Basic Trope: One bullet seems to kill someone in an instant.
- Straight: Bill shoots Mac in the torso and Mac collapses and dies almost immediately. Nobody even attempts first aid.
- Exaggerated:
- Bill takes down mob after mob - even if he only grazes them, they just seem to give up and die instantly.
- Those who die from bullets can no longer be resurrected, including ways that can bring back the disintegrated.
- Downplayed: Characters die quickly from gunshots, but linger a little before expiring.
- Justified:
- It was a shot to a vital spot such as the heart or brain.
- Alternately, the bullet is designed to fragment for massive, systemic damage, or they have been hit multiple times.
- Mac dies due to blood loss or perhaps severe shock.
- Mac doesn't die by the bullet, but rather from falling to his death.
- The bullet is designed to deliver Hollywood Acid into the target's bloodstream.
- Inverted:
- Bill shoots Mac's corpse and he springs back to life
- Only a Flesh Wound
- A gunshot wound, even a headshot that splatters someone's brains across the room, invariably means a slow, agonizing death.
- Immune to Bullets (an exaggerated inversion, as no amount of bullets will do Bill in)
- Subverted: The shot seems to kill Mac but he comes back a scene later...
- Double Subverted:
- ... to die from a second bullet.
- … but that turns out to be his Identical Stranger.
- Parodied:
- The gun shop Bill frequents is advertising the Super Bullet, which is guaranteed to drop your opponents even if it just grazes them.
- Just being shot at is enough to scare Mooks to death, even if the bullets come nowhere near them.
- Zig Zagged: Bill shoots Mac, who appears to die instantly. Then, as Bill turns to walk away, Mac opens his eyes, crawls forward, and shoots Bill... who dies instantly.
- Averted: Mac gets shot and lives long enough to bleed out and deliver a Final Speech.
- Enforced: The producers of this film are big on gun control and want to reinforce how deadly guns can be.
- Lampshaded: “This gun shoots death!”
- Invoked: Bill practices shooting for the vitals for clean kills.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Bill practices to avoid shooting the vitals.
- Discussed: "Well, I guess one shot is all it takes..."
- Conversed: "Wow, he died rather quickly, considering I shot him in the foot..."
- Deconstructed: Any world in which bullets are so lethal is a world in which professionals who often face gunfights are bitter and cynical, leading to a swathe of Sociopathic Hero tendencies. You could die at any moment without even knowing what killed you. Such situations provoke fatalistic attitudes.
- Reconstructed: Characters find ways to rationalize the danger they are placed in and grow stronger as a result. They also start wearing full-body ballistic armor all the time.
- Implied:
- The scene where Bill shoots Mac is censored with a Shadow Discretion Shot. We see Mac’s shadow fall over, but that’s the end of the scene; we don’t know if he immediately died or not.
- Bill tells Evan that Mac was killed quickly, but we don’t see the scene where Bill killed Mac.
Back to Instant Death Bullet
