Coup De Grace

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

After a villain attacks a location, there will usually be one or two wounded people left lying on the floor wincing in pain (sometimes begging for mercy depending how tough they are). The villain will then dispatch them with a single shot, or any kind of One-Hit Kill, to the head. Usually one handed.

If pronounced after the French manner, the term is pronounced "coo deh graass" and translates as 'blow of mercy.' However, most English speakers anglicize the pronunciation so the last word is pronounced "grah", which in French changes the meaning to "blow of fat". However, since we're speaking English and not French, it's a bit of a moot point. It comes from the use of such execution methods as the "Breaking Wheel", often used in France during the Dark Ages, where the victim is stretched across a wheel and has their limbs broken by a very large hammer. Often, it was then ordered for the executioner to deliver a fatal blow to the chest, in order to end the torturous ordeal quickly.

Also used in assassinations. In Russia, this is known as a "control shot". It's also used by hero protagonists on occasion, often spy characters, either to ensure a kill has succeeded, or to make sure a Big Bad is indeed dead. Not to be confused with actions such as a "Double Tap" in which multiple bullets are fired during the initial action; these are additional killing shots (or blows) delivered at some point after the target is disabled.

If it's done to ensure a swift and painless death, see Mercy Kill. May be used as (part of) a Finishing Move. Contrast Finish Him!. Part of the Coup De Grace Cutscene, obviously. Its Subversion is the Thwarted Coup De Grace.

As a Death Trope, Spoilers ahead may be unmarked. Beware.

Examples of Coup De Grace include:

Anime and Manga

  • Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai: The Massacre chapter has the Big Bad administering this to Shionand Satoko after disposing of the rest of the characters. The last of the True Companions, wasn't so lucky.
  • In the anime Hellsing, Sir Integra has to do this for all Helsing personnel after the mansion is attacked.
  • Naruto: After Naruto defeats Kakuzu with Wind Style: Rasenshuriken, Kakashi finishes Kakuzu off with Lightning Blade. Pain tries this once on Kakashi with a nail, and while Kakashi makes the nail disappear with his Mangekyo Sharingan, he seemingly dies of exhaustion after saving Choji from a missile. Pain seemingly does this a second time on Hinata, although it doesn't kill her. Sasuke starts to deliver one to a stabbed through Karin by Madara's advice that she knows to much to let her live but is interrupted by Sakura arriving.
  • In Black Lagoon, the leader of the Extra Order company does during their attack on the Yellow Flag in the first arc. Revy also delivers a Coup De Grace to a neo-nazi she mortally wounded in a later arc.
  • Death Note. Averted at the very end, when Matsuda's final shot at Light is deflected by his fellow officers, causing it to hit the concrete next to his head. Also averted earlier on, when Soichiro can't kill Mello, even at the cost of his own life. For a series so heavily steeped in Grey and Gray Morality, it's suitably marked by the good guys' inability to kill anyone. Mello and L are exempt from this one.
  • In Monster, Johan performs several on screen, and God knows how many off.
  • Subverted in Berserk. After completing a series of horrific and unimaginable deeds to his former friends Guts and Casca, Griffith, now Femto, leaves our Star-Crossed Lovers unconscious and dying on the ground of hell and is about to let the Apostles finish them off. Luckily for these two, the Skull Knight breaks through the Vortex and saves them just in the nick of time.

Comic Books

  • In the Warhammer40000 graphic novel "Imperius Dictatio" it is done with Humongous Mecha.
  • Sin City: Marv does this to a female sex-slaver in a Christmas issue. Yes, there was a Christmas issue.

Film

  • In Full Metal Jacket, Joker shoots a Vietnamese sniper in the head as a Mercy Kill. She'd already been so wounded, she was going to die anyway, but Joker eased her suffering. His squadmates completely miss the point, and praise it as a cold-blooded kill, despite the Heroic BSOD, complete with Thousand-Yard Stare on Joker's face.
  • Heat: Bad guy on bad guy example.
  • The 2004 The Punisher movie contains several instances, both from the good guy and the villains.
  • 300: An amusing hero-on-villain version; Leonidas and the Captain idly converse about how there's no reason they should not "be civil" when dealing with the Persians. Leonidas is even eating an apple... and all the while the rest of the Spartans are searching the fallen for wounded Persian soldiers to finish off. This is also present in the comic, with one of the Spartans humming or whistling.
  • Serenity: Hero on bad guy: Mal shooting an Alliance pilot, although Book had already shot his ship down by the time the crew of Serenity got there.
  • Pan's Labyrinth: Done generously throughout, mostly by Captain Vidal but briefly by the heroic guerrilleros as well.
  • Kill Bill: The Bride was a victim of one such, described as such by the Bride's own words. Proven unsuccessful, naturally.
  • At the end of Reservoir Dogs does Mr. White shoot the badly-wounded Mr. Orange in order to put him out of his misery, or is it because Orange has just confessed to White that he's a cop?
  • In The Patriot, Benjamin Martin is treating wounded American and British soldiers. The British Colonel Tavington orders the American soldiers shot and the house burned down as punishment for "harboring the enemy".
  • In Rambo, after the titular character has shot up the crew of a pirate boat (with a pistol vs automatic weapons, no less; he gets six shots off in the space of about one second, and they all hit) there is still one pirate left wounded, so Rambo blows his brains out.
  • Clarence Boddicker, noted cop killer, shoots Detroit police officer Murphy in the head after Boddicker's men have just had their fun shooting the officer with shotguns, repeatedly. With Murphy dead, OCP technicians have a fresh corpse they can use to build RoboCop.
  • In Bad Company, Anthony Hopkins shoots an unconscious terrorist dead for no readily discernible reason (there were like 50 CIA agents in the building, so it's unclear why they couldn't have just taken the guy prisoner.). He later complains that there's no one left to interrogate after the second terrorist jumps off the roof of the hotel.
  • In one scene in Blade Trinity, Blade and his sidekicks get into a fight against a bunch of security guards armed with nightsticks. After easily overpowering most of the security guards, Blade whips out a gun and kills the last security guard for no apparent reason other than to show that he can.
  • Red Dawn : The good guys are seen finishing off Soviet wounded as part of that movie's uncompromising depiction of guerrilla warfare.
  • James Bond generally didn't need to execute a coup de grace on his targets. An exception is Dr. Dent in Dr. No, who after being shot down receives an extra bullet in the back, for safety. (An act, it should be noted, that does not occur in any of Ian Fleming's novels.)
  • In Commando, Arnie's character, sitting next to a bad guy on a plane, knocks the thug unconscious and, even though the enemy is out cold, then proceeds to break his neck, just to be sure. ("He's dead tired.")
  • In Pacific Rim, remembering how failing to confirm the kill on Knifehead cost the life of his brother, Raleigh tells Mako to "check for a pulse" on the apparently downed Leatherback. They proceed to shoot it with Gipsy Danger's plasma cannon repeatedly until its chest explodes. "No pulse."

Literature

  • The central question during the trial in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is whether the victim was shot in self-defense during a gunfight, or was wounded and then coup-de-graced.
  • Time Enough for Love: In Robert A. Heinlein's novel, Lazarus Long invites a man and his two sons to dinner out in the middle of nowhere on the prairie where his homestead is. After the man pulls a hidden gun and proceeds to inform Lazarus that he and his sons are all going to rape Lazarus' wife, she shoots the gun out of his hand. After the man's two sons are killed, Lazarus asks him if he has any last words before putting him out of his misery. (Lazarus' misery, that is.)
  • In the The Book of Dreams, the final The Demon Princes novel, Howard Alan Treesong is faced with a Fate Worse Than Death, permanently imobilized and surrounded by vengeful enemies. His split personalities, however, have enough psychic power between them to knock him over into a pool of water and drown him.
  • In Malevil, surviving enemy commander Jean Feyrac is shot with a bow when he rides a bicycle ahead of his retreating men. He falls silently and it isn't until a few minutes later, after the ambush is sprung, that someone checks on him and learns he was only fatally wounded. Hervè is reluctant but Feyrac's crimes are too great and he finishes him off with his rifle.


Live Action TV

  • Lost: One tragic example is that mercenary bastard Keamy killing Alex in the fourth season.
  • The TV adaptation of the Robert Harris novel Archangel.
  • CSI: Miami features a rare example of a goodie doing this. On two occasions, with only the first being just in style as the guy still had a gun.
  • Burn Notice: The pilot starts with the hero being viciously beaten up by some Nigerian arms dealers. After decoying a pair of their dumber thugs into carrying his supposedly helpless self into the bathroom where he then knocks them out, the hero stands over the unconscious thugs while drawing and cocking a pistol. The camera immediately cuts to a viewpoint outside the bathroom—and then we hear two pistol shots through the door. The door then opens, revealing the hero limping away.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Another example of the good guys doing it to a fallen villain: Giles cold-bloodedly smothering Ben the doctor to death during the season 5 finale (see Shoot the Dog).

Giles: "No she couldn't. Never. And sooner or later Glory will re-emerge, and make Buffy pay for that mercy. And the world with her. Buffy even knows that and still she couldn't take a human life. She's a hero, you see. She's not like us."

  • Twenty Four has had this occur on more than one occasion.
  • In an episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, John does this to Cromartie, just to blow off some steam, apparently, since one bullet from a handgun won't do much to a Terminator.
    • A debatable example depending on one's view as to whether Terminators are actually sentient (i.e. alive), made more complex by how the Terminator Cameron is depicted in the series (is she or isn't she?)
  • Subverted in Battlestar Galactica. When the insurgents ambush the Cylon execution squad and rescue the human prisoners, Cavil is still alive but badly wounded. Rather than finish him off, Seelix leaves him lying there to suffer, saying "I hope it hurts a long time before you go to Download City."
    • "The Plan" has Cavil getting angry at Boomer for shooting Adama in the chest instead of the head. Indeed Adama himself learns from his experience—when he orders Admiral Cain's assassination (using a plan clearly based on his own shooting) he makes a point of telling Starbuck to shoot Cain in the head.
    • Also played straight in the Pilot Miniseries: Galactica's fighter wing is remotely disabled by the Cylon fighters exploiting a backdoor in their fighters' control software. Once the fighters are left adrift, the Cylon raiders peform a mass coup de grace, launching a volley of missiles with one missle tracking each helpless fighter.
  • A later episode of the original La Femme Nikita TV series has the heroine rather disturbingly firing bullets into the heads of a group of unconscious Section agents, to ensure their deaths.
  • It's strongly implied in the NCIS season finale "Judgment Day" that either Jenny Shepard or Mike Franks does this to several bad guys during the gun battle that results in Jenny's death.


Tabletop RPG

  • Done quite often in Dungeons & Dragons; there are actually rules in the 3rd edition of the game for when it may be done and how it affects attacks. One of the most surefire ways to kill something in 3rd edition is to have a spell-caster paralyze or otherwise incapacitate your opponent and then have a fighter or a rogue with a high-critical weapon perform this trope on them while they're down, because a coup de grace is a guaranteed maximum damage critical hit. You don't roll anything at all. If the victim survives that, they must roll a fortitude save with a difficulty equal to the damage dealt plus ten or die. Often, it's the failure of the save that kills them, not the damage. It comes up in earlier editions as well, back to the original D&D rules in the "Three Little Brown Books" that came immediately after Chainmail. A totally helpless person could be slain instantly, for example paralyzed or magically-sleeping ones. Most of the durability of a person (its Hit Points) were abstract. It was assumed that regardless of the combat rules one should still be able to behead or neck-shiv a comatose man.
  • There are rules for coup-de-grace (here called "pointblanking") in Unknown Armies. Appropriately for the themes of the game, they also detail the effect killing a helpless victim has on the executor's Sanity Meter.


Video Games

  • In Knights of the Old Republic, if you are unable to turn Bastila back to the Light Side, you have three options: defeat her in combat and kill her, be defeated and killed by her, or defeat her and then give her a quick, execution-style death.
  • Call Of Duty 4
    • Done by Big Bad Zakhaev to the incapacitated SAS troops in the final bridge scene.
    • Also done by Captain Price to Khaled al-Asad.
    • You yourself can do this with your rifle or knife to wounded enemy troops, which is usually a good idea; you have no idea if they're going to produce a pistol or a grenade to take you down with them. Call of Duty does a damn good job reminding the player of the merciless brutality of war.
    • In Call of Duty, World at War, in the campaign mode there's a section where you can finish off some Germans who had just been holding you captive before someone rescues you.
  • Several of the Sync kills in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War have this at the end.
  • Delivered to Ricardo Diaz in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
    • Subverted when it comes to Tenpenny in San Andreas, where he already died after his last words (he fall off a bridge in a truck before muttering his last words). CJ was about to do it but he's already dead. To this troper's regret, the player doesn't get to do it - death by Big Purple Dildo would have suited the bastard nicely.
  • Gears of War famously allowed the player to curb-stomp wounded enemy soldiers. Gears of War 2 ups the ante with many, many more instant kills to wounded enemy soldiers. Oh the humanity.
  • The World Ends With You has an instance of this in the case of a certain spoileriffic death: Joshua shooting Neku while he's down and startled.
  • Dark Messiah: The player can use a bladed weapon to run through any enemy that's been knocked to the ground.
  • Eternal Darkness features this in spades - Not only did each weapon have its own finishing move, each person had their unique ways to finish off horrors as well. Most of these are with blades as few characters have access to firearms. Also, players were encouraged to finish off enemies as doing so restored sanity. These include:
  • You can do this to wounded people in Postal. There is a control (default: X) which stands for "Execute".
  • Jade Empire: Sir Roderick Ponce von Fontlebottom does this to you if he defeats you. Given how hard it is to beat him without exploiting your own Game Breakers, you'll probably see it at least once.
  • Each member of the Killer7 has their own method for dispatching Heaven's Smiles that have lost their legs. They range from Dan kicking the target onto its back and double-tapping, to Coyote curb-stomping it, to Garcian bashing its head in with his briefcase.
  • Done by Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater during the Virtuous Mission.[1] He walks in while Snake is surrounded by Spetnaz, and then shoots all of them. One is left on the ground, squirming on Ocelot's beret. Ocelot promptly shoots him in the head and picks up his hat.
  • In The Godfather: The Game, you can do this as one of the Execution Styles to finish off a weakened foe.
  • In Scarface the World Is Yours, if you get into melee range with an enemy while having a gun out, Tony can force him onto his knees and shoot him up. The game clearly labels this as "Execution" and gives you extra Balls for killing folks this way.
  • In Assassin's Creed II you have the option of attacking enemies on the ground and doing so while armed is a One-Hit Kill. Some of the moves shown for Brotherhood include sweeping an enemy off his feet and shooting him with the crossbow or following up a flooring Groin Attack with a curb-stomp.
  • "Fatality" moves in Mortal Kombat.
  • Dwarf Fortress: If you've knocked an enemy unconscious, you get a guaranteed hit on any part of the body you like, allowing you to do what you like: slicing them in half, decapitating them, and hacking off their limbs and watching them writhe in agony are among the countless options available.
    • This also causes trap immune enemies to become vulnerable to traps.
  • In Defense of the Ancients, an assassin-type hero named Morted has this as her ultimate. It doesn't always invoke this trope, instead being more of a massive Critical Hit.
  • Eternal Sonata: This is one of the first attacks Fréderic learns, though it's fairly weak compared to some of his other specials. Feels good to finish an enemy with it though.
  • Troika's Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil uses this as per the Dungeon's and Dragon's rules, and uses it as the method to ensure trolls remain dead.
  • In Halo 3, the Arbiter does this to Truth, who is already infected and being consumed by the Flood.
  • In Soldier of Fortune, Dekker delivers this to Hawk.


Web Comics

  • Spoofed in Penny Arcade, as a rule of nerf gun fighting, if a player finds an enemy who is out of ammo he is allowed to shoot them executioner style.

Gabe - "Killing me won't bring her back, you know."
Tycho - "Ain't that a shame. (Toink)"

  • Roy Greenhilt from Order of the Stick delivers several of these to Goblins afflicted with sleep in one of the early chapters. The technique he uses is even called "Coup de Grace." Note that it wasn't V's spell which put them to sleep but the length and boring nature of the incantation.

"I never knew you had such great cleavage, Roy."

  • The eponymous protagonist in Sarab deals out one of these to an unnamed girl. Or rather, her avatar.


Western Animation

  • Transformers: The Movie : The Decepticons hijack an Autobot shuttle bound for Earth and lay waste to its crew. Ironhide is the one unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of a Coup De Grace from Megatron (As if being Killed Off for Real so soon wasn't bad enough). Additionally it cements Megatron's badass credentials when he looks at Ironhide, sneers a magnificent 'Such heroic nonsense' at him and blows him away.


Real Life

  • When fighting in Real Life, be aware that employing this trope may be in violation of The Laws and Customs of War, depending on the circumstances. Even if the enemy in question was requesting a Mercy Kill, he won't exactly be able to vouch for you at your court martial later on.
  • Relatively common in mechanized and naval warfare. An enemy disabled in the heat of combat may then be ignored while more threatening targets are focused on. While it is a crime to Sink the Life Boats, there is nothing particularly wrong with swinging back to finish off a crippled Cool Ship if there is any chance the crew may repair her and bring her back into the fight. This was indeed a common role for submarines during larger battles during World War II.
  1. ↑ Virtual Mission?
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