Karma Houdini/Film: Difference between revisions

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** In the book series, Count Olaf {{spoiler|is eventually killed.}}

* In ''[[Pick Up On South Street]]'', Richard Widmark is a pickpocket who accidentally steals a wallet containing [[MacGuffin|microfilm]] that a gang of [[Dirty Communists]] are smuggling out of the country. When the cops pull him in, he tries to goad one into hitting him in order to get the man suspended. When they offer him immunity for the film, he decides to sell it back to the spies instead. When the girl from whom he stole the film (who turns out to be a [[Minion with an F In Evil]]) comes to get it back, he alternates between seducing her and [[Values Dissonance|slapping her around]]. Even when the commies murder his best friend in cold blood, he's still willing to sell the film to them, which would have gotten him killed, had the girl not knocked him out and taken it to the cops. And what's his comeuppance for being such an unrepentant louse? He gets the girl and rides off into the sunset scott-free...but not before dropping by the police station to rub the head cop's nose in it.

* Cole Williams, the brutal casino security chief from ''[[~~Twenty~~ ~~One~~|21]]'' is the primary antagonist, who not only makes things very difficult for the protagonists but brutally beats caught card counters and steals millions in winnings from one of the characters, and his only penalty is loss of his job due to being made obsolete by computers. At the end of the film he is shown on vacation in Caribbean with his stolen millions.

* Cole Williams, the brutal casino security chief from ''[[21 (game show)||21]]'' is the primary antagonist, who not only makes things very difficult for the protagonists but brutally beats caught card counters and steals millions in winnings from one of the characters, and his only penalty is loss of his job due to being made obsolete by computers. At the end of the film he is shown on vacation in Caribbean with his stolen millions.

* {{spoiler|"Cobb"}} from [[Christopher Nolan]]'s early film ''[[Following]]''. He kills, manipulates others into setting themselves up as his fall guys, and disappears. The police don't even know he exists.

* At the end of ''Nick of Time'' the [[Big Bad]] behind the assassination plot gets away.

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* [[Complete Monster|Sylvia Ganush]] in [[Drag Me to Hell]] dies before she can receive any comeuppance for effectively murdering somebody over a bank loan. This is subverted when you realize how evil she established herself as earlier in her handling of a case involving a stolen gypsy necklace and a 10-year-old boy, which will remind you that even if she did succeed at murdering the protagonist {{spoiler|(which she did)}}, she'd definitely find herself in a lower circle (most likely Judecca, that icy spot in Level IX that's reserved for traitors to benefactors, and failing that, ''definitely'' Level VII, outer ring, ''at the very least'') than the protagonist would.

* [[The Shawshank Redemption]]: Andy Dufrense gets out of Shawshank prison, getting back at Warden Norton and Capt. Byron Hadley for their mistreatment, and Red gets released from Shawshank too, but Elmo Blatch, the man who really murdered Andy's wife and her adulterous partner, has nothing happen to him, as far as we know.

* Throughout ''[[~~The~~ Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans|Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans]]'', Terrence McDonagh steals drugs from his station's property room, bets money he doesn't have on college sports, robs people of their drugs, commits acts of [[Police Brutality]] against the elderly, extorts a young woman into having sex with him, extorts a college quarterback into going along with a point-shaving scheme, tips a drug kingpin off about a drug bust, and loses the key witness to a quintuple homicide. At the end of the film, {{spoiler|he arranges for a group of gangsters who were trying to kill him to be killed by a different group of gangsters, gets the excessive force complaints against him dismissed, wins $10,000 betting on a single football game, gets his hands on a huge bag of uncut heroin, solves the quintuple homicide by [[Framing the Guilty Party]], and is promoted to captain}}.

* Throughout ''[[Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans|Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans]]'', Terrence McDonagh steals drugs from his station's property room, bets money he doesn't have on college sports, robs people of their drugs, commits acts of [[Police Brutality]] against the elderly, extorts a young woman into having sex with him, extorts a college quarterback into going along with a point-shaving scheme, tips a drug kingpin off about a drug bust, and loses the key witness to a quintuple homicide. At the end of the film, {{spoiler|he arranges for a group of gangsters who were trying to kill him to be killed by a different group of gangsters, gets the excessive force complaints against him dismissed, wins $10,000 betting on a single football game, gets his hands on a huge bag of uncut heroin, solves the quintuple homicide by [[Framing the Guilty Party]], and is promoted to captain}}.

* The cab driver from [[Rat Race]], who maroons Cuba Gooding Jr.'s character in the desert, [[Complete Monster|probably to die]], just because [[Disproportionate Retribution|he made a highly unpopular call in a football game]].

* Dr. Claw in ''[[Inspector Gadget (film)|Inspector Gadget]]'' averts this when he's arrested for murdering Dr. Artemus Bradford and attempting twice to murder John Brown, and it's stated in one novelization that he was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment and (as mentioned in the sequel) served with a bill of attainder. He does play this straight in the second film, though; he tries to rob the entire Federal Reserve in Riverton, and what's the only punishment he gets? Gadget, G2, and Penny run him out of town at the climax of the film, with Claw swearing his usual threat: "I'll get you next time, Gadget... ''next time!''"

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[[Category:~~Karma Houdini~~]]

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