25 Greatest Film Deaths This Century

Right when the MCU was just finding its feet, Matthew Vaughn provided a biting alternative to the coming storm of superhero gloss. Based on Mark Millar’s icky and edgy comic book series, Kick-Ass tells the story of ordinary kid Dave Lisewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose only superpower is being able to take a good kicking, but who nonetheless makes it his mission to tackle crime in his corner of NYC.

Along the way, Dave teams up with real ass-kicking heroes Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and his daughter Hit-Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz), and they come up against crime lord Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong). Now, things don’t exactly go smoothly at any point in the film, and an unfortunate double-crossing leaves Kick-Ass and Big Daddy in the hot seat (literally) in one of D’Amico’s warehouses, getting beaten and brutalised and, yes, set on fire.

Vaughn and his team allowed Cage to go all-out on this one, and as the Batman-adjacent hero burns, he screams and hollers like a maniac, guiding his daughter to defeat the well-armed men while dying horribly. What could have been a fairly rote (but no less saddening) death scene was brought to life by Cage’s intervention, and stands out as a strangely epic death that is quite unlike any other.