There Is No Kill Like Overkill/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • It's all the more chilling for its quiet, guilt-tinged delivery when Alfred in The Dark Knight Saga reveals how his mercenary squad finally caught the Robin Hood-style bandit they were hunting after they couldn't find him and he realized didn't care about money:

Alfred: We burned the forest down.

  • The 2010 Live Action Adaptation of Space Battleship Yamato: The ship is armed with enough gun turrets to throw a wall of bullets in every direction and destroys an entire fleet this way. And the ship's iconic Big Freaking 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. 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.
  • The Godfather:
    • The death of Santino "Sonny" Corleone. Ambushed at a toll booth by a dozen Tommy Gun-wielding gangsters, shot several dozen times inside his car, then shot some more outside the car, then shot on the ground after he died, then had his face kicked in for good measure. The commentary for the film confirms that they wanted to make sure Sonny stayed dead, given that his elderly father had been repeatedly shot earlier in the film and survived, and that Sonny was known to be a tough bastard.
    • At the end of the movie, the elimination 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.
    • In Training Day, Alonzo Harris is a lesser version of this 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.
  • RoboCop:
    • 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...
    • In the original Robocop, the main character's brutal death at the hands of Boddicker and his men before he was rebuilt as the titular cyborg.
  • Crazy Survivalist Burt Gummer from the Tremors series is all about the overkill.
    • In the first movie, 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 the second movie, he kills his first Graboid with 4 pounds of C-4. And then kills another with a cluster bomb. Then, he shoots one of the Shriekers with a .50 caliber "Grizzly" anti-tank gun with a solid bronze bullet, which prompts Earl to comment, "Man, Burt, you put a whole new shine on the word 'overkill'." And it's not even the biggest gun he uses in the series.... Then there's the detonating 4.5 tons of high-explosives and reducing an entire oil refinery to a large crater to kill the remaining Shriekers.
    • In the third movie, he blows up his entire house to kill a single Ass Blaster.
    • In the prequel, his ancestor buys a 2-inch bore Punt Gun and uses that to kill a Graboid.
  • Ending of Bonnie and Clyde, with the titular characters being ambushed by a posse. Except this is also Truth in Television.
  • In the fourth Rambo movie 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 WW 2 (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.
    • Also at one point upon stealing a machine gun turret John Rambo empties several rounds into a single soldier in a jeep literally ripping him to pieces.
  • 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 2, 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 Back Stab 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. Given the amount of damage a single Moorwen did to the colony, this is perhaps Justified.
  • 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.
    • 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.
  • 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, 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The Naked Gun
    • In the first movie, the Big Bad falls to his death. Then is run over by a bus. And then a steamroller. And then 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:
    • The Narada, Nero's ship is capable of wiping out whole fleets of Klingon Warbirds and drilling down to a planet's core. 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.
  • In The Great Mouse Detective, Ratigan tries to dispose of Basil with an overkill-tastic Death Trap including a mousetrap, an axe, a gun, and a falling anvil, noting that he couldn't decide which method would be best . . . so he used them all. Of course, Basil is able to use the various parts of the trap against each other and escape.
  • 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).

    • 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.
  • 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 fate 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.
  • In Aliens, Ripley recommends nuking the site from orbit to make absolutely sure that no xenomorphs escape.
  • In Alien:Resurrection, Ron Perlman's character shoots at a little spider with his sidearm.
  • Marked for Death: Seagal[who?] grabs the Big Bad, gouges out his eyes using his thumbs, breaks his back over his knee, throws him through a wall and finally sends him down an elevator shaft, where he lands on a spike.
  • Bert I. Gordon's 1955 debut monster pic 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 In the first movie 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". After all that, he still managed to say a few words before his head died.
  • 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's 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 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, he was inclined to fire missiles at it until it's vaporised.
  • 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.
  • Die Hard:
    • It 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. Crowning Moment of Awesome? You bet your Scarf of Asskicking it is.
  • The death of a revived Doras in the Decade finale movie 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.
  • Subverted, sort of, in Looney Tunes: Back in Action:

ACME Chairman: You see, if the Train of Death doesn't kill him, those twenty boxes of TNT will. That, or the 100-pound anvil dangling above him, or- Oh, look. There's the Pendulum of Doom! What's the Pendulum of Doom doing here?! 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.
  • Star Wars Episode VI: A New Hope:
    • The amount of energy required to destroy a planet is some eight to nine orders of magnitude greater than what killed the dinosaurs, and seven to eight more than required to just kill everyone. And the Death Star gives five to six orders of magnitude more than that. Even moreso as they could've cracked the surface or burned away the atmosphere using a lot less resources.
  • Revenge of the Sith: After Aalya Secura is shot by the Clone troopers, they continue to shoot at her dead body afterwards.
  • 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.
  • 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 who had it coming to him, but damn.
  • 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.
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