5 Movie Death Scenes and Why We Remember Them

Full Metal Jacket (1987) – Psychotic Breakdown. Vincent D’Onofrio plays Marine Pvt. Pyle, a casualty of boot camp because he is clearly unfit for military life. The constant abuse of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) is bad enough, but when the overweight and hungry Pvt. Pyle hides a jelly doughnut in his footlocker, the drill instructor punishes everybody else and makes Pyle eat the doughnut. In retaliation, his fellow trainees beat him with soap wrapped in towels. As his mental health deteriorates, Pyle begins to excel at the shooting range, and is complimented on his progress by Hartman, who is not seeing any signs of instability. After Pyle is accepted into Gunnery Sergeant Hartman’s “beloved corp,” he is found in the latrine, loading his weapon ‘Charlene” with a “762 millimeter, full metal jacket,” by Pvt. Joker (Matthew Modine). The ensuing commotion wakes up Hartman who never misses a beat with his non-stop verbal abuse. His last words are: “What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? Didn’t mommy and daddy show you enough attention when you were a child?” It makes you uneasy when you realize the drill instructor helped train his murderer to be a killing machine.

Sympathy Factor: None for the Gunnery Sergeant. We’ll leave the verdict on Pvt. Pyle up to you.

Reservoir Dogs (1992) – Betrayal: The remarkable thing about this gory flick is how people have always talked about the “Like a Virgin” and tip discussion at the diner more than the death scenes. Still, we have a new twist on the fate of the undercover and the theme of betrayal. Usually when someone is undercover, that person survives because he’s a good guy and we don’t like to kill off the good guys too much. When Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) tells Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) that he is a narc, he is dying in Mr. White’s arms. Mr. White is holding the police at bay with his own weapon while they have guns trained on him. Mr. White really cared about Mr. Orange, which in some strange way, made him more human than even Mr. Orange. This bombshell just devastates Mr. White who kills Mr. Orange and then the cops kill him. It’s true that Mr. Orange was already dying, but the scriptwriters could have managed to pluck him out while still killing off Mr. White, and have him make a miraculous recovery. We’ve seen weirder recoveries .

Sympathy Factor: It depends on whether it makes you happy or mad that the Mr. Orange let Mr. White believe they were friends.

If we missed the death scene you remember most from a movie, it’s possible we didn’t see it but it’s equally possible we didn’t blink an eye when we did!