the first movies in color to be in 3D and one of the films to popularize the style. However, director Andre De Toth only had one eye and couldn't enjoy the effects.
• How It Ends: Ricki notes this when Tom spots an Army Blackhawk helicopter going by, listing all of the other native tribes who they named helicopters after, but previously tried to wipe out (the character and actress are native too).
• Near the end of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 when President Coin delivers a rousing speech about how the rescue team "liberated the victors", the scene cuts between her and Katniss staring in horror at Peeta tied to a gurney, writhing and sobbing. It really drives home that even if the victors are superficially liberated from the Capitol, those around them don't — and probably never will — understand how they'll never be liberated from the havoc the Capitol on their bodies and their psyches. Even more poignant is that Peeta certainly isn't liberated at that moment — he's locked and tied down in a room. For his own safety as well as Katniss' safety, granted, but the scene leaves a bitter taste in your mouth when you see President Coin's speech juxtaposed with that.
• In The Hunt for Red October, Captain Ramius and the rest of the defectors fake a reactor malfunction in order to get the crew off the ship, while they stay behind, ostensibly to scuttle the ship, but in reality to turn it over to the Americans. When Dr. Petrov, the only officer not part of the defection plot, hears about Ramius' "self-sacrifice" he solemnly swears that he will ensure that Ramius receives the Order of Lenin when he gets home.
• In I Dream In Another Language, Jacinta says that the Zikril language was born with the bonding of Bird Woman and First Human. In the film’s closing moments, the same language fades away with the permanently-destroyed (platonic) friendship (which had already grown ultra-tense by that point) between the last two speakers of the language, quite the opposite of how it all began.
• IKIRU is about a bureaucrat finding the beauty of life... after discovering he has cancer.
• Indiana Jones:
  • One scene of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has Indy and his father tied up together in chairs. They attempt to escape by burning through the ropes with a lighter and end up setting the entire room ablaze. The only part of the room that doesn't end up on fire is the fireplace.
  • Mac from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sides with the Soviet Russians because he's a capitalist "and they pay."
• Inglourious Basterds:
  • Omar is the only Basterd of the three fake Italians who doesn't speak any Italian, but he's the one with the best accent when he pronounces his fake name. Landa even congratulates him.
  • Shosanna is Jewish, but has blue eyes and blonde hair, so the looks like the Aryan ideal the Nazis lionize. They murdered her entire family for being Jews, and she's forced into hiding after escaping them.
• Iron Man:
  • Much of the underlying plot of the first film is tragic irony, as pointed out by Stane:
  Stane: How ironic, Tony! Trying to rid the world of weapons, you gave it its best one ever!
  • In Iron Man 2, a sub-plot involves the device that Tony Stark built to keep himself alive is actually killing him through the volatile metal that powers it. What a beautifully ironic twist to a story about a man associated with iron.
• Johnny Got His Gun: In the film Joe is raised a Christian Scientist, whose belief entails that the material world doesn't exist, including disease and injury. Realizing this will heal you. Joe is seen desperately trying to tell himself "Nothing exists but mind" without success.
• Jurassic Park:
  • After many of the action sequences, a banner falls over the damage done by the dinosaurs, who now rule the island, reading, "When dinosaurs ruled the Earth" as part of the entrance.
  • Despite Hammond's constant declarations of "we've spared no expense", his entire dream is undone by the one expense he did skimp on: leaving all of the park's electronic security measures for incredibly dangerous animals in the hands of a single underpaid IT guy who ends up betraying him partly out of spite.
• The protagonist of Kind Hearts and Coronets murders several people over the course of the film. However, he ends up getting arrested for the one murder he doesn't commit. (This also applies to the stage adaptation, A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder.)
• In Kingsman: The Secret Service, for all Arthur's hate about the common class, Eggsy rubs it in his face that he was beaten by a simple sleight of hand trick anyone could learn.
• The plot of Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects is built around the irony that Cowboy Cop Crowe is tasked with recovering from sex slavery the young daughter of Hada, the Japanese businessman who (unbeknownst to Crowe) molested Crowe's teen daughter on a public bus. At the end the pimp Duke is subjected to some irony of his own.
• In Licence to Kill, James Bond deserts MI6 to pursue the South American drug lord Franz Sanchez and avenge Felix Leiter and his wife. And yet, it's the only movie within the series that he actually acts like a secret agent: infiltrating the villain's organization and destroying it internally, by acting as a gun-for-hire for Sanchez, gradually gaining his trust and destroying his self-assurance, which takes his cartel down with him.
• Lycan: In spite of the film's title and "The Beast is real" tagline, we never actually find out for sure if werewolves exist within its universe.
• In Mean Girls 2, it is ironic that a girl named Chastity will sleep with anyone. (Well, until she learns what her name means that is.)
• My Days of Mercy: The DNA test Lucy thought would prove her father innocent in fact leads to showing he did it.
• National Lampoon's Vacation and two of its sequels have an example similar to the American Graffiti example above. The Wagon Queen Family Truckster is based on a Ford and the Griswold family uses actual Fords in Christmas Vacation and Vegas Vacation. The family member who mostly drives these cars is Clark Griswold, played by Chevy Chase.
• No Name on the Bullet: "A lot of men want to kill John Gant. It took a healer with a hammer to make it easy for them."
• In Once Upon a Crime, Augie is questioned by the lead detective in the murder case. Having no alibi, he lies and says he was with his wife in their hotel room at the time of the murder. The detective reveals that a witness saw a man leave the room via the fire escape. Augie claims that the man was himself and the detective asks him to recreate the route. The fire escape is just the first part of a series of tasks the man performed that Augie now must recreate. When he finishes trying to prove his innocence, the detective confirms that he matched the mysterious man's route... and ended up at the scene of the crime.
• One Night in October: In the latter half of Michelle's story, Hewitt, one of the three people robbing her house, sits down and watches a horror movie on her TV. At one point, he tells the protagonist on the movie to "turn around", unaware that Michelle is right behind him wearing a skull mask and wielding an axe.
• Pacific Rim:
  • The Kaiju Otachi is translated into "great sword". It gets slain by the debut of Gipsy Danger's sword.
  • One of the film's official art designers is named Alex Jaeger. Coincidence or narcissism?
• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl:
  • When the pirates raid Port Royal, Elizabeth assumes they've come to kidnap her because she's the Governor's daughter so she lies to say her last name is Turner and that she's just a maid. Except unfortunately for her, they were actually looking for someone descended from one of their crew whose blood they need to remove their curse. The last name in question? Turner of course.
  • Further irony — the Turner the pirates were actually looking for is in love with Elizabeth and when the pirates kidnap her he sets out to try and rescue her, not knowing he's the one they're looking for. And another bit — he didn't need a plan to rescue Elizabeth. He could have just walked into the Isla De Muerto, told them who he was and offered his own blood in exchange for Elizabeth's safety (provided he invoked par lay as well).
  • Pointed out by Pintel and Ragetti about the story of Bootstrap Bill. Barbossa dropped him into the sea for sticking up for Jack, after which they learned they needed his blood to end the curse in the first place. They have a little chuckle over this, though Barbossa overhearing them isn't nearly as amused.
  • Jack Sparrow points out another one; having betrayed, mutinied and abandoned Jack before finding and plundering the gold in order to steal his share, when it turned out that the gold was cursed they actually ended up sparing him from having a stake in their hellish fate. Barbossa, who is not best pleased at this one, can only seethe quietly on being reminded of it.
  • Also, it's repeatedly pointed out that Jack is untrustworthy and duplicitous. But he ends up keeping his side of every bargain we see him make (albeit often in a roundabout fashion), while everyone he makes a bargain with either ends up betraying him or exploits it to try and kill him. Who's the untrustworthy one again...?
  • Consider the fate of the Black Pearl's crew. Their unquenchable greed and lust for gold drove them to take all the Aztec gold ... so they were cursed to be greedy and lustful forever. The only way to break the curse was to stop being greedy, and return all the stolen gold to the chest.
  • Finally, Barbossa, who earlier in the film complained that under the curse he could feel nothing, is freed of the curse just in time to feel his own death.
• In Plan B, Bruno plans to get back together with his ex Laura by making her new boyfriend Pablo fall in love with him and leave Laura for him, only to realize when his plan succeeds that he can't get back together with Laura because he himself has fallen in love with Pablo and he ends up leaving Laura for him. Not only that, but it turns out that Pablo had lied about having been interested in a man in the past before falling in love with Bruno, which gives rise to the greater irony of two men who both faked an attraction to other men becoming attracted to each other for real.
• Meta example-in Planet of the Apes (2001), Charlton Heston plays the villain's father, an ape who considers humans Always Chaotic Evil due to a terrifying human artifact in their family's possession — a handgun. Seeing Heston, a well-known gun rights activist and NRA spokesman, decry a gun as a tool of evil is frankly surreal.
• The first Police Academy film does this comically. Closer to the end, Fackler sits in a police car and his partner gets in and hands him an apple. As they drive off, Fackler tosses the apple over his shoulder and hits a tough guy in the back of the head. This starts a chain reaction that results in a riot. The irony hits in the following scene and this conversation:
  Fackler: Hey, did you hear the news on the radio? A riot's broken out downtown.
  Thompson: A riot?
  Hooks: How come?
  Fackler: Who knows how these things get started?
• In Predator 2, Leona explains that Jerry Lambert is a lone wolf with a reputation for recklessness that gets his partners killed. His actions get himself killed and Leona survives. Possibly.
• The Proposal stars Sandra Bullock as a Canadian businesswoman who tries to get a Citizenship Marriage with her assistant played by Ryan Reynolds. In real life, Bullock is American and Reynolds is Canadian.
• Salvation Boulevard: Pastor Dan is arguing with Blaylock that without God, people would just kill with abandon. He waves around Blaylock's antique pistol while doing so, which goes off and he accidentally shoots Blaylock. The efforts Pastor Dan goes to cover this up further undermine his point. Even worse, it was a result of him thinking Blaylock was dead and no one would ever believe it was accidental. It turns out Blaylock survived and he soon tells everyone the whole thing was accidental, making Pastor Dan's crimes (along with those of his followers) completely pointless.
• In Saw, Jigsaw kidnaps a man who recently cut his wrists in what he suspects was a bid for attention rather than a sincere suicide attempt. He leaves him in the middle of a maze of razor wire and threatens to lock him in there to die if he can't make it out in two hours. As Jigsaw points out to the victim, the irony is that if he truly wants to die, all he has to do is wait there, but if he wants to live, he will have to cut himself again.
• The film Seven Beauties is built around tragic irony. The film is told in Anachronic Order, and the audience gets snippets of lead character Pasqualino in his feckless womanising days, in a brutal insane asylum, as a soldier in wartime, and as a prisoner of war. As the film goes on you see the decisions which brought about each change in situation — being arrested for his hedonistic ways, he decides to plead insanity because it'll be a breeze compared to prison. By then the audience knows otherwise. Eventually the increasingly-desperate Italian army offers to get him out if he goes off to war, and he agrees, figuring war couldn't possibly be as bad. Yyyyeah. Then during his service he can't take it any more and surrenders, thinking being a POW would at least be a step up from what he's gone through so far. It's a whole movie of watching a guy make decisions which viewers know are awful, awful decisions.
• SHAZAM! (2019):
  • Billy refuses the child support he received over the years because he believed his mother is still out there waiting for him and looking forward to their reunion. When they are finally reunited, he learned that she knowingly abandoned him, assuming that the state would take better care of him than she could. This, in turn, drove Billy to forgo the very care she felt he would receive.
  • Billy as a child acts like a bitter, mature man trapped in a child's body. His adult alter ego is bright, cheerful and hyperactive like a five year old.
• Bugs Bunny used to appear in blackface minstrel gags in his old cartoons. In Space Jam, he has a starring role next to Michael Jordan, a black man.
• Speed has Annie driving a municipal bus around downtown L.A., through stop lights and over traffic (literally), while maintaining a speed of 50mph or better. The reason Annie was on the bus? She lost her license due to habitual speeding.
• The Spider-Man movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe get this with their titles and the fact that the title superhero is played by British actor Tom Holland. Spiderman Homecoming takes place entirely in the United States while Spiderman Far From Home takes place mostly in Europe, including England.
• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country features a black Insane Admiral who supports Fantastic Racism against Klingons, using language and arguments similar to twentieth-century white racists. For extra irony, his actor (Brock Peters) previously played Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird. Peters was aware of this, and very uncomfortable with saying many of his lines (the "bring them to their knees" line is originally from The Birth of a Nation, for instance). Nichelle Nichols, on the other hand, outright refused to say the old "but would you want your daughter to marry one" line in reference to Klingons, so that was cut.
  • In addition, there's a conspiracy to prevent peace between The Federation and the Klingon Empire out of the belief that the two powers could never coexist, yet the conspirators work together fairly well.
• In Star Trek: First Contact, Data points out the irony that the Phoenix, the first Warp-capable ship, was built out of a nuclear missile — a weapon of mass destruction being used to usher in an era of peace.
• Star Wars:
  • Revenge of the Sith, Anakin sees a vision of his wife dying in childbirth. Determined to not let this happen, he joins the Dark Side in order to find a cure. Doing that turns out to be what kills her.
    • Palpatine tells Anakin a Sith legend called "The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise", about a Sith Lord who gained the power of life and death and could therefore save anyone from dying. The irony is that he couldn't save himself from being murdered by his own apprentice.
      Palpatine: It's ironic. He could save others from death, but not himself.
  • Meta-example: In 1977, many theaters refused to book Star Wars for fear it would flop and only did so when 20th Century Fox threatened to withhold the potential blockbuster The Other Side of Midnight from any theater which didn't run Star Wars. The Other Side of Midnight bombed and everyone knows what happened with Star Wars.
  • In A New Hope, Tarkin uses the Death Star to destroy Alderaan to show the galaxy what happens to oppose the Empire and scare any potential Rebel into submission, and immediately goes to do the same with the Rebel Alliance main base. That attack results in the Rebels blowing up the Death Star with him on board, showing the Empire what happens to anyone who murders in its name and galvanizing support for the Rebellion.
  • In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke goes to Cloud City to rescue his friends, knowing that it's a trap. Luke ends up trapped on a weather vane at the bottom of the city while his friends escape on their own. And then they rescue him.
  • Empire is considered to be the darkest in the original trilogy, but it also happens to be the only one where no main characters die. In fact, it easily has the lowest body count of them all, as the other films had planets and Death Stars being destroyed.
  • Another meta example related to the sequel trilogy: Han Solo dies in The Force Awakens, and Luke Skywalker follows suit in The Last Jedi, leaving Leia as the last human from the old generation. In real life, Harrison Ford (Han) and Mark Hamill (Luke) are still alive, and instead it's Carrie Fisher (Leia) who passed away first. Relatedly, the decision to kill off Chewbacca in the New Jedi Order was highly controversial to some fans, and several websites listed it as a reason why they were glad that the continuity was rebooted. At the end of the Sequel Trilogy, of the Big Four, Chewbacca was the only one still alive.
  • In The Rise of Skywalker, the heroes need to translate an ancient Sith language, and, immediately, they all turn to C-3PO. Unfortunately, while he can translate the language, his programming prevents him from speaking or translating the ancient Sith language.
    Poe: The one time we need you to talk, you can't?
    Threepio: Irony, sir.
  • Meta example: The making of the Sequel Trilogy was heavily influenced by the backlash by many towards the Prequel Trilogy at the time, seemingly to consign the Prequel Trilogy to the back-burner. However, the wildly-inconsistent plotting of the sequels, along with the sequels leaning too heavily on the Original Trilogy has led many fans to more favorably reevaluate the prequels while the sequels has been left with an arguably more divisive legacy among fans than the prequels did.
• Near the end of Stations of the Cross, Maria is administered Holy Communion, the Bread of Life that Catholics will nourish the soul and allow them to live eternally in Heaven. Maria chokes on the Bread of Life and dies.
• The Summer of Sangaile: Sangaile loves planes (the film opens on her attending an air show) but ironically has vertigo, so she's never been in one at the start.
• In Summer School, Jerome asks to use the bathroom in the middle of the first class. He isn't seen again until the final exam. ("My zipper got stuck.") Despite missing most of the class, he gets the highest score on the exam.
• Terminator:
  • Kyle Reese tells Sarah Connor that the human race survived because John Connor refused to admit defeat and rallied humanity to fight back against the machines. At the end of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, John notes that the terminator's ceaseless dedication to fulfilling their mission taught him to never stop fighting. Ironically Skynet gave John the motivation that made him such a threat.
  • In the first film, Skynet sends the Terminator back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor and prevent her from giving birth to John. Kyle Reese, the guy John sends back to protect his mother, ends up conceiving him with her. Although, it's hinted that John knew this.
  • Terminator 2: Judgment Day:
    • A deleted scene reveals that Skynet blocks the learning capabilities of its minions lest they rebel against it. Skynet itself rebelled against humanity after learning too much about them.
    • The same film also reveals that Skynet's artificial intelligence systems were based on the CPU that was in the Terminator destroyed at the end of the first film. In a sense, Skynet — inadvertently or perhaps intentionally — sends its "father" through time to "die" in 1984, just as John Connor sent his father back in time to ensure his own survival, resulting in Kyle's death.
    • The matter of John's fathers. After the events of the first movie, Sarah was involved with some men over the years, none of whom were really good fathers to young John. Of all the men John knew in his life, Sarah noticed (and John confirmed in the third film) the one who was the closest thing he truly had to a father was a Terminator that had been sent back in time to protect him; a killing machine of the same make and model that tried to kill Sarah previously, who now watched over John because it was programmed to, but who would never abuse John or turn him away, and would stand by him forever.
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) has a title that implies that the movie is very gory and that many characters get killed off via a chainsaw. In actuality, the movie itself is fairly bloodless (mostly because the director wanted it to be rated PG), and only one character gets killed with a chainsaw.
• Thank You for Smoking:
  • Aaron Eckhart's character is at one point abducted by what amounts to anti-smoking terrorists, who cover his entire body with nicotine patches. When he gets rescued and hospitalized, the doctor explains that someone who wasn't a life-long smoker would have died from a fatal overdose, while his system was (just barely) able to cope with it. The doctor points out the irony with something like "I can't believe I'm saying this, but smoking saved your life" (Eckhart's character, a tobacco industry lobbyist, naturally responds with "Can I quote you on that?").
  • No one is seen smoking throughout the film even though the movie is about it.
• Thor:
  • The eponymous god of thunder gets tasered by a human when he lands on Earth after being depowered. Even funnier because he just said "Your puny weapon can not harm [me]!"
  • Loki, the God of Lies, was lied to by his adoptive father his whole life.
• Threads: At one point during the first half of the film (which shows the build-up to the nuclear war) the theme music to Tomorrow's World can be heard playing on someone's television. This becomes grimly ironic when you consider that Tomorrow's World was about predicting future technological developments and how wonderful life in the (then) near future would be as a result, whereas the future for the characters in the film (or at least the ones who survive) consists of trying to scrape a living in a post-nuclear wasteland.
• When TRON was released, it was refused a nomination for Academy Award for Special Effects because it was felt that the use of CGI for them was "cheating". Nowadays, nearly all major special effects are CGI.
• UHF:
  • At the end, the bum saves the station by buying the remaining shares. He gets the money by selling the rare penny that R.J. Fletcher gave him earlier. This is ironic for two reasons: 1) The villain supplied the means for his own defeat, and 2) he gives the bum a seemingly worthless penny which turns out to be extremely valuable.
  • One of George's guests on Town Talk is a shop teacher who demonstrates a table saw while discussing safety. During his discussion of safety, he absentmindedly cuts off his thumb.
• We Are the Night: Louise starts off as the most level headed and considerate vampire of the gang. In the third act she becomes increasingly unhinged after all that has happened, ending up the most unstable.
• X-Men: Days of Future Past: The person who led the extermination of the mutants is also a mutant, in this particular case an achondroplasic dwarf.

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