10 Minor Characters Given Overly Dramatic Death Scenes

So you're an actor and you're struggling to get your big break. Your agent calls and they've got you a part in a big new Hollywood film. The only problem is that you only have a handful of lines of dialogue and have barely any influence on the main plot. However, the director wants a tacked on, emotional scene to give a false sense of pathos. Your character gets to die and you get to make tragic faces despite the audience knowing barely anything about who you're playing. It's win-win.

Welcome to the world of the overly dramatic death scenes for minor characters. Here are some of the most notable:

Haldir in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

For the climatic battle of Helm's Deep, Peter Jackson and co. had a problem. Aragorn and friends were facing a battle against overwhelming odds but, as fans of reading will know, no-one particularly important was going to die. How are we meant to get our emotional kick when the only one's dying are a few grizzled peasants? Craig Parker, that's how.

Some genius remembered the character of Haldir, played by Parker for all of two minutes in the first film in the trilogy and decided it would be a great idea to bring him back and swiftly kill him, just so the audience has something to be sad about. Said genius probably didn't stop to think that the audience might not really care too deeply for that elf that was in Lothlorien for a bit. So, Haldir returns to honour an allegiance between men and elves and then dies in a way that is something of a running theme in this list; fighting heroically until his last breath and passing away in the hero's arms. Absolutely no-one was upset about this.

Mifune in The Matrix Revolutions

Having killed off most of the poorly fleshed out supporting characters in the first film, the producer's of the Matrix sequels decided to introduce thousands more supporting players to be poorly fleshed out, but this time with with stupider names like Ballard or Sparks. One of the characters to get a better deal was Mifune (Nathaniel Lees). Not only did he get to make a rousing speech, he got a pretty good death too. Not from the character's point of view of course; having your face cut up by Sentinal tentacles must sting, but Nathaniel Lees must have loved the opportunity to show off his range of facial expressions, which vary from 'stern' to 'angry.'

Needless to say, Mifune dies fighting heroically until his last breath, only this time he doesn't die in the hero's arms but in the arms of the tedious kid that no-one likes.

Hagen in Gladiator

Having failed to turn the phrase "Hagen dies" into some sort of joke involving ice cream, I'll cut straight to the point; Hagen (Ralf Moeller) was doomed from the start. Hagen is a classic bad-ass with a good heart. At first he gives Russell Crowe a good kicking and the audience thinks he's kind of a dick but then he turns out to be a good guy and a fierce warrior. He's willing to fight with Maximus to the death, and, as with a lot of characters willing to fight with the main character to the death, he dies. Hagen defends Proximo's Gladiator school as Maximus attempts to escape, showing how much of a bad-ass he is along the way before ultimately dying fighting heroically until his last breath. Again.

Ben Hayes in King Kong (2005)

This was never going to end well. Peter Jackson had shown in The Two Towers that he would never be happy with just letting faceless expendables die so one or two of the not-so-important supporting players were doomed the minute they set foot on Skull Island. Jack Black's film crew got a pretty unfair deal but it was Ben Hayes (Evan Parke) who was there to pack an emotional punch. A wise and weary mentor and father figure to Jamie Bell's Jimmy, the audience was instantly made aware of him being a good guy because he knew stuff about books.

Having established this bond between Hayes and Jimmy, Jackson proceeds to kill Hayes in a horrifying way; first being crushed by King Kong and then thrown to a bottom of a canyon. Needless to say, Hayes died heroica...well you know the rest.

Tommy Ryan in Titanic

Tommy Ryan (Jason Barry) DID NOT die heroically fighting until his last breath, thus making this list less monotonous.

Having established himself as a man of good character based purely on the fact that he was Irish, Ryan epitomised the fun and exciting ethic diversity of steerage class and how far it was removed from the evil and boring rich people. He was doomed, however, along with his partner in crime Fabrizio, who suffered death by funnel.

It was a tall order for Tommy Ryan to have a distinctively tragic death in a film full of tragic deaths but being shot by 1st Officer Murdoch in the scuffle for survival is pretty tragic. Murdoch shooting himself afterwards didn't help either.

The Not-So-Important Jedi in Revenge of the Sith

There's nothing like a good montage of mass murder to tug on the heartstrings. George Lucas even went one step further and decided to get younglings involved. But for the actors who had endured hours in make-up to play background Jedi with only the occasional cool looking lightsaber kill to show for it, this was their moment in the sun. Order 66 is executed and the Clone Troopers turn on the Jedi and kill them one by one in a series of cowardly ways. We don't know anything about these characters, but it's kind of sad in a way. Well, a bit. But not much.

Rest in peace pointy headed beard man and kind-of-hot blue woman. Rest in peace.

Dr. Satnam Tsurutani in 2012

Remember when Jimi Mistry was going to be the next big thing in Hollywood after he made East is East and set off to make the god-awful The Guru? Well this is where he ended up. Tsurutani is pretty much responsible for finding out the world is going to end. He has a nice family too. Chiwetel Ejiofor really wants to save him but he encounters the evils of bureaucracy and doesn't. Thus, Tsurutani, nice family and all, dies with everyone else, leaving the many dislikeable and undeserving characters to survive on the arks.

Frank Harris in The Day After Tomorrow

While we're on the issue of Roland Emmerich disaster movies, we best cover The Day After Tomorrow. What Emmerich really, really, likes to do is take a small character, give him the slightest hint of emotional depth and pathos, and have him die in a sad yet contrived situation and expect the audience to feel bad about this. We saw this with Satnam Tsurutani and we saw it with Frank Harris (Jay O. Sanders).

Harris is a grizzled old timer, loyal to the end to Dennis Quaid. We know very little about him, but he's a good guy. So when he falls through glass and is left dangling high above a shopping centre and threatens to pull his colleagues to their doom with him, he cuts the rope and falls to his death to save them. Note the variation from the common theme; Harris sacrifices himself heroically, rather than fighting heroically.

Stan Olber in Volcano

Staying on the theme of heroic sacrifices, Stan Olber (John Carroll Lynch) saves a bunch of people from a subway train being consumed by lava (for those that haven't seen it, Volcano is about a volcano erupting in down town L.A., for some reason). As a reward for his valiant efforts, he slowly burns to death after jumping into a pool of lava. You can't help thinking that Stan should have made a better job of his jump but this scene has the distinction of being one of the only memorable things in Volcano. Thus a small character is transformed into a tiny redeeming feature of an otherwise terrible, terrible movie.

Ivan Dubov in Face/Off

The character of Dubov is instantly rendered cooler by the fact that he's played by Frank Subotka from The Wire (Chris Bauer). His role is small, but important to the plot and featuring an impressive amount of drool. Dubov is an enemy of Nic Cage's (except Nic Cage isn't really Nic Cage, of course) but when the idea is suggested that they work together on a escape, he come's around to the idea pretty quickly and all of a sudden Cage and Bauer are best buds. Dubov does most of the hard work in helping Cage escape, but is thrown off a walk-way and dangles over a big drop with only a gun and Cage's hand between him and falling. Naturally, he falls and Cage is briefly sad before forgetting about him completely.

The 10 best Nicolas Cage films.

Nicolas Cage isn't exactly the most popular actor to ever make it big. Sure, he's appealing enough to land big budget roles, but there are plenty of people who'd much rather be forced to wear a helmet full of bees than sit through one of his movies (especially The Wicker Man).

Nic Cage is marmite. He's eccentric, he's weird, his hair is a bird, and he doesn't help himself by making some terrible, terrible film choices. I must admit it would be much easier to make a list of the 10 worst Nic Cage movies, but I won't, because in the last year or so Cage has made two films to help restore his reputation. They're in this list so I won't mention them here but they served to remind us that when he picks the right role (which he hadn't done for a very, VERY long time), Cage can be a damn good actor.

Over the years, he's had the mid-life crisis, made big budget duds (which despite a return to form, he is still doing), but in a career spanning over 20 years he has had his fair share of good movies. Below are 10 of his best:

10. Face/Off (1997)

Absolutely ridiculous. This is literally one of the most unbelievable plots an action movie has ever produced. Yet it is the best film John Woo made in a rather ill-fated spell in Hollywood, purely because it is an awful lot of fun.

Cage and Travolta are given the opportunity to ham it up and they take it with relish, producing cartoonish performances as a heroic cop and demonic villain who trade faces in a top secret undercover operation. It all gets very complicated but there are some genuinely good action sequences (Cage's prison escape is a highlight) and for a man who's made some pretty bad action movies, this is easily one of the better ones.

9. Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

Will not be the film Martin Scorsese will be remembered for, nor Nic Cage for that matter, but this film definitely had it's moments. Cage plays a paramedic haunted by visions of the people he's tried to save. Moody and atmospheric, it was a welcome change of pace for Cage, who was well into a string of ridiculous movies at this point. It gave him an opportunity to flex his acting muscles, resulting in one of his better performances.

8. The Rock (1996)

Probably the film that created Cage the action star, for better or worse, The Rock is an over the top Michael Bay film that came before Bay really lost it. After 81 tourists are taken hostage on Alcatraz island, Cage, a biochemist, must get to the site to disarm some stolen gas warheads, but he needs help. The interplay between Cage and Sean Connery in this film is great, and The Rock just works as a boombastic and entertaining action movie; a formula Cage would struggle to find in future movies.

7. Matchstick Men (2003)

Once again, a film that finds Cage working with a top director for a smaller, less spectacular film. What Ridley Scott's Matchstick Men lacks in big budget excess it makes up for in charm and wit. Cage is perfectly cast as an obsessive compulsive con-man, playing up to his trademark quirks and neurotic style. The twist is somewhat disappointing, but Matchstick Men makes for an entertaining and diverting conman movie that works well because it plays to Cage's strengths, offering great support from Sam Rockwell and Alison Lohman.

6. Lord of War (2005)

A film that is arguably best remembered for its inventive opening credits sequence if anything else, Lord of War may have glossed over a serious issue, but it certainly left the viewer with something to think about. Cage gleefully plays an amoral arms dealer, charting his pursuit by an interpol agent, his family relationships and the inner conflicts of his job. At times both funny and haunting, it's an entertaining way at confronting an issue that is at the forefront of modern conflict.

5. Kick-Ass (2010)

The first of the redeeming films I mentioned earlier, this is Cage demonstrating he has a sense of humour, and moving away from the overly serious roles that almost led to him becoming something of a self-parody. In a film with so many great bits in it, Cage is one of the best. The Adam West-style voice he uses in his Big Daddy alter-ego is hilarious and his bizarre relationship with his daughter is as touching as it is twisted. This is exactly the sort of role Cage needed to help restore a damaged reputation with the movie going public.

4. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

The second of the redeeming films. This is Nic Cage at his crazy best. Too easily dismissed as an unnecessary remake of a not-that-brilliant film, it actually shares little in common with the Harvey Keitel original. Cage makes the role of the bad lieutenant his own; a drug addicted weirdo with a very loose sense of morals. The crucial thing is that he remains likeable, with a shred of decency that shines through and keeps you rooting for Cage's character. It's the strangest role Cage has taken since Adaptation, which is a shame because nobody does strange better than Nicolas Cage.

3. Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

The film that won Cage an Oscar. It's depressing, often heartbreaking, and a difficult watch but features powerful performances, with Cage putting in a career-best performance as an alcoholic screenwriter looking to drink himself to death. Darker and more personal than anything Cage had done before or since, the chemistry between Cage and Elizabeth Shue is great and Cage was deserving of the recognition he received for a very challenging role.

2. Adaptation (2002)

The film for which Cage received his second Oscar nomination, it marked a brief return to form after a mid-career slump. The famously complicated and highly unique plot charts screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's (Cage) failed attempts to adapt a Susan Orlean's 'The Orchid Thief' into a screenplay. The film features a wonderfully offbeat performance from Cage, playing a meek and uncertain man, and getting the opportunity to act against himself as Kaufman's (fictional) brother. The most original film Cage has starred in, with Nic at his oddball best.

1. Raising Arizona (1987)

Whether there is something to be said about the fact that Cage's best film came out 23 years ago is up to you but it is one of the Coen Brother's best and certainly Cage's funniest performance. Cage and Holly Hunter but in wonderful performances as an ex-con and ex-cop who steal a baby. The chemistry between the two actors is superb and despite their twisted actions, there is something very sweet at the heart of this movie. It's the kind of role Cage needs to be in again at some point, but with a Ghost Rider sequel in the works (who asked for that!?) we might need to hold our breath.