Hawkeye in Avengers: Age of Ultron
Avengers: Age of Ultronspends a significant portion of its second act establishing that Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) has a secret family living out on Walden Pond or somewhere, and that his wife Laura (Linda Cardellini) desperately wants him to quit Avengering before he gets himself killed. This is entirely likely given that he is the butt of virtually every joke made about the team of superheroes.
Somehow, Hawkeye makes it to the end of the film, and Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a character to whom we have absolutely zero emotional attachment, dies instead. It’s a surprising moment for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it seems pretty clear it was intended for Hawkeye.
Cooper and Justin in Event Horizon
Event Horizonis a movie about a spaceship that travels to literal Hell-with-a-capital-H by passing through a tear in the universe and becomes super haunted. Like, so haunted the ghosts work rotating shifts. Justin (Jack Noseworthy) and Cooper (Richard T. Jones) are two charming members of a rescue crew sent to recover the ship, so we expect them to last about as long as an alliance with your rage-quitting friend Pete in a game of Risk.
Justin steps into a Hell portal, goes catatonic, and then walks naked out into space to try and kill himself… but survives. He spends the rest of the movie locked safely in a futuristic medicine tube. And the wise-cracking Cooper gets launched out into the void after the spaceship he is standing on completely explodes, only to somehow rocket back to the haunted ship in time to save the day. It’s… unexpected.
Randy in Scream
Screamrevitalized teen slasher films in 1996 while still remaining true to the genre’s tradition of hiring people in their late 20s to play high schoolers. Part of what made the movie fresh and unique was its meta approach to horror films, perfectly embodied in the character of Randy (Jamie Kennedy), an oddball nerd who patiently explains the rules of horror films to his fellow horror movie costars as they are being murdered.
As Randy himself eventually realizes, he is the exact type of character who typically gets murdered into barely quantifiable dust in these movies, only to later be discovered folded into a refrigerator or something by the film’s heroine. But Randy miraculously survives, which in hindsight might not have been the best decision, as it convinced people that Jamie Kennedy should be cast in more movies.
Aunt Meg in Twister
Twisterfollows a plucky group of storm chasers led by Jo (Helen Hunt) and Bill (um,Bill Paxton) as they pursue tornadoes across the Midwest with no visible source of employment or income. Partway through the adventure, the team stops at Jo’s Aunt Meg’s (Lois Smith) house to eat several Cracker Barrel menu items and exchange expository dialogue.
Aunt Meg is 1000% the wise old character who dies at the end of act 2 to signify the hero’s lowest point, so when we learn that a twister is headed straight for Meg’s hometown, we totally expect Jo to find her pinned beneath some debris, delivering one final line of encouragement before passing on. All of that is exactly what happens, except Meg is somehow basically ok and just has to spend the night in the hospital. Don’t play with our emotions like that,Twister.
Ocean Master in Aquaman
The villainous Ocean Master (Patrick Wilson) seeks to conquer all the realms of the undersea kingdom and then wage war on the surface world, eliminating all terrestrial life on the planet, because he’s sick of finding plastic Coca-Cola rings and Styrofoam containers floating in the ocean. Only Ocean Master’s brother Aquaman (Jason Momoa) can stop him.
Aquaman and Ocean Master have a climactic,Lord of the Rings-style battle on the back of a futuristic submarine while mermaids and crab people and a mythological Kraken wage war around them. Then their mother Atlanna (Nicole Kidman) shows up and makes them stop fighting and sends Ocean Master to his room. Really thought he was going to get booted into a propeller or eaten by a sea monster.
Nick Van Owen in The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn) is the character everyone always forgets is inThe Lost World: Jurassic Park, because that film was made during a time in the 1990s when Vince Vaughn could quietly slip into a movie unnoticed like a tall, box-headed ninja. Nick is a professional photographer sent with a team of scientists to document the dinosaurs on Jurassic Park’s Site B, a second island made for cloning and production.
Nick deliberately sabotages another expedition to keep them from killing a tyrannosaurus, which winds up costing several people their lives, because tyrannosaurs do not have the emotional capacity to show gratitude or understand when someone has done them a favor. Nick disappears during one of the film’s two climaxes, so we totally expect Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to trip over Nick’s severed arm or something, but Nick suddenly reappears at the last minute with a fleet of rescue helicopters.
The Joker in The Dark Knight
For better or worse,Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker inThe Dark Knightis the brass ring comic book movies have been chasing ever since. The Clown Prince of Crime manages to completely destroy the lives of every single character in the film, so when Batman (Christian Bale) tracks him down to a construction site in the final act, we’re totally expecting Joker to get flung headfirst off a steel girder into righteous oblivion.
The Joker does indeed get monkey-tossed off the construction site, but Batman fires a grappling hook into his trouser leg and hoists him to relative safety. Evidently the Joker uses a powerful Kevlar weave in his fanciful clown pants. It’s bittersweet, because we’re admittedly glad the character survived, but we know we’ll never see him again.
Cal in Titanic
Cal (Billy Zane) is the cartoonishly villainous money baron determined to destroy the budding romance between Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) in directorJames Cameron’s epic filmTitanic. Cal’s becomes increasingly menacing until finally resorting to chasing them around with a handgun and chaining Jack up as the ship sinks.
Cal somehow makes it to the end of the film, unscathed and with not a hair out of place. We learn in a brief bit of dialogue that Cal later loses all his money in the stock market crash and commits suicide, but that’s hardly the crushed-by-falling-debris-or-perhaps-eaten-by-an-octopus fate the audience had been expecting for the past three hours.
The Operative in Serenity
The Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a relentless assassin tasked with recapturing psychic warrior ninja River (Summer Glau) after she is boosted from military custody by her brother Simon (Sean Maher) and hidden aboard a junky spaceship with a crew of charmingly witty miscreants. Their irascible wit is not enough to stop The Operative from killing two of them.
Serenityis a sequel to the beloved but short-lived seriesFirefly, so plenty ofFireflyfans went to see this movie only to be gut-punched by the sudden, unexpected deaths of two major characters. Both deaths are caused by The Operative, the film’s chief villain, so it’s a real surprise when Captain Mal (Nathan Fillion) finally defeats him in a battle above unnecessarily spinning future machinery and lets him live.
Gaear Grimsrud in Fargo
Fargois a typicalCoen Brotherscrime farce following career wiener Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) as he hires Carl (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear (Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife so he can extort ransom money from his overbearing father-in-law. Things quickly spiral out of control due in no small part to the violently unpredictable Gaear, who kills both Carl and Jerry’s wife after they annoy him too much.
When hero cop Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) catches Gaear stuffing Carl into a woodchipper, we’re practically shouting at her to blow him away before he wreaks any more havoc. But the cool-headed Marge merely wounds him, so she can bring both him and Jerry to justice.
