There Is No Kill Like Overkill / Live-Action Films

• Casino: A number of scenes include especially brutal deaths, but none moreso than the climatic scene, where one of the Villain Protagonists Nicky Santoro and his brother, Dominick, are lured to a cornfield where they are brutally clubbed to near death by mobsters working for Nicky's bosses, who had finally lost his patience with Nicky. The mobsters don't simply beat the Santoro brothers, but they continue striking both of them dozens of times with full force, long after injuries were serious enough to be life-threatening, let alone send whatever “cease and desist” message they were hoping to send to Nicky. In fact, Dominick – whose beating Nicky was forced to watch before the mob shifts their attention to him – was virtually unconscious (but still breathing) when the mobsters were finished, only to get clubbed a couple more times (including the fatal blow to the skull) when Nicky cried out for mercy on his brother. They stop just short of actually beating Nicky to death, but only so he can be Buried Alive.
• Terminator
  • The Terminator:
    • The title character seeks out women named Sarah Connor, and shoots one several times, starting with the head shot. Later, he attacks the police station where Sarah's taken shelter, single-handedly killing almost all the police officers stationed there.
    • And in the end, Sarah Connor shoots the Terminator, blows him up with a gasoline-laden semi-, and crushes him in an industrial press.
  • In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the T-1000 has his head blown apart, his body frozen and shattered into fragments, and finally melted in a vat of molten metal.
  • Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines has the T-850 driving a massive helicopter and have the bottom of it scrape along the metal floor, hitting a pursing T-X. This removes most of her poly-alloy skin, but she breaks out of the wreckage and even detaches her own legs in order to pursue her target. It's only until the T-850 takes out one of his hydrogen fuel cells, which he proceeds to jam straight into her mouth, is when the T-X is finally killed by getting blown up by a miniature nuclear explosion.
• The Italian Job (1969) has a famous case of someone being called out for overkill: once Arthur blows up the panel truck the thieves have been practicing with, Charlie complains "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"
• It's all the more chilling for its quiet, guilt-tinged delivery when Alfred in The Dark Knight reveals how his mercenary squad finally caught the Robin Hood-style bandit they were hunting after they couldn't find him and realized he didn't care about money:
  Alfred: We burned the forest down.
• The 2010 Live-Action Adaptation of Space Battleship Yamato seems to run on this trope. The ship is armed with enough gun turrets to throw a wall of bullets in every direction and destroys an entire fleet this way. Not to mention the ship's iconic BFG, the Wave-Motion Gun is powerful enough to create a massive shockwave that creates a crater when it's fired near the Earth's surface. And that says nothing about the damage it does to the enemy ship on the receiving end. Then there's the powerful tremors felt in the Earth Defense Forces underground base, knocking out nearly all communications.
  • To be fair, the anime version of the Yamato is just as badassed. Perhaps even more so.
• As Hannibal so eloquently put it, "overkill is underrated."
• The James Bond films are archetypal for their rather messy deaths, although most of them are not caused by Bond himself or are Karmic Deaths. Then Licence to Kill upped the ante with a Darker and Edgier Bond who had no qualms with dispatching enemies in the most violent way possible, culminating with sending the Big Bad to Hell via an exploding tanker truck.
  • Bond's cars are a special case themselves - a self-destructing Lotus, a BMW being sawn in half, an Aston Martin that gets rotated 7 times, a brand-new Lincoln Continental being crushed into a cube...
  • A prominent example of a villain choosing overkill is Karl Stromberg, who has a table gun in his dining room designed to fire an explosive projectile straight into the crotch of whoever's across from him. Bond manages to dodge the shot and shoves his PPK into the tube to show him what he thinks of the idea...
  • Let's not forget Hugo Drax, who gets shot with a poison dart and ejected into space, leaving a mystery as to what killed him first - poison or asphyxiation?
  • Also, in Goldfinger, Bond just barely talks his way out of being burned in half with a laser—starting at his crotch. Goldfinger, taking no chances the next time, handcuffs him to an atomic bomb, which is then locked inside a bank vault, just to make sure.
• The fate of Yuri, the main villain of No Retreat, No Surrender 2: After being flung into a pit full of crocodiles, a jeep then falls on him while he's being devoured alive. And the jeep explodes, for good measure.
• The Godfather:
  • The death of Sonny Corleone is the straightest example. Ambushed at a toll booth by a dozen Tommy Gun-wielding gangsters, he is 1) shot several dozen times inside his car, 2) then shot some more outside the car, 3) then shot on the ground after he died, then 4) had his face kicked in for good measure. The commentary for the film confirms that this is all a justified trope: they wanted to make sure Sonny stayed dead, given that his elderly father Vito had been repeatedly shot earlier in the film and survived (and not for the first time, as the book chronicles), and that Sonny was known to be a tough bastard. (The generally accepted number of times Sonny had been shot is 147, incidentally.)
  • At the end of the movie, the montage massacre of the heads of the Five Families during the Baptism scene, along with Moe Greene and Tattaglia's mistress who had the misfortune of sharing his bed at the wrong time... and Carlo Rizzi, Michael's brother-in-law, for his role in Sonny's death. The body count for the end of Part II is relatively minor compared to Part I but aside from Hyman Roth's death, there was no real need for Michael to have the other two killed... including his own brother Fredo. It would take the mob boss massacre orchestrated by Joey Zaza in Part III to top the whole trilogy.
• GoodFellas: All of the deaths are extremely brutal, but none moreso than an infamous scene where Tommy shoots Stacks in the back of the head at the latter's apartment, then shoots Stacks three more times after he collapsed on the floor, dead. Later, Henry re-enters the apartment – just before he and Tommy leave for an appointment – and shoots Stacks' corpse five more times.
• In Training Day, Alonzo Harris is a lesser version of The Godfather as a deliberate Shout-Out: first the Russians crash his car, then they shoot him in the car, and after Alonzo leaves the vehicle, battered, he is shot brutally on full-auto.
• Predator might be a borderline case in that the protagonists are fighting an almost invisible opponent and just happen to have his approximate position known. But then, the six people are emptying two assault rifles, two sub-machine guns, a grenade launcher, and a minigun at a patch of jungle over the next 40 seconds, all the while reloading and continuing to fire. And they didn't even get a good hit.
  • This scene was utterly bizarre for a couple of reasons -1. only one of the characters even saw the creature or even had an idea of where it went. The rest just spend the entire time randomly shooting in the general direction just because Mac was doing so when they arrived. 2. The team was stuck in the jungle with only the resources they were carrying on their back. Considering #1, this seems like a tremendous waste of ammo. However, the very team itself could be considered to be this trope since they seem to be very well armed for what is supposed to be a commando extraction mission on foot. Not only do they have firearms, grenades, etc., they also have a significant amount of claymore mines and other explosives.
• RoboCop (1987):
  • Just about everything. Giving a security robot Gatling guns? Sure, why not? How about making a new police robot as tall as a auditorium? Sure...
  • Given that RoboCop was rebuilt from the remains of a murdered police officer, it was kind of a foregone conclusion that Alex Murphy would die in the line of duty in a very horrific way. When ambushed and taken captive by Clarence Boddicker and his gang in a steel mill, 1) Boddicker shoots Murphy's right hand off with a shotgun at point blank range, 2) Murphy stumbles a bit, clutching the stump with his left hand, 3) Emil Antonowsky shoots Murphy's entire right arm off at the shoulder with another shotgun, 4) Emil and the other gang members - Joe Cox, Steve Minh and Leon Nash - empty their shotguns into Murphy's torso, 5) Murphy is still not dead (probably because he's got a bulletproof vest on), so Boddicker pulls a pistol and puts a bullet in his head at point-blank range (which probably qualifies as a Mercy Kill at this point).
  • Said security robot provides a great example of this trope as his first demonstration has him malfunctioning and eventually pumping an executive full of lead (again: thousands of live rounds were loaded for a boardroom test!) until his wires are pulled from the inside.
    • A commenter does the math on how many bullets were blasted into Kinney before the ED-209's power was cut. 88 shots, twin machine guns on both arms = 352 bullets.
• Ending of Bonnie and Clyde, with the titular characters meeting the business end of More Dakka from the police posse. Except this is also Truth in Television.
• Similarly, most of the hero deaths in Dillinger (1973) apply, though Pretty Boy Floyd (repeatedly machine gunned as he runs across a field) and Homer Van Meter (shot by a dozen heavily-armed farmers) deserve special mention.
• In Big Game, Hazar seems fond of it.
  • He shoots the tour guide with a surface-to-air missile designed to take down passenger planes, blowing up the man and a huge chunk of forest around him.
  • The bomb he plants aboard Air Force One vaporizes the entire lake the plane's in — and it's not like it's a small pond.
• In Rambo IV, we are introduced to an un-exploded Tallboy bomb as the Mercenaries trek through the jungle toward the massacred Karen village. Later John Rambo sets up a Claymore next to the bomb while Burmese soldiers chase him. The Tallboy was developed by the British in WW2 (more specifically, by Barnes Wallis, he of the Dambusters' Bouncing Bomb) to destroy hardened bunkers and was at the time the single most concentrated repository of High-Explosive in a single weapon. The Claymore by itself is capable of invoking the Chunky Salsa Rule on everyone within a dozen yards, when it went off and caused the Tallboy to sympathetically detonate the results were... impressive.
  • At one point Rambo commandeers a jeep turret on which sits a Browning A2 anti-aircraft machine gun. The first thing he does is absolutely destroy another soldier in the jeep by liberally unloading into him about two dozen rounds, from a gun whose each bullet will blow a big hole into a human torso. Sure enough, the soldier's bottom half - and some gore on the gun's shield - are all that's left. Rambo then directs the gun's absurd firepower onto the infantry below, causing Ludicrous Gibs aplenty.
  • During said gunfight Rambo notices a patrol boat and targets it with the machine gun, utterly annihilating the crew and making it wholly inoffensive. The Karen rebels, not quite content with that, blow it sky-high with a rocket launcher.
• Team America: World Police: Team America uses machine guns, rocket launchers, and missiles to kill terrorists, even if they are in a crowded city. They wind up destroying all the monuments and destroying the town, but hey, the bad guys are dead!
• In the Robert Rodriguez film adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City the character Hartigan, after knifing one of the primary villains of the piece in the gut and proceeding to "take his weapons away from him... both of them," graphically and with his bare hands, then begins to brutally beat the bad guy's face in until "After a while all I'm doing is punching wet chips of bone into the floorboards. So I stop."
  • He did take Junior's other 'weapon' away once already, ineffectively, some years ago. This time, he was just making sure.
• In Sukiyaki Western Django, Hiyomuri shoots a boy's father dead in front of him, then shoots him 4 more times once he's hit the ground and his wife is crouching over the body, who he then attempts to rape because he likes the look of her bathed in her husband's blood.
• In Pet Sematary Two, after Edward Furlong's father kills the revived corpse of the sheriff, he leaves the house to go to search for his son. But just as he's about to open the door to his pickup, he stops, goes back in the house, empties the clip, reloads, empties the clip again, then leaves in his pickup! Zombies: Always Make Sure.
• In The Gamers, the protagonists backstab an old rival with a ballista.
• Mr. Grocer's favorite method of assassination in Grosse Pointe Blank.
• In Outlander, Kainan's people do orbital bombardment on a planet just to kill its natural inhabitants. Of course, given the amount of damage a single Moorwen did to the colony, this is perhaps a Justified Trope in retrospect.
• Freddy vs. Jason:
  • One of Jason's first victims is the Jerkass Trey, who he impales somewhere around a half-dozen times with his machete. Afterward, noticing Trey's death spasms, Jason sets down his machete, grabs both ends of the bed, and breaks it (and Trey) in half.
  • Let's just say it; Jason Voorhees is the patron saint of this trope. Especially when played by Kane Hodder.
  • In Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Tommy Jarvis hacks Jason Voorhees into little pieces. Then, in Part VI, he comes back, and impales him with a rod. That probably wasn't such a good idea.
  • Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday starts with the FBI siccing a small army on Jason, who absolutely unload on him with pistol and machine gun fire, shotgun blasts, and an airstrike. And even that doesn't permanently kill him!
• Halloween:
  • Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers has Michael preparing to kill a bunch of sanitarium employees by overlooking a tray filled with medical tools. At first, it looks like he's going to grab a scalpel, but, having apparently gotten tips from Jason Voorhees, he decides to grab a huge machete (that was there for some reason) instead.
  • In Rob Zombie's Halloween II (2009):
    • Michael stabs a nurse in the back. And then does it again. And again, and again, until after about an entire minute filled with stabbings, he rams the knife into her skull and leaves it stuck there.
    • In the director's cut, Michael is killed when the cops shoot him with a full barrage of bullets, when the first couple of shots alone likely would've done him in. Then again, while this Michael is no longer Immune to Bullets, he can still take quite a bit of punishment (up to and including surviving being shot in the face), so overkill in this case is playing it safe.
  • In the latest Halloween movie, Halloween Ends, when the citizens of Haddonfield finally get the upper hand on The Shape once and for all - shot, stabbed, legs crushed with a fridge - they take his now dead body and throw it into a car crusher. Michael Myers, at the end of the movie, is nothing but a pulpy liquid.
• In the end of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey when Christopher Robin offers Pooh Bear himself instead of Maria whom he is about to kill he says "You left!" to him before slitting her throat with a kitchen knife and stabbing her corpse anyway, letting Christopher Robin escape him.
• Portrayed in a video game within Inside Man. A young boy makes his alter ego shoot many times at what must be an already dead man's head, and then he puts a grenade in the man's mouth. The lead bank robber, who is chatting with him at the time, is appalled.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Logan brings down a helicopter and its mutant operator, who is then incapacitated and trapped. He could use his adamantium claws to stab his helpless victim, but decides instead to blow up the entire helicopter in a massive display of pyrotechnics.
  • In X-Men: Days of Future Past, this seems to be the Future Sentinel’s general philosophy when taking out targets. As such they commit a string of ruthlessly brutal and outright cruel executions during the film, seemingly to ensure their targets are taken out for good. There is some cold justification for this considering how much punishment some mutants can take, though it doesn't make what they do any less horrific.
• The Naked Gun:
  • In the first movie, the Big Bad falls to his death. Then is run over by a bus. And then crushed by a steamroller. And then trampled by a marching band playing "Louie Louie". And Drebin's boss starts to cry, saying "My father went the same way!"
  • At the beginning of the same movie, O. J. Simpson's character is shot six times, then hits his head on a pipe, burns his hand on a stove, leans against a freshly painted door, gets his other hand caught in a window, falls face first into a wedding cake, and then steps in a bear trap before finally falling into the harbor. He survives.
  • During a rooftop gunfight in the sequel, Nordberg (O. J. Simpson) assembles his weapon: It starts a Desert Eagle pistol, turns into an M60 machine gun, then a Browning M1919A4, and finally a Bofors 40mm AA gun. He fires it once immediately after the gunfight is over, blowing a hole in a building.
• Star Trek: First Contact:
  • Picard empties an entire Tommy Gun magazine against a Borg drone on the holodeck, and after he runs out of ammo he even runs up to the (now completely dead) Borg and prepares to smack him with the weapon. Lily, quite sensibly, stops him and says "I think you got him."
• Star Trek (2009):
  • The Narada, Nero's ship, is capable of wiping out whole fleets of Klingon Warbirds and drilling down to a planet's core. (The drill is left over from when it used to be a mining ship.) As soon as he gets his hands on Red Matter, a substance that can create artificial black holes, his raging overkill tendencies just get that much worse. He starts destroying planets with it. Just a bit of an Omnicidal Maniac.
  • At the end of the film, the destruction of the Narada is another example. After Spock crashes Spock Prime's ship into the Narada, its payload of Red Matter detonates into a colossal black hole that the Narada is conveniently at the center of. After Nero spits in the face of Kirk's offer to evacuate his ship, the Enterprise finishes the job by unloading upon the Narada with its entire arsenal.
• Star Trek Beyond: Used multiple times.
  • Early in the movie, when the swarm attacks the Enterprise, thousands of impacts effortlessly overwhelm her shields and systematically strip her of deflectors, phasers, FTL propulsion and impulse drive, forcing her to crash on the planet.
  • Kirk gets some payback by flipping the entire wrecked saucer on Krall's accomplice responsible for luring the ship to the nebula, smashing her like an insignificant bug under the ship's bulk.
  • Krall's murder of Ensign Syl using a weapon of mass destruction.
  • The even larger swarm attack against Starbase Yorktown.
  • Kirk finally gets his back when he uses some Beastie Boys to sabotage the swarm with The Power of Rock.
  • And finally, Krall is defeated by getting ejected out into space where he gets consumed by the same WMD he used on Syl, until the Starfleet emblem that he was wearing on his chest is all that remains.
• Star Wars:
  • According to the background material for Attack of the Clones, the missile equipped Hail Fire Droids were used by the Intergalactic Banking Clan for 'debt collection'. Don't pay your bills on time and missiles will blow your house up.
  • Revenge of the Sith: After Aalya Secura is shot by the Clone troopers, they continue to shoot at her dead body afterwards.
  • A New Hope has the Death Star Superlaser The amount of energy required to destroy a planet is some eight - nine orders of magnitude greater than what killed the dinosaurs, and seven - eight more than required to just kill everyone. And the Death Star gives five - six orders of magnitude more than that. Not to mention, that they could have cracked the surface, or burned away the atmosphere, using a lot less resources (A Hyperdrive with the safety's turned off, for instance).
    • Justified by the kind of defenses planets in the Star Wars galaxy may have: Alderaan had a planetary shield that survived the Superlaser blast for a tenth of second. The designers still went overboard, but they had a reason for that.
    • Darth Vader: "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force."
    • Also justified by the fact that it was supposed to be a massively vulgar display of power which would get the attention of anyone even considering revolt. Much of the Expanded Universe states that they succeeded, but not quite the way Tarkin had hoped. His intention was that everyone would be too scared to oppose the Empire. (In his own words, "Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.") Instead, because the weapon itself was destroyed his plan was a disaster. His monstrous action against a peaceful planet ultimately inspired more anger at the Empire than fear of its wrath.
  • The Force Awakens gives us Starkiller Base, which goes one step further than the Death Star and blows up every damn planet in a given star system at once — from halfway across the galaxy! The power issues do get addressed here, though: the base is solar-powered, as in it absorbs a star to fuel its weapon... and if you take a look at the novelization, you find it rips its targets down to the subatomic level and scatters them across all the Universe and back.
  • Rogue One has Tarkin using the Death Star Superlaser to get rid of Krennic. It also qualifies as complete overkill as a measure to deal with the Rebels on Scarif, as there were less than a hundred actually in the planet's atmosphere at the time the weapon was fired while thousands of Imperial personnel were present and most of the Rebels had already been killed by those Imperial troops. The superlaser is literally fired directly through the antenna deck where the wounded Krennic is lying, and seeing as that was a less than ideal aiming point to wipe out the remaining Rebels (though the sheer size of the shockwave did the job anyway) there's no way this was a coincidence.
  • The Last Jedi: When Luke walks out on the battlefield alone to meet Kylo Ren, Kylo doesn't mess around: he orders the entire First Order army to blast Luke to smithereens.
    General Hux: Do you think you got him?
    • Subverted when Luke survives the rain of lasers thanks to the fact that he was not technically present. When the smoke clears, he calmly brushes a bit of dust off his robes.
• Ernest Scared Stupid:
  • Ernest goes to his con-artist friends for help and they sell him an enormous amount of fake anti-troll equipment. It turns out he only needed milk, but it's still impressively like overkill.
  Ernest: (coming down the stairs with what looks like a whole lot of fishing gear, strapped with wires and making whirring sounds.) You see before you the state-of-the-art troll-fighter of tomorrow. This multi-directional unitized high-tech fighting machine is toll-free, mucus-free and comes equipped with fifteenmillion megabytes of double-density wayfer-thin alloy forming a virtual reality of modern troll extermination. (He heaves the large device he's carrying gun-like on his shoulder into his hands in a dramatic pose.) Need I say more? (He glances down at Lady Hackmoore who is decidedly unimpressed).
  • Really, for not knowing about the whole milk thing, Ernest had overkill coming out the whazzoo. He set up traps in dumpsters for that troll!
    Tom: Fourteen cans of troll-away spray nineteen ninety-five apiece. Two Bolivian Army slingshots, nine ninety-five each... troll ninja ninchucks... slime-proof troll gloves... chopped troll bait... fifteen no-troll strips... one trolling motor... for a grand total of...
    Ernest: Does that include the giant album of every troll love song ever written?
  • Also, when they were building the treehouse. They had pizza tossers, dog-food gatling guns and a helicopter bomber.
• The fate of Cyrus the Virus in Con Air: beaten to within an inch of his life, smashed through a bridge on the extended ladder of a moving firetruck, gets electrocuted after he falls off the ladder, dumped on a conveyor belt, and his head smashed by a piledriver (the machine, not the wrestling move). He doesn't get better.
• District 9 features several varieties of alien weapons. Most result in Ludicrous Gibs, all work on this principle. And it is oh so satisfying.
  • One of the least powerful alien guns displayed is a compressed air cannon that can throw a grown man dozens of feet into the air. A Prawn Rail Gun can blow heads and limbs off with contemptuous ease and reduce military-grade body armour so they may as well just be wearing t-shirts, and the Mini-Mecha used by Wikus in the final battle has a BFG version of this gun as well as a Lightning Gun and a Macross Missile Massacre launcher. What makes this really terrifying is these alien weapons that real life special forces would kill to get their hands on are implied to be the alien equivalent of jury-rigged prison slingshots. Imagine what the aliens' actual military has.
• In Inglourious Basterds, Hitler and Goebbels were riddled with bullets, blown up with dynamite, and the cinema they were in was burned to the ground. Other high-ranking Nazi officers suffered similar fates as well, although not as bad.
• Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet. Hamlet not only stabs Claudius with his fencing sword, he also drops a chandelier on him and, while Claudius is pinned down by said chandelier, force-feeds him poison.
• The Alien series:
  • In Aliens, Ripley recommends nuking the site from orbit to make absolutely sure that no xenomorphs escape.
    • the Alien queen gets all her eggs shot, burned, or blown up, barely escapes being nuked, then is thrown out the airlock by Ripley's wearable forklift.
  • In Alien: Resurrection, Johner shoots at a little spider with his sidearm.
• In the spoof film Wrongfully Accused, Leslie Nielsen's character is convicted of a murder he didn't commit, and is sentenced to be executed "buffet style": Hanged, lethally-injected, electrocuted, and placed before a firing squad.
• In Bounty Killer, Drifter kills his ex-wife by shooting her with a shotgun at virtually point-blank range and then shooting a massive corporate logo off its support wires so that it falls and literally crushes the woman's head.
• Steven Seagal is made of this trope. See the climax of Marked for Death. Seagal grabs the Big Bad, gouges out his eyes using his thumbs, throws him through a wall, breaks his back over his knee, and finally sends him down an elevator shaft, where he lands on a spike.
• King Dinosaur has a group of astronauts exploring a rogue planet that's drifted into the solar system, and discovering a giant iguana among its native animals. After being forced to flee from it, one of the astronauts calmy announces "I've brought the atom bomb", and they proceed to nuke the giant lizard. As stock footage of a mushroom cloud fills the screen, the heroes proudly announce, without a trace of irony, that "we've brought civilization to Nova."
• Final Destination: After the cast cheats Death, they begin to die off one by one. Most of these deaths were simple death by bus, decapitation, etc., except for one. For some reason, Death seems to really hate Ms. Lewton, the teacher. First her computer explodes, which lodges a sharp piece of glass into her throat, then the spark from the explosion causes fire which spreads inside her house. As she staggers, she falls down and manages to get stabbed by her own kitchen knife, then the gas cooker door blows open, spewing out gas. Then to top it all off, thanks to the gas, the entire house explodes. Sure you don't want to divert a meteorite to crash into the wreckage just to be absolutely sure, Death?
• Der Clown - Payday:
  • How do you kill the remaining two villains? Bomb the two-engined cargo plane they're in with gold bars until it explodes in a huge fireball.
  • In the pilot of the series, they're shooting bazookas at people during one shootout.
• In Ghostbusters II, we learn that Vigo the Carpathian was "poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disemboweled, & drawn and quartered" (replied Peter Venkman upon hearing this, "Ouch."). After all that, he still managed to say a few words before his head died... basically declaring that even this wouldn't be enough eventually. He came darn close.
• The Self-Destruct Mechanism for Resident Evil: Degeneration probably counts. In sequence, it consists of: drenching the contaminated areas, up to and including the whole facility, in flammable decontamination fluid, igniting said fluid, dropping the contaminated sections down a 3000ft deep shaft, blowing them up again, and then, if the whole place is contaminated, sealing everything under a steel cover thick and tough enough to withstand a nuclear blast. Admittedly, they are working with some of the most lethal infectious pathogens on the planet, but it's still a little overboard. Considering what has happened in Resident Evil before when these lethal infectious pathogens get out, you can never be too careful.
• Undercover Brother: Mr. Feather is dropped out of a helicopter over the ocean. Just before falling hundreds of feet (the impact alone of which would've killed him instantly) a great white shark leaps out of the water, and eats him.
• In 300 and Hero (2002), Leonidas and Nameless are each killed with a Rain of Arrows plentiful enough to fell a whole regiment. Though in Leonidas' case, he was with a regiment. Most of them had died by that point, but still!
• The captain of the salvage team in Event Horizon, after having found out that the titular ship was possessed by infernal forces, was inclined to fire missiles at it until it's vaporized.
• In Shooter, a Gun Nut recounts the story of a sniper who was infamous for his brutality on the battlefield. The opposing side despised him so much that when they corner the sniper in the building, instead of trying to flush him out, they just bombarded it with enough artillery to level an entire city block. This is standard tactics for dealing with snipers, just not usually while they're in urban areas.
• Letters from Iwo Jima is a rare example of overkill being shown from the receiving end.
  • It's POV Prequel, Flags of Our Fathers shows the business end in detail for around half a minute. Everything from medium caliber Anti-Air guns to the largest-caliber 16-inch battleship shells are practically thrown at the island in full force, both before and during the invasion of Iwo Jima.
• Die Hard:
  • The series has VERY pragmatic "terrorists" (there's always a twist on what they really are in each movie, usually thieves). Even when McClane was a nobody, and when the bad guys thought it was just a random guy, they took no chances and attempted to kill him several times, prompting John's Properly Paranoid moments on the walkie talkie.
  • Then there's a scene in the second movie where the bad guys shoot at an airplane cockpit with machine guns, filling it with bullet holes, and then throw all their grenades just for good measure. When they see him parachuting out of the explosion, they just call him (again pragmatically) "Lucky Bastard".
• Swarmed
  • One character goes after a wasp with a double-barreled shotgun after it kills her boss, the mayor. It takes three tries, but she does eventually kill it... after destroying a chandelier, corkboard, and an office chair.
  • Later they graduate to flamethrowers, and end up blowing up the swarm with about six propane tanks. Soaked in lighter fluid.
• In Bruges: Ray kills the priest with many, many gunshots, even though he was at close range. A few of those unnecessary shots had gone off-target and killed a little kid.
• What does it take to defeat Shadow Moon in All Riders vs. Dai Shocker? The All Rider Kick - twenty-six Rider Kicks, performed en masse by the protagonists of every Kamen Rider series from the original through Decade. Overkill? Sure. Moment of Awesome? You bet your Scarf Of Ass Kicking it is.
• Kamen Rider:
  • The death of a revived Doras in Kamen Rider ZO isn't quite as over-the-top, but close. He gets taken out by no less than twelve Kamen Riders, ten of whom were in their Super Modes, hitting him with their respective finishing attacks.
    • A feat nearly equaled in the Chou Den-O Trilogy, where Diend's Complete Form summons copies of eight movie-exclusive Riders, with all nine of them performing their finishers en masse. The opponent in question wasn't even nearly as strong as Doras, making this an even bigger case of overkill.
  • Kamen Rider Zi-O movies:
    • Kamen Rider Heisei Generations FOREVER: At the film's climax, Tid/Another Ultimate Kuuga proceeds to get Rider Kicked by all 20 lead Heisei Riders in their standard forms, after he deemed them to be nothing more than fictional characters.
    • Kamen Rider Zi-O: Over Quartzer: Taken even further when Kamen Rider Barlckxs (who had augmented himself with the power of Bio-Rider and J to become an enormous water-based threat) is defeated by 21 Kamen Riders, with 19 of them (Kuuga - Build) in their Final Forms, Zi-O in his Oma Form and Geiz in his normal form.
• Subverted, sort of, in Looney Tunes: Back in Action:
  ACME Chairman: You see, if the Train of Death doesn't kill him, then those crates of TNT will. Not to mention the 2-tonne anvil hanging over his head, and- Oh, look. There's the Pendulum of Doom! What's the Pendulum of Doom doing there?! I did not order the Pendulum of Doom! It's overkill! Get rid of it!
  • He's talking to Wile E. Coyote, by the way.
• In the climactic shootout of John Woo's A Better Tomorrow II, one mook gets shot more than 20 times.
• In Beverly Hills Cop, drug dealer Victor Maitland gets shot about twenty times by Foley and Bogomil at the climax.
• In The Transporter, there's an attempt at killing Frank Martin at home. Since he's got a reputation of being badass, it involves thousands of machine gun rounds and three missiles. He survives by simply not being there.
• The Matrix:
  • The helicopter scene is this. Then again, shooting at Agents with a minigun for several seconds straight is absolutely justified.
  • And the famous lobby scene. You really start to wonder whether the advantages of carrying a loaded and ready gun outweigh the rather more severe disadvantages of having far less ammunition to work with, as well as the sheer amount of weight and bulk that carrying over a dozen guns would impose on the wearer.
• After Harley knocks out Brother Bob with his own monster truck in Monster Man, Adam takes the wheel and proceeds to drive over him again and again until he is nothing but bloody paste.
• Burt Gummer of the Tremors franchise lives and breathes this trope.
  • In the first Tremors, he and his wife unload multiple machine guns, assault rifles, an elephant gun, and even a flare gun into a Graboid. Then, he makes home made bombs that're powerful enough to make their guts airborne when exploded underground.
  • In Tremors 2: Aftershocks, he kills his first Graboid with 4 pounds of C-4 (which even he admits was excessive). And then kills another with a cluster bomb. Then, he shoots one of the Shriekers with a .50 caliber anti-tank gun with a solid bronze bullet (though that one was justified in that it was the last bullet he had). Then they detonate 4.5 tons of high-explosives and reduce an entire oil refinery to a large crater to kill the remaining Shriekers.
  • In Tremors 3: Back to Perfection, he blows up his entire house to kill a single Ass Blaster. And then he finds out it was completely unneccessary.
  • In Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, his ancestor buys a 2-inch bore Punt Gun and uses that to kill a Graboid. (For the uninitiated, a Punt Gun is a big...big shotgun. Sort of More Dakka, but only needing one pull of a trigger. The name come from the fact they were so large, to be used for their intended task they had to be mounted to flat-bottom boats known as 'punts'. Oh, and their purpose? Harvesting entire flocks of ducks....with one shot.)
• The Punisher (2004): Castle just doesn't kill Howard Saint, but also just about everything Saint cares about. He sabotages Saint's money-laundering operations and then gives the money away. He then causes a rift with Saint's Cuban partners. After following both Saint's wife Livia and his best friend Quentin Glass, he creates the illusion that the two of them are having an affair behind Howard's back (despite the fact that Quentin is gay). When Howard finds out thanks to Mickey (who is Castle's mole), he stabs Quentin to death and then throws Livia over a bridge; she survives the fall but can't get off the train tracks in time and gets run over by a train. After he kills all of Saint's men in the club, he rigs a trip-wire grenade and forces his son John to hold up the grenade, where he eventually tires out and is blown up. An injured Howard tries to run, but Castle ties him to a car and sends it towards a parking lot, where he has rigged several hidden bombs that blow up as the car dragging Howard passes by, which light Howard on fire before that car blows up and we get an overview shot of the flames in the shape of the Punisher's iconic skull. Saint's an asshole that had it coming to him, but damn, what an example of overkill. To top it all off, Castle calmly explains it all in detail to Saint before finishing him off.
  • Overkill for an Overkill... the Saints, Glass included, were being Punished for killing his ENTIRE FAMILY (at least 3 whole generations) as payback for the accidental death of their son during criminal activity.
• Memetic Badass Samuel L. Jackson describes this phenomenon perfectly in Jackie Brown:
  Ordell Robbie: AK-47: the very best there is. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room, accept no substitutes.
• In The Raid, Jaka kills a mook with three point-blank headshots. When the residents attack the SWAT van, they open up on full-auto and just keep firing.
• The Jericho missile, in Iron Man. To elaborate, Tony Stark built a missile that can flatten an entire mountain, and it isn't nuclear. Nope. It's just one large missile that splits into a thousand smaller warheads. The shockwave from the demo blasted off the generals' caps from the horizon.
  Tony Stark: They say the best weapon is one you never have to fire. I respectfully disagree. I prefer the weapon you only have to fire once.
• The poor Mook from The Expendables 2. After rounding a corner, he happens to meet up with the entire crew, who have just made mincemeat out of a small army of bad guys. He gets ventilated by every one of them at once.
  Barney: Rest in pieces.
• The Usual Suspects: "He lets the last Hungarian go. He waits until his wife and kids are in the ground and then he goes after the rest of the mob. He kills their kids, he kills their wives, he kills their parents and their parents' friends. He burns down the houses they live in and the stores they work in, he kills people that owe them money. And like that he was gone."
• The opening death scene of the two girls in Suspiria (1977). Most of the killer's time is devoted to Pat to whom he does a combo of breaking through glass, stabbing, disemboweling and garroting. Her nameless friend gets caught in the rather unnecessary aftermath, as after Pat is hung, the broken glass from the ceiling impales her both through the head and through the waist.
• In Dredd: Ma-Ma uses a set of three supercharged Gatling guns to absolutely decimate an entire level of the block. This actually ends up as a plot point, as Dredd realizes no one would go to such lengths to kill a Judge unless they had something big to protect.
• Pacific Rim: How do you Double Tap a kaiju? You fire your plasma cannon into its chest until most of its torso is a burning skeleton. Granted, Raleigh had a very good reason for this his brother Yancy got killed at the beginning of the movie when a kaiju they thought dead turned out to have a quite a bit more fight left.
• Hard Ticket to Hawaii has an assassin who rides around on a skateboard carrying a gun in one hand and a blowup-doll in the other. The heroes hit him with a truck. While he is flying through the air, they blow him up with a rocket launcher. Then they blow up the doll with another rocket.
• Dieter Von Cunth from MacGruber after he survives getting his hideout blown up and attacks MacGruber at his wedding, MacGruber headbutts him off a cliff, shoots him half a dozen times as he falls, when he lands he hits his head on a rock splitting it open and spilling his brains out, MacGruber then blows up his corpse with a grenade launcher then pisses on it.
• Virgil's death by interrogation in True Romance: Virgil beats up Alabama, trying to find out where Clarence and the drugs he stole from Drexl Spivey are. Throwing her into the shower, she blinds him with shampoo, hits him over the head with the toilet cover, then sprays him with hairspray, stabs him once, and blasts him to hell with a shotgun, and once she's used up all the shells, strikes him with the shotgun barrel for good measure.
• Conan the Destroyer: after Conan rips off Dagoth's horn, he impales the slain monster's head with his sword, prompting the theme music to swell triumphantly. Malak, the Lovable Coward and shameless glory hound, decides to get in on the action and stabs the dead monster with his tiny dagger, causing the triumphant theme music to swell all over again.
• The climax of All the King's Men: after Willie Starke is shot by Adam Stanton, Starke's bodyguards empty their handguns into Stanton. This isn't enough, as several state troopers belatedly arrive and fire Tommy guns into Stanton's body. Since the book and movie were based on Huey Long, it's very much Truth in Television.
• Transformers Film Series: There are unsurprisingly, many, many examples in this series:
  • Let's start with the first movie:
    • Megatron wakes up after being frozen for years. His first action? Murder every human that he can.
    • Frenzy vs humans in a small locked room. He has two machine guns built into his arms. They all have shotguns. Then Agent Simmons grabs a flamethrower, and Frenzy gets his head torn off by his discus weapon.
    • Brawl's defeats and eventual death. Arm chopped off by Ratchet. Shot up over and over again by Jazz and humans. A grenade detonated against his chest, knocking him out. Once he gets up, is still getting shot up by humans, and then gets his spark blown out by Bumblebee's plasma cannon. Lennox puts it best:
      That thing is definitely dead now.
  • Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen:
    • Sideswipe of the Autobots takes on (possible dimension-hopper) Sideways of the Decepticons. Does he shoot him? Does he stab him? Does he cut him in half like a lot of deaths in these movies? How about all three? First he flips into the air and shoots, perforated his car mode bilaterally. Then, he launches his sword down into the other's hood while in midair, hits the ground with both wheels, spins, grabs the sword, and bisects this mofo lengthwise.
      Damn I'm good.
    • Three Decepticons take on Optimus Prime. They are Megatron, Starscream, and some other guy we don't care about, but he's huge. Optimus still almost wins. He mutilates Starscream, rips off the Big Guy's face, and brutally beats Megatron. But he's also kicked in the face hard enough to shatter his face-plate. Then shot in the chest with enough force to launch him across the forest. And once the battle is over, Megatron sneaks up and stabs him through the chest while lifting him in the air. Oh, and the blade is attached to a gun, which Megatron then shoots off. The hole it leaves is big enough to walk through.
    • Epps calls for an airstrike. Cue the B-2 Bombers laying down a carpet of explosives thick enough to block out the sun, followed by a display of Impressive Pyrotechnics that actually set a record for biggest practical explosion in a movie.
    • He doesn't kill Megatron, but at the end Optimus hands him his metal ass pretty good. A straight-up beat down with guns and swords first. Then he twists Megatron's gun/sword arm around and uses it to shoot off half his face. Finally, Optimus uses the jet engines on his back to blast Megatron through a wall. The Decepticon leader is missing one arm, half his face, and various other parts of his body. His response? "Starrrrschream!"
  • Transformers: Dark of the Moon:
    • Megatron's plans. As The Dragon to the Fallen, he started a war on Cybertron to eventually take over the galaxy for his master. The Allspark was key to victory in that war. But in the event it was destroyed, he already had a deal with the Fallen to use the last Star Harvester to get more energon. Except he was playing his master. Really he just wanted Optimus to get the Matrix so the Autobots could bring back Sentinel Prime, which would lead to their own destruction when Sentinel switched sides.
    • Sentinel has a rust gun that causes any metal to dissolve. When he switches sides, he shoots Ironhide with it not once, not twice, but three fucking times! Immediately before that, he gave a short Breaking Speech to the Autobots and Humans. Between the second and third shots, he gets in a Pre-Mortem One-Liner.
      I hereby discharge you from duty.
    • This film does a pretty good job of Deconstructing the idea of an alien invasion. As such, the Invasion of Chicago is filled with overkill. The Decepticons have Flying Aircraft Carriers, several types of airships, hundreds if not thousands of troops, and a giant metal worm that tears through rock like tissue paper. They unleash it all on Chicago. When they're done, the city resembles the radioactive Chernobyl site from the film's opening. The Decepticons also seem to enjoy shooting at random buildings and small groups of civilians with their fighter-ships.
    • On that note, the Decepticons' weapons are this for humans. While they might do a lot less damage to Cybertronians, the Con's weapons unleash pulses of energy (instead of simple plasma blasts, bullets, or lasers) which rip a human's flesh from their bones, and then completely shatter most of said bones into fine powder. Without a Gory Discretion Shot by the way.
    • Shockwave's death. First he gets his eye sniped at by humans. Then another group of humans appears in the building right next to him and blasts him with enough machine gun fire to tear off half his armor. Then Optimus Prime comes in and uses some brass-knuckle-like weapon to gouge out his guts. Then the Prime reaches around to behind his neck, grabs the bundle of wires that is like a cross between optic nerve and spinal cord, and rips it out. To add insult to injury, he uses Shockwave's own cannon to shoot down the Space Bridge Pillar.
  • Transformers: Age of Extinction:
    • Ratchet's fate. Poor Ratchet. He's hiding in the smokestack of an old steamer ship when its blown up by humans. Then when he tries to get away, he's shot up with missiles and machine guns, forcing him to transform. His leg is blown off. He pleads with the humans to have mercy, because he is, after all, just a medic. Then Lockdown gets involved. Between him and the humans, Ratchet is reduced to little more than a torso with some limb stumps hanging off. Then Lockdown pulls Ratchet's spark out from his chest and crushes it. Oh, and after he's dead? The humans who helped kill him sell his parts to a company that melts them down. Optimus was pissed when he found out.
    • Hound seems quite fond of invoking this trope. He threatens to splatter Joshua Joice, hits an alien bug thing with a plasma blast that makes it explode (just because it sneezed on him), and kills a ton of KSI Prototypes with more force than reasonably necessary. He also shoots his guns into the air to celebrate Optimus' return, and shouts with joy at the sight of giant (by Autobot standards even) robot dinosaurs obliterating the Prototypes.
• In Life Blood, Brooke stabs Warren 87 times; a fact that Rhea does not learn until she hears it on the television, and which seems to discredit Brooke's claim that it was self-defence.
• Mortal Engines:
  • On discovering that Shrike intends to kill Hester Shaw, Valentine sinks the entire prison he's in, killing everyone except Shrike who is dead anyway and he knows will survive.
  • Tom and Hester are shot at by mobile cities using the same Harpoon Guns they use for spearing other cities.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) Ghidorah, a 500 feet Kaiju, charges all his Beam Spam attacks (three heads, three city pulverizing beams) to atomize a human child that angered him.
• When the killer in Cherry Falls proves to be Not Quite Dead, Deputy Mina comes out firing into his body Guns Akimbo and does not stop till both semi-autos are empty.
• House Shark: After living in his backyard for two months because of the shark in his house, Frank states he wants to burn his house to ashes, and then burn those same ashes, and then load those ashes onto a rocket and shoot it into the sun, and then nuke the sun.
• Iron Sky: Hell hath no fury like a Woman Scorned such as Vivian Wagner. So the new Moon Nazi Führer Klaus Adler returned to the Moon alone when he should have banged her brains out. What does she do? Assume command over a space battleship blistering with nuclear weapons just to dump a shitload of nukes onto that unfaithful, egotistical swine. The only reason why she ends up in a battle against the Nazi invasion is because Adler conveniently happens to launch it when the U.S.S. George W. Bush is already on the way to him.
  • That said, what actually kills Adler is one of his own girlfriend Renate's stiletto heels in his forehead. And the George W. Bush's sheer amounts of firepower are not only justified, but necessary against the town-sized flying saucer Götterdämmerung that can and does blow a huge chunk out of the Moon with its Wave-Motion Gun.
• At the climax of Stay Tuned, Helen is held hostage by the bad guys and Chained to a Railway. Not only that, but the train is set to crash into a stockpile of explosives right behind her.
  Helen: He's going to hit me with a train and blow me up?!
• The fate of Gramps Johnson in Them!, who dies five times over: his neck and back broken, his skull fractured, his chest crushed, and his body saturated with enough formic acid to kill twenty men. This is all naturally a mystery to investigators, until an expert explains to them that this is what an attack by an ant the size of a Buick looks like (it's the formic acid that's the giveaway you see; ants use the stuff for venom).
• Subverted for laughs in Spiderman Homecoming when one of Vulture's goons tries to sell some of their high-tech weapons, like Ultron Drone arms or Chitauri Grenades, to a thug. Said thug balks at the idea of the guy trying to sell him such overpowered things when all he wants is a simple handgun to rob with.
  Thug: Man, I wanted something low-key. Why are you trying to upsell me, man? I need something to stick up somebody. I’m not trying to shoot them back in time.
• Juan of the Dead: When Preacher Jones shows up, he instructs the gang to get in his truck. Just as Juan climbs in, an undead China materializes, grabbing Juan by the ankle. Juan does not just kick that person away; he bludgeons them multiple times with his oar. He justifies it to the others by claiming China was a pain in his ass.
• The titular assassins in Death Machines certainly don't half-ass it with their killing methods. Mr. Gioletti's hitmen are annihilated via rocket launcher, being tossed off a building, run over with a bulldozer, and hit with a truck before being decapitated with a sword. Gioletti himself is also blown up with the same bazooka. The only person Madame Lee tries to strong-arm in the whole film aside from Gioletti gets blown up sky-high when he refuses to play ball.
• Renfield (2023): Renfield and Rebecca succeed in trapping Dracula, but since there's so much conflicting lore on how to kill a vampire, they're not sure how to go about it. Not to mention, Dracula is so old and powerful that Renfield isn't convinced he can be permanently killed, having seen him come back from seemingly-certain death countless times before. So, he and Rebecca consider their options and decide to go for all of them. Dracula is staked, decapitated, dismembered, lit on fire, has his ashes mixed into concrete. Then said concrete is separated into tiny cubes, and those cubes are tossed into a sewer. Renfield admits this was both for thoroughness' sake, and for fun.
• Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos stabs Tony in the stomach, and then prepares to finish him off with a blast of four Infinity Stones all at once. Knowing Thanos, this was probably meant as a twisted form of Villain Respect.
• El Camino: Because the police do not know the extent of Jesse's involvement with the Neo-Nazis and the subsequent massacre (in reality the Neo-Nazis tortured Jesse into working for them and the massacre was entirely Walt's plan), they have no idea how dangerous he could potentially be now that he's on the loose. Responding to his vehicle's LoJack, Jesse watches (hiding in Skinny Pete's car) as a caravan of several dozen cop cars and SWAT vans rush to the El Camino's location.

---