11 Movie Cliches You Couldn't Live Without
4. A**hole Character Meets An Excessively Violent Demise
The Cliche: Typically in an action, horror or disaster movie, there will be one character above all others who the audience is intentionally engineered to dislike.
Said character will then meet their gruesome comeuppance with an hilariously over-the-top, ultra-violent demise, seen recently in San Andreas (Ioan Gruffud's douchebag stepfather character gets crushed to death by a shipping container) and Star Trek Beyond (an alien who lures the Enterprise into a fight ends up flattened by the crashing Enterprise ship).
Why It's Awesome: The perverse comic value is really what makes this work: the characters have been written to be as loathsome as possible, and so audiences are practically encouraged to take great pleasure in them dying as horrific a death as possible.
Note that sometimes screenwriters don't quite get the tonal balance right, as evidenced in last year's Jurassic World, where the babysitter was savagely toyed with and devoured by a dinosaur for... being a bad babysitter? Right...