November 9, 2021 24.3k votes 6k voters 288.9k views
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Vote up the most memorable moments when a hero took someone down with them.
Some of the best movies include heroic sacrifice scenes. You know the moments we're talking about - scenes where the film's protagonist makes the ultimate sacrifice to save the world while bringing the villain down with them. Scenes like this can be found in everything from the MCU to beloved horror films from the 1970s. A hero sacrificing themselves never goes out of style.
Scenes in which a hero sacrifices themselves work best when audiences really know the protagonist. When the person giving their life for the greater good is just some unknown, it doesn't really have much of an effect, but if the audience has seen this character grow and change over the course of a couple of hours (or let's say a decade of intertwined films), then that death really means something.
The best version of these scenes occurs when the hero in question also takes out the number-one baddie in the film. These don't just make for fist-pumping moments - they bring the entire audience together.
Pretty much every moment of Leon: The Professional is dripping with awesome fist-pumping action. When Leon is tasked with taking care of Mathilda, a girl who saw her entire family get murdered by the ruthless DEA agent Stansfield, he deftly handles henchmen, cronies, and creeps with homemade traps, guns, and bombs - everything he does is to keep Mathilda safe.
As the film comes to an end, Stansfield brings down the hellfire of the DEA and NYPD on Leon's apartment building, and while Leon puts up a fight, it's clear he's not getting out of this alive. Leon attempts to escape his apartment complex dressed as an officer, but just as he sees daylight, he's stopped by Stansfield, who puts a few bullets in our hero and lords over him for those final moments. But that's when it happens: Leon hands off a ring to Stansfield, a ring that's connected to a vest full of grenades. With this final gesture, Leon leaves the world, but he takes out one of the worst villains of '90s cinema.
In Gran Torino, Walt Kowalski is an angry, old Korean War vet who tosses off racial epithets like he's getting paid for it. His neighborhood is overrun with gang violence, but everyone is too afraid to do anything about it, even after they shoot a teenage boy and assault the boy's sister. The boy, Thao, wants to get revenge on the gang, but Walt locks him in his basement to keep him from becoming bitter and angry.
Walt takes matters into his own hands to save Thao and their neighborhood. He finds the gang members and goes out of his way to draw their ire by walking right up to them and talking immense amounts of trash while pretending he has a gun. The gang members open fire on him in public, leading to their arrest.
In what has to be one of the most heartbreaking moments in the MCU, Tony Stark finally gets a chance to show the entire world, nay, the galaxy, that he's not just some loud-mouth billionaire with a fancy robot suit. After watching Thanos snap half of the universe away with the Infinity Gauntlet, Stark pushes himself to bring everyone back.
Stark puts together a ragtag team of every hero left on the planet to travel back through time and steal every Infinity Stone, as well as the Gauntlet. In a battle with an earlier version of Thanos, the Hulk and Carol Danvers prove to be powerful enough to wield the Gauntlet, but Thanos knocks it out of their hands over and over again until Stark picks it up and uses it to destroy Thanos and his army with his own snap. The overwhelming radiation coming off of the glove ends Stark's life right then and there.
Ripley spent three Alien films fighting Xenomorphs and government bureaucrats, but in Alien 3, she finally gives her life to keep Weyland-Yutani from getting its hands on one of those nasty little creatures and turning it into a weapon (or at least trying to). The film begins with Ripley's escape pod from the end of the second film crash-landing on a prison planet. Her two companions are dead, and she's stuck with a bunch of lice-infected prisoners. Oh, and she has a queen Xenomorph growing in her chest.
During her brief stay on the prison planet, Ripley saves as many of the prisoners as she can from the creature running roughshod over everyone, but when the Weyland-Yutani crew shows up to collect Ripley and the creature inside her, she opts to take her own life rather than live with the knowledge that she let the Xenomorphs live. As it prepares to pop out of her chest, Ripley dives into a vat of molten metal.
At the end of The Exorcist, Father Karras drags a demon straight to hell after one heck of a night at work. Karras has been tasked with acting as assistant exorcist to Father Merrin, an older and more experienced priest, in the exorcism of a young girl named Regan. The duo witness the demon-infested girl spin her head around on her shoulders, speak in tongues, spew pea soup, and shout more vile obscenities than an early-era Odd Future record, but when it's time to remove the evil spirit, things take an even darker turn.
Karras realizes that the demon won't leave Regan unless he does something drastic, so he implores Pazuzu to enter his body and leave the girl alone. The demon does just that, and Karras uses all of his remaining strength to dive out a window, breaking his neck and sending the demon back to hell.
After putting together theFellowship of the Ring, a group of adventurers made up of Hobbits, Humans, an Elf, and a Dwarf, Gandalf leads them through the mountain Caradhras. Unfortunately, the group has to travel through the Mines of Moria where a dang Balrog known as Durin's Bane is rumbling around.
This giant, fiery creature chases the group to a small bridge over a great chasm, and this is where Gandalf makes his "final" stand. He turns and yells that the Balrog will not pass before using all of his magical strength to send it into the great unknown. As he tells the Fellowship to run, Gandalf is pulled into the chasm along with the Balrog.
Even though this is the demise of Gandalf the Gray, it's the birth of Gandalf the White, an even more powerful wizard with serious drip.
