11 Movie Cliches You Couldn't Live Without
3. "Two Days Til Retirement"
The Cliche: A character will be something like two days away from retirement, which of course dooms them to a brutally ironic demise before they can actually quit their profession (usually a police officer) for the quiet life.
Though there are plenty of examples of the trope (Carlito's Way, Layer Cake), its subversion is in fact far more widespread in films such as Falling Down, Lethal Weapon 3 and most recently Avengers: Age Of Ultron, where Hawkeye is blatantly set up to die due to his family being introduced, and actually survives thanks to Quicksilver's sacrifice.
Why It's Awesome: Any time you hear about a likeable character preparing to exit this life of crime, it immediately injects the subsequent action with so much more tension and high stakes, and if the film is cagey enough, it can end up totally unpredictable as a result.
Most genre-savvy viewers will be immediately suspicious if a major character has "one last mission" before they quit to spend the rest of their lives fly-fishing, and rightly so, but the fact that filmmakers also toy with the cliche means we can never be quite sure which way is up.