No-Holds-Barred Beatdown

"This time, Boggs didn't put anything in Andy's mouth, and neither did his friends. What they did do was beat him to within an inch of his life."

—Red, from The Shawshank Redemption

Put away the magic, energy blasts, and witty banter. Beauty Is Never Tarnished, Made of Iron, Toon Physics, and Hollywood Healing, if they were present in the story before, are all temporarily turned off. This is the scene where a villain (or very dark antihero) pummels, punches, kicks, beats, and/or batters someone into a limp, bruised, bloody pulp. Note that as far as Fight Scenes go, this is quite one-sided. That Heroic Second Wind you're waiting for? Keep waiting. It doesn't end that way.

When the victim can no longer even try to strike back, or if he never even had a chance to, the attacker just keeps going. It takes all the victim's Heroic Resolve just to keep breathing. And sometimes, even that may not be enough—some attackers take this to its logical conclusion and beat the victim to death in a scene that often qualifies as both Nightmare Fuel and crossing the Moral Event Horizon.

Dialogue is limited. At most, a particularly cold attacker may continue to mock or insult the victim between blows. Some blows are delivered off-screen; sounds are sometimes more disturbing than visuals, anyway.

In the West at least, 99.9% of the time, this happens between males for obvious reasons. And, no, it doesn't always have to be villain-beats-up-hero, but most of the time, it is... we hope (unless the villain really deserves it.)

Appropriate Viewer Stock Phrases are "I can't believe I'm watching this," and "I'm going to be sick."

If both combatants hand out a brutal beating, it's How Much More Can He Take?. If the beatdown is in retaliation for a past injustice but still makes you think "too far?", then it's Extreme Melee Revenge. If the victim is trying desperately to get away, the attacker may need to inform him or her that You Will Not Evade Me.

Contrast with the Curb Stomp Battle and Once Is Not Enough. Compare Unstoppable Rage (one of the causes) and Cold-Blooded Torture.

Examples of No-Holds-Barred Beatdown include:

Anime

• In the final battle between Suzaku and Kallen's Knightmare frames in Season 2 of Code Geass, since they're both fairly evenly matched now, nor do they have to withdraw due to other circumstances as in earlier battles, fight pretty brutally. Both of their Knightmare's get heavily damaged, to the point where the only thing really left of their mechs afterward is an arm or leg (although Suzaku "loses" by having his blow up).
• In Dragon Ball Z, Frieza's legendary beatdown of Vegeta, right after Frieza achieved his fourth and final transformation. In the uncut version (read: the one you won't see on Cartoon Network), it's quite possibly one of the most savage beatings bestowed in all of anime. Frieza literally pummels Vegeta until Vegeta can barely move from the pain and injury, tears of humiliation and agony dripping from his eyes. And just when Goku arrives and it looks like it'll be a Big Damn Heroes moment, Frieza finishes the fight by blasting Vegeta through the heart, killing him. While most of the cast is quick to admit Vegeta can't keep his mouth shut, Goku is heavily enraged by Kick the Dog-methods of one-sided fights.
  • In fact, apart from Super Saiyans, all of Freeza's fights reached a point where he'll get fed up, power up, and utterly destroy his opponent without even trying: Nail, Krillin, Gohan, Piccolo, Vegeta and even Goku were almost killed in direct confrontations this way.
  • Just as harsh: Hercule/Mr. Satan's daughter Videl is savagely beaten to the point of crying by her superpowered (male) opponent, Spopovich in the Tenkaichi Budokai tournament. He takes this almost literally as the last move he used was standing on and attempting to crush her skull against the tournament floor.
    • During the first half of the fight Videl gave him a pretty far going beatdown, as she didn't know the true extent of the power Gohan had trained her to, but was just trying to win. She and the audience even thought she accidentally killed him at one point, but it turned out for this guy having your neck suddenly wrenched around 75 degrees by a roundhouse was far less than fatal. Of course, considering he barely registers any damage later in the fight, it's likely he let her beat the crap outta him for shits and giggles.
  • Also, earlier in Dragon Ball, Piccolo Daimao, even taking his robe off for some Serious Business, handed one of these to the young Son Goku. Even momentarily stopping his heart beating.
  • Raditz's first fight with Goku, which ended with him stomping on Goku's chest.
  • Vegeta's fight with Kid Buu when Goku needed one minute to charge enough energy to defeat him. Made even more sad as Vegeta was fully aware that Kid Buu was way out of his league and that simply surviving the minute was going to be hard as hell. Add to this that Vegeta was already dead, so 'dying' in his current form meant being Killed Off for Real. That 'fight' was simply sad.
  • Any time Gohan lets his anger loose, he will be handing one of these to somebody. Unfortunately, he usually can't maintain his pissed-off state long enough (most people in DBZ would require a week-long beatdown to actually lose a fight). But man oh man, as long as he stays mad he will ruin your day.
    • Gohan going SS2 had him deliver one to Cell, only using a Ki attack at one point in the fight and mostly pummeling him. Turning SS2 gave Gohan a sadistic streak rivaling Frieza and had him let Cell hit him once just to show how outmatched Cell was, and as the fight went on it became clear Gohan was just dragging the fight out to torture him, which eventually backfired.
    • And, at the late Buu saga, he doesn't need to be mad to have access to his full power. And demolish Buu with mere punches and kicks.
  • When Cell first encounters the androids, he beats 17 down to the point where he can no longer even move, only able to watch in horror as Cell prepares to absorb him.
    • To say nothing of Cell's utter decimation of Piccolo immediately prior.
      • Common in the movies, with Goku getting one from Turlus after the latter ate of the fruit from the Tree of Might, which had a notably brutal Kick the Dog moment when Goku could barely stand and Turles pummeled him with repeated Ki blasts. More famously, any fight involving Broly has him do this before his beaten by a Deus Ex Machina.
• In Monster, a couple of thugs decide to mug Dr. Reichwein. Big mistake.
• Johnathan Joestar's beatdown of Complete Monster Dio Brando in the first part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, wherein he beats Dio so badly that Dio actually starts to cry. Considering how much crap Dio had put Johnathan through from literally the moment the two met, this was really cathartic.
  • Most main characters get at least one of these throughout the course of their part of the series, though not usually against the main villain. Jotaro completely annihilating Steely Dan after being put through all kinds of torture while he held his grandfather hostage comes to mind. The guy gets beaten up for three full pages, mind you.
  • Which is topped by Giorno giving one the biggest beatdowns in the manga to Cioccolatta for about 5 pages straight, ending it by punching him into a garbage truck.
    • On the villain side, there is Vanilla Ice subjecting Iggy to one in rage for being forced to destroy an effigy of his master Dio. Iggy is actually killed as a result of the beatdown
• In Yu-Gi-Oh, the end of the battle between Yami and Insector/Weevil on the top of the train qualifies as a hero-on-villain version of this trope. Despite already having won by the game rules, Yami just keeps on pulling his kill spell effect on a defenseless Weevil.
  • Though Anzu conveniently turns up, making this somewhat of a What the Hell, Hero? moment instead.
  • In Yami's defense, Weevil had just made it appear that Yugi's soul had been utterly destroyed, so this could really count more as a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• In episode 4 of Baccano!, Ladd Russo shows just how much of a Badass antagonist he is by mercilessly beating up a member of the Lemures with his bare fists, taunting him all the while. He continues beating the man's bloody face even long after it's apparent that his victim is dead, then just laughs it off. The episode itself is appropriately titled "Ladd Russo Enjoys Talking a Lot and Killing a Lot."
• At the beginning of Tenjho Tenge, Nagi Souichirou picks a fight with Takayanagi Masataka, biting off far more than he can chew when Masataka blocks his cheap shot with a chopstick, then proceeds to Kamehameha the punk across the room. Masataka decides to play the role of villain for a bit and swiftly proceeds to rearrange Souichirou's face with an unending flurry of kicks. Masataka eventually falls victim to another cheapshot from Souichirou, which, most unfortunately for our main protagonist, prompts Masataka to descend into a berserker rage, massacring Souichirou in one of the most brutal beatdowns in the series. The "fight" ends with Masataka intentionally missing his final wall-shattering punch (floor-shattering in the manga) as Souichirou passes out. Watch it here.
  • Also in Tenjho, when Aya faces off against Shiro (the staff guy) during the bowling alley fight. After Shiro inadvertently awakens her Dragon Eyes, Aya proceeds to beat the poor guy within an inch of his life, with his own weapon, laughing all the while. (Granted, she did feel pretty bad afterwards.)
• Fullmetal Alchemist has Ed's beating of Shou Tucker. In order to keep his job, Tucker uses alchemy on his adorable daughter Nina and fuses her with the family dog, making her into a chimera. When Ed sees what happened, he begins pummeling Tucker, and completely loses it when Tucker claims they are Not So Different. Al stops Ed, telling him that if he doesn't stop, Tucker will die (Al then tells Tucker that if he doesn't shut up, he'll start killing him).
  • Roy Mustang confronts Envy and learns that Envy killed Hughes. Cue the Curb Stomp Battle, with Mustang repeatedly mutilating and incinerating Envy in the worst way imaginable, Ed and Hawkeye are barely able to talk Roy down from literally crushing Envy's True Form like a worm under his boot… Whereupon Ed instead Talks The Monster To Death.
  • And of course there is King Bradley Vs Greed. Let's just say that Greed died at least 16 TIMES without even coming close to being in the position to retaliate.

Bradley: So Greed old boy.....How many times would you like to die?"

• • During the final battle, just after Al sacrifices his soul to get Ed's arm restored, Ed proceeds to brutally beat the remaining Philosopher's Stones out of Truth!Father one punch at a time with his bare hands.
  • In episode 22 of the 2003 anime adaptation, Envy totally humiliates Edward and Lust and Gluttony take Alphonse hostage. The only reason the Elrics got out of that one was because they were saved by Scar, who actually did much the same thing to Ed in an earlier episode. And then of course, there's the final battle with the homunculi, in which Envy sadistically kills Edward after revealing that he is actually Edward's half-brother..
• Thorkell, a Blood Knight extraordinaire and major antagonist for part way through Vinland Saga, continually lays a beat down on the protagonist every time they meet in combat, often with his bare hands, though he loses an eye and a pair of fingers at the same time.
  • Askeladd's no stranger to this as well, as the latest 'duel' between him and Thorfinn was arguably the most humiliating bare-handed asskicking the latter's gotten to date in the series. In this case, however, it was mostly Thorfinn's fault, having challenged Askeladd while he still had a broken arm, and having failed to learn anything about finding new moves and keeping a cool head from their previous duels.
• In Rurouni Kenshin, the first proper fight between Saito and Kenshin eventually turns into this after Kenshin is stabbed, and when Saito ends up using his belt and coat to try and strangle Kenshin after losing his sword he then resorts to his fists. A wuss, Saito is not, and Kenshin's forced to awaken his Super-Powered Evil Side just to survive while Kaoru watches helplessly. Luckily, they're stopped Just in Time before they actually manage to kill each other. Later, the fight with Enishi goes a lot like this, but once again they're stopped by Kaoru.
  • Saito hands out another beatdown later in the series, this time to Sanosuke, to prove that he couldn't hack it in the coming battle in Kyoto. For the extra kick in the teeth, he trashes him at unarmed combat.
    • Further more, he does it while avoiding Sano's shoulder injury, a weakness he would normally take advantage of.
  • This trope is inverted during the first Kenshin/Enishi fight. After Enishi says he's to kill Kaoru, Kenshin goes into an Unstoppable Rage and beats the crap out him, putting away all the fancy techniques that Enishi easily defeated earlier.
• A rule of thumb for One Piece is that this will happen to some degree whenever Luffy deals with a Logia Devil Fruit user, or one of the Seven Warlords of the Sea. The most obvious examples are Crocodile (who delivers it in a classic style after revealing that Luffy can't hurt him at all), and Aokiji (who does it, all at once, to the best of the heroes, taking The Worf Effect to its logical extreme).
  • Magellan managed to invoke this in every fight he took place in during the Impel Down arc. Luffy's strength meant nothing when Magellan only had to touch him once with his poison for a fatality, and he was unable to land a hit in turn without covering his hands in the poison. It was possibly the closest Luffy has come to dying to date.
  • Slightly subverted when Luffy faces a Logia Devil Fruit user he actually has an advantage over, and proceeds to kick his ass. When God Eneru recovered, he was too terrified of Luffy and didn't actually want to fight him anymore. His solution was to trick him by grafting a giant golden orb on Luffy's arm. When Luffy returned he gave one final move that completely defeated Eneru.
  • In an odd neutral-on-hero example, when Zoro challenges Mihawk, supposedly the world's best swordsman, to a battle, Mihawk proceeds to effortlessly block everything Zoro does with a tiny dagger. He proceeds to stab Zoro in the chest and, when Zoro refuses to surrender, he agrees to use his BFS, with which he shatters two of Zoro's swords and almost kills him. He only lets him live because he wants to see if Zoro really can surpass him.
  • A rare hero version occurs when Chopper activates Monster Chopper. The previously one-sided fight with Kumadori suddenly becomes a smackdown so brutal, you actually feel sorry for the villain who had previously just beat the hero within an inch of his life.
  • Don't forget when Bellamy beat up Montblanc Cricket and the Monkey Brothers, Luffy heads back to Mock Town and hands him a extremely satisfying one-hit KO.
  • Marine Admiral Akainu for most of the Marineford arc was the living embodiment of this trope. Most notably his brief one encounter with Ace
    • Immediately after said encounter, Whitebeard drops one on both Akainu AND Bleackbeard, although both escape death by the edge of their teeth.
• In Bleach, Ichigo is delivered a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown by Grimmjow and Tesla (though in the latter case, he was half dead after defeating the former anyway.
  • And before that Yammy gives him, one after his Heroic BSOD kicked in.
  • Then later on, Aizen delivers one to Gin. Admittedly Gin had just stabbed him, but after Aizen came back again, he proceeded to slash him across the chest, rip his arm off, stab him through the chest, and finally throw him through a building.
    • The Ulquiorra fight was just brutal. The favor was returned.
    • Giant Mook Allon cements himself itself as the only thing in the Manga almost as terrifying as Barragan by delivering several almost impossibly brutal versions of the One Hit KO. It tears out half of Rangiku's torso before she can blink. It crushes Momo's ribcage with a single punch. It attempts to crush and eat Hisagi when he attempts to take it on, and blows Iba away with a backwards glance during his attempt at Big Damn Heroes.
    • Badass Grandpa Yamamato delivers one to a special hollow that was created to stop his Infinity+1 Sword. The hollow rendered his sword useless, but Yammato simply killed it with a set bare-handed attacks.
• Ninja Scroll: Himuro Gemma delivers a beating of this type to Jubei. Not even getting his arm cut off stops him. Getting his skull bashed in does, temporarily.
• Yusuke Urameshi provides one of these in Yu Yu Hakusho to the main arc villain, Sensui after he is taken control of by his ancestor, Raizen. Sensui is thrown and beaten around like a ragdoll before he is finished off by the hero. Which was what he wanted in the first place.
  • Another beatdown occurs earlier in the series during the Tournament Arc. Yusuke and his opponent realize that they're running out of strength, so they decide to keep trading blows between one another until one of them finally collapses. Yusuke comes out winning, being the Determinator he is at times.
  • Then there was Bakken, who both gave and received one. First, he decided to play around with Kurama, who had just survived two brutal fights in a row and was essentially asleep on his feet. He was only convinced to stop the carnage by the threat of Yusuke shooting him in the back: rules or no rules. Whereupon Yusuke himself takes up the fight... and despite Bakken's mist ability promptly dealt him back for every blow given to Kurama earlier: only with Yusuke's much-stronger fists. Adding insult to Bakken is the fact that Yusuke also took every blow he threw at him and shrugged it off before beating him to a pulp when he was begging for mercy.
  • Younger Toguro's fight with Yusuke in the final match was very evenly matched...until he goes 100%. it took a supposedly Heroic Sacrifice from Kuwabara to make the hero be a real threat to the demon because it was WAY TOO ONE SIDED, to the point that Yusuke was being beat around like a rag doll.
    • And then there is Genkai Vs The Beautiful Suzuka. Genkai pounds him so hard indents of her fist are left all over his body, and his face has been bruised and to the point it's unrecognizable.
  • Kuwabara receives two of these during the Dark Tournement arc. The first is during a three vs. three fight and the good guys have just learned that their opponents are Brainwashed and Crazy. Kuwabara, subscribing to the Honor Before Reason school of thought, refuses to attack them any more and the three gang up on him. It ends about as poorly as you'd expect. The second example is in his very next fight, before he's had a chance to recover. Due to several counts of trickery, Hiei and the Masked Fighter were disqualified before the match could begin, leaving Kurama and Yusuke as the only fighters with most of their bones in tact to face five opponents in a row. Fatigue claims Kurama halfway through the third guy, and Yusuke is disqualified on a technicality before his match with the final one. Kuwabara is yelling in pain while climbing into the ring, but he agrees to fight for his team because he's the only one left. As it turns out, his opponent's power involves covering himself in rock and slamming himself into an enemy. Kuwabara's already broken body takes several of these attacks before Yukina shows up and The Power of Love gives him a second wind and renews his energy so that he can send the guy flying with one shot.
    • Speaking of Kurama, the fight that he loses in that match didn't end when he passed out. His opponent slammed his body around like a rag doll for several minutes before they finally called the match over.
• Naruto has Neji beating down Hinata in such a manner, practically killing her when she doesn't give up.
  • Even more recently, Hinata takes on Big Bad Pain to protect a helpless Naruto, finally confessing her love for Naruto before charging the most powerful Ninja in the world without a trace of fear. Pain proceeds to sidestep her attack, crush her into the ground with gravity, and seemingly stab her to death in front of Naruto.
    • This scene is even worse in the anime because it isn't so much of a Curb Stomp Battle. Pain doesn't one-shot Hinata and she puts up a much better fight- but that ultimately just means that she gets knocked down- and stands up. And gets knocked down again. It's brutal.
    • It's worse in the Anime also because Hinata's more focused on freeing Naruto than facing down Pain...and rather than beating her in two brutal moves, Pain drags it out and practically tortures her to death in front of Naruto.
    • After seeing Hinata get stabbed, Naruto inverts this beyond anything ever seen in the anime. Naruto, suffering from the loss of his master, his village, his first teacher, and now the only non-filler girl in love with him, loses all hope and resorts to the Nine-tails to bring down Pain. In the anime, Kyuubi Naruto, already in the 4-tailed state, mercilessly beats him on the Megaton-scale, yet Pain is unscathed. Angered even further, he transforms into a never-before-seen 6-tailed form and attacks him with far more power than before. Ironically, he doesn't attack Pain in his 8-tailed state, considering he was trying to break out of a moonlike mass that Pain trapped him in.
  • Really most of the arc was Pain doing this to all of Konoha. Naruto was the only one who can really do any significant damage to him in a non-Pyrrhic way (Kakashi, Choji, and Choza vs. Deva path is the only one that could even be considered a "battle"), and he only arrives halfway through. And still got his ass kicked in the end. And the only reason he lasted as long as he did was because Pain was holding back because he was trying to capture, not kill Naruto.
  • The fight between Killer Bee and Hebi (Sasuke's group) is ridiculously one sided. He utterly flattens them all at once and then goes into his super mode just to hammer in that they are in way over their heads. By this point, they're all bruised and broken and then he starts charging up a tailed beast ball. And at the end, he fakes having lost the fight in order to go on vacation and makes them look like utter fools.
  • And the first was Naruto first tapping into his Super-Powered Evil Side for the first and pawns Haku.
• Lordgenome, in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Unique in the fact that he delivers one, bare handed, to a mecha.
  • Not just that, he climbed out of his own mecha as it was in the middle of being destroyed by the hero and fucked his shit up barehanded.
  • And because obviously this wasn't spectacular enough, the second movie takes this trope to Up to Eleven during the Final Battle, during which the Anti-Spiral King finally snaps and proceeds to beat the living hell out of our heroes while furiously ranting about the sacrifices made by his race and how the good guys are nothing but a group of reckless fools whose actions will doom the universe, culminating in the brutal dismemberment of The Show's Namesake Mecha.Seriously, the squiggly man was pissed. After which they get back up and give him a beatdown in return.
• Played with in Kinnikuman when Brocken Jr. faced off with Ramenman. Brocken delivered one of these to Ramenman for a time until deciding to use the Camel Clutch, the move Ramenman had killed his father Brockenman with. At that moment, Ramenman asks if Brocken is all out of moves and proceeds to break free and beat Brocken down.
• Elfen Lied has a fight between Lucy and Nana, wherein Lucy, already having won, proceeds to slowly rip Nana's limbs off, one by one. Made even worse by Nana desperately repeating that it doesn't hurt.
  • Any fight involving Lucy turns into this, though in the anime she actually ends receiving of one from Nana. In case outside of her, there was a Bando delivering one to the Unknown Man, knocking out several of his teeth, amongst other things.
• The already extremely violent samurai series Shigurui shows several examples of Samurai throwing away their swords and beating people to death in the most brutal fashion possible, sometimes against multiple armed opponents!.
• In Fushigi Yuugi, Tasuki receives one of these from Brainwashed and Crazy Tamahome. They're more or less evenly matched when the fight begins, but Miaka can't bear the idea that her beloved Tamahome might be hurt or killed, and begs Tasuki not to use his weapon. He obeys, challenging Tamahome to be a man and fight him bare-handed instead. Tamahome promptly responds by hitting him in the face with his weapon... which knocks Tasuki down, where Tamahome proceeds to grind his face into the ground and issue one of the most prolonged, violent beatings in the series. Eventually, even Nakago arrives to pile on.
  • Despite being reduced to a broken, bloody mess by the end of the sequence, this is widely regarded as the Crowning Moment of Awesome for Tasuki. At a certain point in the battle he knows he's probably going to get beaten to death, but keeps getting up to take more punishment from Tamahome and Nakago anyway in order to keep them preoccupied while his allies escape.
• Possibly one of the greatest examples in all of anime occurs in Karas: The Revelation. The hero Otoha has been stripped of his powers, but it's revealed that, possibly due to a genetic disease ( he's incredibly bishonen for being the product of incest)), he's incapable of feeling pain. He readily cuts open his own hand with his sword without so much as wincing, and he more than once takes bullet wounds in fights and carries on with barely a hesitation. Even with this knowledge however, the audience cringes during his fight with a bull demon in a subway station: without his powers as Karas, Otoha is massively outclassed, and although he briefly holds his own, he's eventually impaled on a spike the width of a car tire and hurled the length of a city block... and he still gets back up.
  • To elaborate. He survives a Wave Motion Gun attack. There's a moment where it really looks like he's going to summon up some supernatural power, one brief moment of hope, but it doesn't last. His Karas sword SHATTERS, he's got shards of glass or metal in HIS EYES, minus one arm. And he still TRIES to keep fighting. Which basically results in him collapsing forward, lamenting his weakness. And then, he became a Karas again, and delivered a curbstomp of his own to what was, in all likelihood, the weakest monster of the series.
• "Karas: The Prophecy", being part 1 of the previous entry, opens with quite possibly the most epic battle of the entire series. Between Eko, the former Karas, and his replacement. Eko, being hundreds of years old and only recently replaced, delivers a fairly one-sided beating to the Karas who preceded Otoha. With Crowning Music of Awesome in the background. And transformations from samurai / ninja to something resembling fighter jet combat.
  • Basically, whenever Eko enters the fray, a beatdown is about to commence. To the degree where its DISAPPOINTING that he Scaled Up into a giant asian-style mecha-dragon looking thing. As giant monstrosities never seem to put up as good a fight as a human Big Bad, and do not lend themselves to epic kung fu battle. Which was what made Eko such a wonderful villain. He knows that Authority Equals Asskicking and he's not afraid to do it. Which makes sense, considering he spent centuries as a monster-fighter in Japan...
• One episode of Darker than Black has the protagonist undercover as a waiter in a Yakuza run restaurant. He is attacked by a disgruntled patron who in the process causes a lot of damage to the restaurant. The next scene shows the protagonist befriending a young gangster while the customer is being savagely beaten in the background.
  • Much more to the point is the fact that the first time we see Our Hero, he does this to someone. The guy was pretty much helpless, since he had the incredibly sucky remuneration of breaking his own fingers. Hei beat the everloving crap out of him, including knifing and kicking his freshly-injured hand to get him to talk. He finished by zapping the guy to death. Why yes, Hei is an Anti-Hero. Why do you ask?
• The second episode of Kino's Journey features a Neutral-on-Villain version of this as Kino is told to drop her weapons in a pile... and then quickly annihilates the three slavers with one of her remaining weapons. As The Stoic, she doesn't show the typical rage these fights often develop, but it's messy, violent, and very, very brutal.
• Shion (disguised as Mion) delivers one of these to Satoko in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, she ruthlessly beats the little girl in the middle of the class room while berating her for crying and taking up all her brother's time. She was about to kill her, saying that a cracked skull would shut her up, when Rika threw herself in front of Satoko saying she would also have to Go Through Me and Rena joined her. Shion was about to also take them out, and then she was Punched Across the Room by Satoshi... the boy she was doing it for. It should be noted that while this event was only shown in one chapter, since it is part of the back story (taking place a year before the main story) it is assumed to happen in every world.
  • In the third episode of the OVA, Satoko gets another beatdown, this time from Rika armed with a chair. First with a chair thrown hard to the face followed by four or five solid blows delivered at full force stopped only by Rika's mercy. However in this instance, Satoko was practically asking for it.
    • In the sound novel Rika hits her with the chair, then hits her. It's not as violent or traumatizing as the anime, but still effective.
• Mahou Sensei Negima has Heroic Resolve turn every fight Negi participates in into one of these at some point, since its a theme of his character to have such difficulties due to inexperience. Interestingly, the most intense of these came at the hands of another good guy during the end of the tournament arc. Negi got back up, and pulled out his new upgrade...and still can't win.
• In Deadman Wonderland, this happens to Ganta during the majority of his battles. The only thing that keeps saving him is that, in the end, when everything looks hopeless and he's about to give up, he always gets a surge of energy and determination that makes him stand up again.
• In Rave Master Haru does one of these on Lucia using a demon sword, and even almost kills him before Elie snaps him back into his senses. Then Lucia pulls one of these on Haru and almost kills him before Shuda intervenes and gets killed instead except he recovers. The fight this sparks is significantly less one sided.
• In Fairy Tail during the Oracion Seis arc Brain reverts to his other personality Zero and proceeds to utterly defeat Natsu, Gray and Lucy. And then keeps trashing them around for the lulz again and again. Borders with Nightmare Fuel.
  • Then later Hades who proceeds to do this to Makarov then Natsu, Gray, Erza, Lucy, and Wendy.
  • Before that two heroic variant have Elfman and Mirajane on two different occasions when one was watching the other get tortured and the result an EPIC beatdown.
  • The Iron Dragon Slayer, Gajeel after eating some iron, delivers one of these to Natsu. Natsu can't even stand by the end, at least until he got some fire to eat… He also does to Lucy in the anime.
• Transformers:
  • Liokaiser, in his first appearance in Transformers Victory, effortlessly beat the coolant out of Star Saber; even the Theme Music Power-Up couldn't save him, and only the arrival of God Ginrai let him walk away with his life.
  • And not forgetting(as much as would like to) Transformers Energon, wherein Megatron revives as Galvatron and proceeds to brutally kick the scrap out of Scorponok, brand him with the Decepticon sigil, then use his body as a shield before proceeding to rampage out and thrash our brash young hero-Bot (off-screen, but still). Then there's his Mind Rape of Starscream...
• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • Episodes 2, 18 and 19 each. In short: if Unit-01 goes berserk on you, you will die. Horribly and messily. The horrific treatment of Bardiel and Zeruel

• • End of Evangelion has a rare two-way No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, with both sides delivering it to one another. Asuka absolutely wipes the floor with the entire JSSDF army, beginning by lobbing a battleship into the heavy artillery and then literally stomping the gunships. Even the MP Evas don't slow her down; she destroys all of them in less than the 3 mins of power she has left. And then it gets turned around in a horrifying and disgusting way. Turns out the MP Evas are effectively immortal. So they regen when she has run out of power, shove a spear through her eye, and then eat her alive. Then lob about 6 more spears, one of which splits HER ARM in half into her body. Even those people who hate Asuka would probably wince and agree that was the worst death of the series.
  • Rebuild 2.22 has this in an awesome way, that wouldn't fit in Neon Genesis Evangelion, but fits surprisingly well here. In short, Badass Shinji curb-stomps Zeruel using Angel-like abilities. To elaborate a bit, Zeruel first beats up EVA-02 in its The Beast Mode, where it's a lot stronger, because its limiters are released. Then EVA-00 comes with an N2 Mine and suicides against Zeruel, only to be burnt to a crisp while Zeruel is unharmed. Zeruel then proceeds to eat EVA-00 in one bite, leaving only its feet. Shinji then shows up in EVA-01 just when Zeruel is only a few minutes from fusing with Lilith, saving everyone at NERV HQ, and launches himself and Zeruel up using one of the high-speed elevators. Zeruel then rips the left arm of EVA-01, and throws it away, after which the EVA's internal power source runs dry... Only to suddenly be fueled by Shinji's Badass! He even creates a new left arm out of nothing but his AT-Field, and uses what can only be described as a Rocket Punch, after which his EVA sprouts wings and initiates Third Impact, just because Shinji wanted to save Ayanami. All while "Tsubasa wo Kudasai" is playing in the background. Yes, a Japanese children's song is playing while Shinji accidentally initiates Third Impact. And somehow, it all fits perfectly within the scene...

• Bakemonogatari, in the Suruga Monkey arc, features Suruga with her Rainy Devil beating the living crap out of Koyomi, breaking his wrist, taking some teeth out, and other unpleasant things. The top of the cake? She rips his abdomen open, takes his intestines out and slings him around the room by his intestines until they rip, sending him to a violent crash against the wall. And she's not finished (Koyomi would have suffered a horrible death if it weren't for Senjougahara, who appears in the midst of it and saves the situation).
  • And again in Nisemonogatari he gets his ass kicked again by Yodzuru, which includes him being kicked though ceiling and later smashed into the ground.
• Pokémon's "Great Bowls of Fire" episode. Dragonite Meets Zodd the Immortal in a truly terrifying and sickening battle. I am still in denial they allowed such a malicious demon thing in Pokémon.
  • It was probably because Dragonite is an otherwise cute and simplistic dragon-thing, whereas other Pokémon can indeed be quite terrifying even when they're not pissed off.
    • There's a trope for that.
  • Alas, poor Seviper. After it bit Jessie's hair, it never stood a chance.
  • There's also the episode "Electric Shock Showdown", where Pikachu got badly beaten by Lt. Surge's Raichu. It got even in the rematch after using Raichu's size against it.
    • In DPP it battled a Raichu and almost died. It even Hyper-Beamed it in the face.
  • Then there's the episode "Tie One On" that has a rare mutual one of these, when Ash's Bulbasaur and another trainer's Meganium beat the crap out of one another, with the fight eventually breaking down into a Vine Whip slug-off that ends with both Pokémon collapsing after a double Solar Beam. It actually was personal, due to a fight earlier in the episode, but the fight between them both apparently makes up for it, as before Bulbasaur and Meganium collapse they smile at each other.
  • In "'Primeape Goes Bananas", Charmander is the victim of one of these until it learns Rage, and even then it still takes quite a few punches.
  • "Odd Pokémon Out": Ash's newly evolved Sceptile is on the receiving end of one from Seviper and Cacnea. He couldn't even fight back because he lost the will to use any of his attacks.
  • Pikachu vs. Entei in Pokémon 3. For one thing, he's a Legendary; and another, Entei's a lot stronger than an ordinary Entei (which is already saying something). You can actually see Pikachu beat up and bruised (but refusing to accept defeat) in mere seconds.
  • In "A Poached Ego", Jessie, James and Meowth take on a Tyranitar with their bare hands (or claws in Meowth's case) in an attempt to buy Arbok, Weezing and their protectees time to escape. They lose very badly but still refuse to give up.
• Mitsumi from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl Adventure gives one to Hareta and his Pokemon after being forced by Cyrus to fight him to save her Eevee. Even though Hareta is a notoriously good fighter he still gets his butt handed to him and beaten up pretty good (both him and his Pokemon this time); the only thing really stopping Mitsumi is her soft side.
• One Monster Rancher episode had Mocchi get the ever-loving CRAP beaten out of him by an opponent during a Tournament Arc. He wins, but collapses as soon as he's declared the winner. The beating itself was actually cut from the American version, for obvious reasons.
• A minor example in Chrono Crusade: After Chrono had already been previously torn up in a fight (enough that he's missing an eye and an arm), Joshua finds out that his sister made a Deal with the Devil that will lead to her dying at a young age. His reaction is to start beating Chrono with tears streaming down his face, screaming that Chrono is a monster. Chrono doesn't even attempt to fight back, because he agrees completely. Joshua stops short of causing any serious damage, so the scene serves to be less of an example of a vicious villain and more an example of two characters having two very different and very extreme reactions to grief. Cue sobbing.
• Villain on scumbag example in Speed Grapher. The anti-villainous Big Bad Suitengu has a Pet the Dog moment where he accepts a girl's play money to pay off part of her father's debt to him (from attending a shady club). The father thinks that Suitengu generally accepts the play money as legal tender, and tries to sell a load of it to him. When Suitengu tells him that the circumstances were different before, the father takes it that Suitengu is a pedophile and offers to sell his daughter to him. Since Suitengu's earlier mercy was because the daughter reminded him of his Dead Little Sister, he savagely beats up the guy and then kills him, revealing his true intentions with each blow.
• Applied by the thug in chapter 2 to Cao Cao. Who is ten. Cao Cao does get even, though.
• Seen in Cardcaptor Sakura, of all things, during the 'Final Judgment'. Sakura is pitted against Yue, who is actually Yukito, the one she loves. Yue starts things off by backhanding Sakura a dozen yards or so, and spends a good three minutes beating her into the ground, before crushing her in her own card, and telling her as she loses consciousness that her price for failure is the entire cast will lose their feelings for the ones they love. Although not as violent as other examples on this page, it's still tough listening to Sakura yelp as Yue slams her into the ground over and over.
• Toriko has a weird example, in that it's a land's NATURAL FEATURES doing this when Toriko attempts to enter the Gourmet World. He is subsequently mauled by everything from the wind, to the gravity and even the droplets.
• Samurai Seven has the show's Big Bad mark his descent into a Villainous Breakdown by shooting up mecha-samurai Kikuchiyo. When he runs out of ammo, he then proceeds to viciously beat him with the butt of the gun while screaming about how he hates everyone and everything and how he's going to crush everything under his heel.
• Yaiba's battle against Soshi Okita during the last arc is this: the latter is unbelievably powerful, so skilled that can utterly destroy Yaiba just by counterattacking, and when he eventually attack his swordstabs are too fast to being seen. And despite unleashing his best attack on the Kid Samurai, the latter keeps coming. That battle was so one-sided and brutal that Soshi even beg Yaiba to stop fighting back, since he didn't want to kill him.
• In one of the Detective Conan movies, both Ran and Conan get brutally beaten up by Irish from the Black Organization.
• This is used in Puella Magi Madoka Magica to show just how badly Sayaka is being broken. She attacks a witch while laughing manically, blood streaming down her face.
• In Dai Mahou Touge Punie-chan does this to Elise von Barbaroque after she fails to assassinate her.
• In Gao Gai Gar FINAL, Gai delivers one of these to Palparepa. And it is both brutal and awesome.
• Jake Martinez delivers one of these to Kotetsu in Tiger and Bunny once Kotetsu (accidentally) manages to hit him. Even ratings-chasing director Agnes is appalled and stops the live broadcast. Off-screen Jake also did similar to Sky Kigh, Rock Bison and - presumably, given how badly he was injured when found - Origami Cyclone.
• Inuyasha: After having once boasted early in the manga that he had never been cornered into a desperate situation, Sesshoumaru's words finally catch up with him towards the end of the manga when Naraku finally decides to send the Dark Will of the Shikon no Tama itself after him. He gets his single arm nearly ripped off, he has to be saved by his brother, his true form is negated by being bound in tentacles and eventually he's stabbed through the chest twice. Once through the heart. He Came Back Strong.
• In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Precia Testarossa makes her debut in Episode 7, where she severely whips her "daughter" to the point where she could barely get up. This was brought on when she failed to collect all of the Jewels.
  • Nanoha gets badly injured by Vita in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's up till the point where Fate and Yuuno intervene.
• Satellizer from Freezing dishes these out and receives them from her many fights in this series. Due to their super Healing Factor, and quite a bit of blood gets spilled, limbs get severed, and bones get broken quite often from these fights.
• In Akira Tetsuo delivers one of these to a Clown gangmember for a) beating up him and Kaori, and b) trying to burn Kaneda's bike. Though comparatively short, it's quite brutal; when Kaneda actually tries to intervene, the once-shy Tetsuo actually snarls that he wants to see the gangmember's head split open. And this is before he develops psychic powers.
• An unusual circumstance in Hunter X Hunter: In the Heavens Arena, where people fight for sport, one of Killua's opponents was Zetsu, a little boy with beginner-level hand-to-hand combat and little else. What Killua thought would be a Curb Stomp Battle went on far longer than it should have, because no matter how many times Killua punched Zetsu and knocked him down, Zetsu kept getting up. This kept going until Zetsu's martial arts master, who was sitting nearby watching, had to yell at him to stop. (Killua had already pulled off a TKO early on, and by this point, Killua was feeling guilty about beating up a little boy.) It turns out that Zetsu had been using his nen, or life force, as a barrier against the punch and to cushion himself when knocked down, but didn't know how to do much else.

Comic Books

• Superman seldom gets a chance to, thanks to it being a world of cardboard, but he's allowed himself to unleash his full fury on opponents like Darkseid, Mongul (Burn.), Cyborg Superman, Lobo, Incredible Hulk, and The Mighty Thor.
  • He does deliver one to the not-Authority in What's So Funny About Truth, Justice, And The American Way? and he was still holding back.
  • Thor gives as good as he gets when it comes to Superman, and both beat the stuffing out of each other once, implying that they are about even.
• Invincible is full of these:
  • In a rare heroic version, Mark (the titular Invincible) does this to supervillain Angstrom Levy and overestimates his durability, accidentally beating him to death.
  • Nolan almost killed him when the latter wouldn't go along with his world domination plans.
  • Sadly, the one implied by the cover of issue 50, Mark beating Cecil to death doesn't happen.
  • Oliver, however, does just fine at beating the Mauler Twins to death.
  • Taken Up to Eleven in the Conquest "arc," which is actually four full issues of almost nothing besides Conquest smashing Mark into more and more bloody pulp. It's Better Than It Sounds, and ends with a Crowning Moment of Awesome as Mark manages to finally land some heavy blows on Conquest, despite having no functioning arms or legs at the point.
• "Something tells me to stop with the leg. I don't listen to it."
• Happens just about to every friggin' character, good or bad in The Dark Knight Strikes Again... and the art's REALLY ugly too.
• In Booster Gold, Rip Hunter, in an attempt to teach Booster that history can not be changed, sends Booster back to try to stop The Joker from crippling Barbara Gordon. Booster receives a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown at the Joker's hands—repeatedly, as in a display of Heroic Resolve, Booster insists on going back repeatedly to try to stop him.
• Deadshot delivers multiple beatdowns of this sort to a gang of white supremacist thugs. The first one results in one of the thugs getting his eye put out, while subsequent beatdowns occur over one night when the thugs decide to go after him for revenge. The beatdowns just keep getting more and more humiliating until Deadshot's date finally offs them.
• Pretty much every fight involving Superboy-Prime is this, though his first fight with Conner stands out in that he not only beats Connor to within an inch of his life, but he literally kicks Krypto the Superdog halfway across Smallville. The JSA, Teen Titans, and the Doom Patrol arrive shortly after that. Does this change anything? Nope. Prime wipes the fucking floor with them; he kills Pantha, Baby Wildebeest, and Bushido, and rips Risk's arm off. He was in the process of beating the shit out of Beast Boy when a bunch of Flashes arrived and managed to seal him in the Speed Force for a good deal of time (It didn't hold, obviously). The other one that stands out is the one against the Superman of Earth-Two. Prime beats him to death with his bare hands even though both are depowered. We get to see every single minute of this.
  • However, the Teen Titans finally got the chance to do this to Prime. They beat him to the point of rendering him unconscious!
• Daredevil
  • In their first meeting Kingpin beats Daredevil and then slams a vault door on his head after Daredevil experiences a moment of Punch! Punch! Punch! Uh Oh...
  • In the "Born Again" arc the corrupt cop, about to confess to framing Matt Murdock/Daredevil, is subjected to a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown by one of the Kingpin's minions.
• If male-on-female beatdowns are rare, they do happen. Tigra was beaten and shot by The Hood in New Avengers #35. She eventually got even but still, hard to look at.
  • Another male on female example is the first time She Hulk fought Red Hulk.
    • Has also happened a few times she fought the Regular Hulk.
• In "A Death in the Family," this happens to Jason Todd's Robin at the hands of the Joker in the third chapter, as Jason is beaten within an inch of his life with a crowbar. Batman later pays him in full in the Knightfall saga, roaring Jason's name the whole time.
  • And speaking of Knightfall, Bane finishing off an exhausted Batman by beating him to a pulp and then breaking his back.
    • Batman delivers a truly terrifying beatdown to the Joker in chapter 7 of Hush. Harley Quinn and Catwoman both try to stop him but get flattened. It's accompanied by an Internal Monologue listing some of Joker's more heinous crimes, so it's hard to feel sorry for him, but the same Internal Monologue makes it clear that Batman has every intention of killing Joker, and nobody is capable of stopping him. At least, until Gordon talks him out of it. It's probably the closest he's ever come to finishing The Joker off once and for all.
      • In Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, The Joker finally presses Batman's Berserk Button, and Batman attacks him with a fury that leaves no illusion to his intent.
• A truly ridiculous example came during a crossover event between The DCU and Marvel Universe, when Venom gave one of these to Superman. Apart from Venom being vulnerable to heat and loud noise, two things Superman is capable of producing in enormous quantities, Superman is also just... totally out Venom's league.
  • Plus, the only reason Venom even holds his own with Spiderman (who may be Badass, but is no where near Superman) is because he knows Spidey inside out. All the other heroes in the Marvel Universe beat the crap out of him.
• Bone has a male and female example when Thorn and Fone Bone get the tar beaten out of them before they're thrown into jail. Really hard to witness, especially when she discovers her bruises, black eyes, and a missing tooth. Then Fone smiles apologetically to reveal his missing tooth. Both are drawn like that for the rest of that day.
• Watchmen begins with The Comedian receiving one that ends with him being flung out of the window to his death. Then, near the end of the comic, Ozymandias beats down on Rorschach and Nite Owl as he explains his motives.
  • Hollis Mason, a former vigilante pushing 70 years old, is killed this way by a group of thugs. The movie manages to make this scene even more hard to watch by letting him get a few punches in.
• Spider-Man lives for this trope. Every now and then a new villain shows up or an old one with a vendetta and Spidey gets the TAR beaten out of him. A lot of the time his Igno moment is very far away. If not for outside interference he would've bitten the dust against Morlun, for instance.
  • In "Spider-Man: The Other" he does bite the dust against Morlun.
  • Spidey gives these out like candy if you push him far enough - say, if you're the Kingpin, and happen to have caused Aunt May's almost-fatal gunshot wound. Usually, he's sorry after, but after THAT one, he just kinda smiled.
• ..."After a while all I'm doing is punching wet chips of bone into the floorboards. So I stop..."
  • And the guy that Hartigan did this to? Completely deserved it.
• Pretty much every fight during World War Hulk.
  • Hell, pretty much any fight with The Hulk is this.
    • Well, not always. Zeus absolutely flattened him without even trying to the point where it took him days to recover from his injuries.
• After a long globetrotting journey to burn out his own mind, Tony Stark finally faces off against Norman Osborn. The "battle" is completely one-sided in Osborn's favor since Tony is all but brain dead and in an outdated suit at that point. The beating is savage enough to render Tony comatose, which of course was All According to Plan. The beatdown was also broadcast on live television, winning Stark public sympathy and casting Osborn in a very negative light.
• Transmetropolitan: The Chair Leg of Truth
• In the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mirage comic series (Leonardo #1), the Foot manages one on Leonardo while he's out training solo. After a lengthy chase, he's cornered and numbers overwhelm him, though most of the actual beatdown takes place out of frame. By the time he's thrown through April's apartment window, Leo is only able to choke out that the Shredder has returned. For the next full issue (#10) he's unable to participate in the ensuing Foot vs. Turtles battle, and the next (#11) is dedicated solely to our heroes' recovery from the incident.
  • See the Film and Western Animation sections for the entries on the 1990 film's and 2003 cartoon's adaptations of this story.
• In The Punisher MAX storyline "Mother Russia", Nick Fury takes off his belt and whips the general who came up with the whole "Fake terrorists crashing a passenger jet full of innocent people as a distraction" plan. Over and over and over again. The guy is a bloody whimpering mess after Fury's through with him.
• This is approximately one-half (or slightly more) of the standard MO of The Boys. The first half is usually some combination of surveillance, investigations, a little blackmail, messing with government agencies, etcetera, but sooner or later someone, somewhere, will be handed the kind of beating that, no matter how much the target might deserve it, is still likely to leave the reader feeling slightly queasy.
• In an issue of The Avengers dealing with the Skrull-Kree war, The Vision displays a Not So Stoic reaction against an opponent after the Scarlet Witch is injured. An ally warns the Vision that he doesn't know what he's doing, and might beat the opponent to death. The Vision replies that he has a computer mind and knows precisely what's he's doing. "I am beating him to death."
• In one of the later Ultimate Spider-Man story arcs, Norman Osborn fights off SHIELD agents while trying again to coerce Peter into helping him. When the conflict reaches its climax, a fight breaks out between Osborn in mutated form, a ship full of SHIELD agents, Spider-Man, and Harry Osborn in mutated form. When Harry tries to beat his father into submission, Norman goes insane with rage and smashes him to the floor, striking him in the face until he accidentally kills him. This shocks everyone into halting the fight, and a moment later Osborn shifts back into human form and requests that someone kill him.
• This occurs in the Garth Ennis Punisher comic Streets of Laredo when a thug insults his boss' son. Rachel, the leader of a gunrunning outfit, has an openly gay son whom she adores. When one of her men calls him a "stinking queer" and proceeds to tell her that someone ought to put him down like an animal, she challenges the man, who is easily twice her size, to a fight. He has a Bowie knife and she has brass knuckles. He doesn't even scratch her and she completely wrecks him before delivering the final blow.
• Preacher (Comic Book): Jesse does this to Jesus deSade, a child pornographer. The graphic reveal of the man's face when Jesse is done with him is possibly one of the very rare moments when one may feel reasonably feel sympathy for a child pornographer.
• In Nextwave #4, the Dirty Cop running the Samuroid Seed gets one of these, courtesy of Aaron Stack and Tabitha Smith. Notably, neither of them know he's dirty and simply beat the hell out of him for being a cop. Played for Laughs.
  • In Nextwave #6, Aaron gets one of these from Monica Rambeau, Elsa Bloodstone, and Tabitha for wearing a woman's bra and refusing to take it off. Played for Laughs.
  • Finally, in Nextwave #8, The Captain delivers one (offscreen) to Dread Rorkannu, which included doing something unpleasant to him with a toilet brush. We never get to know what (thankfully). Unsurprisingly, this too is Played for Laughs.
• Anathos does this to the Legendaries right after reincarnating in Danael: as soon as he appears, he impales Jadina on his sword, slashes Gryf everywhere on his body, burns Shimy's eyes, and cuts Razzia's arm off. All of this in two pages. While the comic had got quite dark at this point, this was so far the most violent scene in the whole series.

Eastern Animation

• The title character of Kuang Kuang is very frequently on the receiving end of these from one or more of his teachers, bleeding all over the floor as they stamp on his head.

Fairy Tales

• In The Blue Mountains, the hero must suffer a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown for three nights to free the heroine.
  • Also in The Three Princesses of Whiteland.

Fan Works

• In Code Geass Mao of the Deliverance, Mao, frustrated by losing C.C. in a terrorist attack, brutally mutilates a corpse with the handle of a pistol (he already used up all the bullets!) while shouting random obscenities until he is physically exhausted.
• In Soulless Shell, Arnold gets one at the hands of Leif's demon form, when he's sliced to pieces for raping a girl after he escapes prison, where he was sentenced to death for raping another one.
• A Dark Knight Over Sin City has Killer Croc and Marv exchanging them with one another. Croc starts off by beating him to a pulp before throwing him out a window. Once Marv survives and does a little prep work he comes back, runs over Croc with a car, smashes him over the head with a fire extinguisher, blinds him with the contents, and then gets ready to send a bullet through his head at point-blank range. Luckily for Croc, Batman stops Marv before killing him.
• Yu-Gi-Oh fanfic Skin has a few of these, most of them during the Virtual World arc thanks to the sudden use of Who Wants to Live Forever?. Even worse for the one exception to the temporary rule, a battle between Yami Malik and Ryuzaki using the Millennium Rod against a duel disk in 'sword combat'; while the 'bad guy' lost in a way, the 'winner' wound up comatose for a month to contrast the single hour of sleep it took for the other to recover.
• In Naruto Veangance Revelaitons, Sakura, of all people, gets to do this to Taliana in the wake of Ronan's assassination, punching her, breaking many of her bones and throwing her away, as the author was in the process of breaking up with the girlfriend on whom he based Taliana. In the next chapter, Ronan, Back from the Dead, beats her up, sets her on fire, and tears her apart.
• In Ace Combat: The Equestrian War, this is what happened to Firefly when she was younger. Later, in chapter 11, Rainbow Dash is a victim of this trope, courtesy of Gilda. Then, in chapter 17, Fluttershy also suffers one brutal beating from Night Raven, even though she ultimately wins.
• In The Dark, Vern, a body guard for the Spice Girls, wants to this to Otis Darwin for what he did to Melanie. He wants to take the law into his own hands after learning the Gornic details of what happened to 3 other women and what could've happened to Melanie.

Film

• The Shawshank Redemption features several of them, including the guards beating up an emotionally overwhelmed inmate who complained that he was not supposed to be there, (said guard then left the inmate to die in the infirmary) and The Sisters routinely beating up Andy, and the guards beating up Bogs (one of The Sisters) so severely he ended up crippled for life. And that's just counting the ones shown on-screen. Red has a way of understating this in his monotone voiceover narration, which perhaps drives home the horror even more; this kind of thing is a commonplace occurrence:

Red: [after the guards retaliate] Two things happened after that. The Sisters never bothered Andy again. And Bogs never walked again.

• A Clockwork Orange: What Alex and his droogs do to the drunken homeless guy at the beginning of the film.
• A Bugs Life: When Hopper sics his rabid grasshopper of a Mons on Flik.
• The first Spider-Man movie. The moment when the hero's at his lowest is the ideal time for a Crowning Moment of Awesome, but come on! Poor Pete's had half his mask torn grenaded off, a severely cut lip, a gash on his side, a black eye, on and on and on...
  • Peter gets this from the Sandman in the third movie, too.
    • Earlier, Peter DOES this to the Sandman.
  • He just found out that Sandman was responsible for Uncle Ben's death so the beatdown was understandable.
• This is one of the standard forms of torture in Spaghetti Westerns:
  • Wallace, one of Angel Eyes's men, beats the living shit out of Tuco at the Union prison camp in The Good the Bad And The Ugly.
    • The Man With No Name himself gets this treatment roughly two thirds of the way through the first two films of the Dollars Trilogy.
      • The Man With No Name himself applies this to a man he was after at the beginning of For a Few Dollars More. Then he shoots him.
• In The Avengers Loki monologues to The Hulk. Hulk hesitates for a second then in the middle of it the Hulk lifts Loki by his leg and slams him to the ground repeatedly before leaving him smashed into the ground.
• In Kill Bill, The Bride receives a hell of a beating—while pregnant, no less! -- at the hands of her former partners in the incident that kicks off her Roaring Rampage of Revenge, though it's only shown in brief moments in flashback.
• Jackie Chan ends up on the receiving end of this in the movie Mr. Nice Guy. He does end up getting his payback through the employment of a very large vehicle (at that time in Chan's movies, in lieu of having a final climactic showdown, Chan would just get in a very large vehicle and drive a hole through the bad guy's base.)
  • His character from Rumble in The Bronx gets a beatdown too. A street gang corners him in a dead-end alley and proceeds to bombard him with glass bottles. Let's just say this scene was "bloody" and leave it at that.
  • Also in Drunken Master, where his character Freddie Hung suffers a not only vicious but humiliating beat-down. He runs away from his master's painstaking (and slightly ridiculous) training, and stops to dry his clothes in an open hut. The owner of the hut—a notorious assassin named Thunderleg, as luck would have it—arrives, and beats Freddie up, ridicules his father, and otherwise utterly humiliates him, forcing him, in the end, to beg for mercy and run away, crying. All of this with Freddie in his underwear. Needless to say, Freddie trains and surpasses Thunderleg, but the scene is still pretty pathetic and painful.
  • In Thunderbolt, after his character Foh puts a dangerous criminal in jail, Cougar gets out of jail and comes looking for him. Then Cougar, who'd previously murdered a man by dragging him behind a race car, took a construction crane and used it to wreck Foh's home and try to kill him, his father, and his sisters. The epic - and extremely bloody - beat-down ended with Cougar using the crane to pick up a metal storage shed that Foh was in - and flung him around inside like a pinball.
  • Chan gets to dish out a few of his own during the climax of Police Story, even giving a Shout-Out to Bruce Lee's famous "shaking fist" pose after wailing on the Big Bad's abs.
• Stephen Chow in God of Cookery gets brutally beaten by the Eighteen Brassmen of Shaolin and dragged away in a trail of his own blood as a Running Gag. The humor comes from a mix of just how vicious the beating is combined with it happening repeatedly at unexpected moments.
  • Also happens in Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, when the Beast gets really pissed over being brained by Chow.
• Cliffhanger is one of the few Sylvester Stallone films in which he gets beaten to a helpless pulp. To be fair, his opponent, Kynette is a martial-arts master.
  • Later on, his best friend is savagely beaten at gunpoint by Irish-psychopath Delmar, in a stomach-turning parody of a soccer game.
  • Which his buddy puts the kibosh on when he gets hold of Delmar's shotgun. "Season's over, ASSHOLE!!"
• The Great Mouse Detective: Ratigan does this to Basil following his Villainous Breakdown. He's really trying to kill him. It adds to the visceral horror in that Ratigan is using claws, and actually drawing blood!
  • The visuals are bad enough, but the audio is what really makes you cringe. You can hear ripping noises and Basil choking on his own blood. You know, for kids!
• Tyler Durden to the Narrator near the end of Fight Club, as well as the Narrator to Angel Face earlier in the film.

"I wanted to destroy something beautiful."

• Lex Luthor does this to Superman with the help of a kryptonite shiv in the most recent movie.
• Bruce Willis movies (Sin City, Last Man Standing, Pulp Fiction, etc.) usually feature one scene where a bad guy or group of them works him over badly like this so that he can get back up and deliver some serious payback.
  • Last Man Standing's beatdown of John Smith after the bad guys corner him without his guns in the bath in particular is cribbed from inspired by the above beatdown of the Man With No Name in Fistful of Dollars.
    • Which was itself taken from the beating received by Toshiro Mifune's Man With No Name in Yojimbo.
  • In Sin City, it's reversed in the end: Hartigan beats Junior's head in until "all [he's] doing is pounding wet chunks of bone into the floorboards."
• Agent Smith does this to Morpheus in the first Matrix movie prior to capturing him.
  • And again to Neo in the third movie.
• Often used in Heroic Bloodshed movies to highlight just how much of an utter bastard the villain is:
  • Shing had the living crap beaten out of Mark Gor at one point in A Better Tomorrow.
  • Johnny Weng beat the living crap out of Ah Jong's best friend Sidney in The Killer in a scene that was very much a Tear Jerker.
  • And in the game Stranglehold, Mr. Wong has his men beat the crap out of Tequila in a flashback after having intimidated Billie, Wong's daughter and the woman Tequila loved, into breaking up with him in a double-duty Kick the Dog moment.
• Practically mandatory in every Film Noir. This commonly takes the form of two Mooks holding the hero by his arms while The Dragon hammers him in the solar plexus repeatedly, brass knuckles or baseball bat optional.
• It seems obligatory for Hong Kong triad films to have a scene of thugs beating someone down, usually with sticks. Lethality may vary.
• In the Halloween film H20, the villain endures a thoroughly over-the-top gauntlet of smackdown, culminating in being pinned between a large truck and a solid surface...and, when addressed, he looks up! This led a young man in the front row to scream, "Exactly HOW much shit can this guy POSSIBLY TAKE?"
  • Also done in Halloween 5 where Loomis tranqs Michael, drops a chain net on him, and beats him up with a two-by-four. And again in Halloween 6, where Tommy beats the living crap out of Michael with a pipe.
• In Blue Velvet, the main character Jeffrey gets almost beaten to death by Axe Crazy sociopath Frank Booth (the homosexual overtones makes this scene even more disturbing than it has to be).
• Jodie Foster's vigilante-creating catalyst in The Brave One.
• This happens to Sefton, a World War II POW in Stalag 17. The people who beat him were his fellow prisoners, who suspected him of collaborating with the Germans. (This action spurs Sefton towards finding the real collaborator, whom he glumly notes, probably "beat him the hardest.")
• A Christmas Story features a rare hero example. Ralphie snaps and beats the hell out of local bully, Scut Farkas, while unleashing a string of profanities.
• Liberally used by the Japanese in Ip Man. The film doesn't bother hiding its nationalism.
  • Two specific examples: Master Liu tries taking on three Japanese pugilists, only to find that Conservation of Ninjutsu is not in play, and ends up getting kicked around. Later on, Ip Man's fight against General Miura culminates in the latter getting pinned to a pole and getting beat down. An arguable Lampshade Hanging of the Curb Stomp Battle/No-Holds-Barred Beatdown occurs when scenes of Ip's practice on a dummy are interposed with the thrashing.
  • The sequel has the Twister's horrible pummeling to death of Master Hung. When Ip pays him back, though regrettably not in full, no one objects.
• At the end of Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof wherein the heroes actually beat the crap out of the bad guy, and it's a male getting the tar kicked out of him by three girls to boot.
• The movie version of Watchmen expanded the Comedian's two page fight into a four minute borderline Gorn beatdown. Not only did the Comedian fail to land a single hit but it was set to Nat King Cole's rendition of Unforgettable.
• At the climax of Event Horizon, the possessed Dr Weir proceeds to beat Captain Miller to a pulp with his bare hands, finishing with a kick that snaps Miller's spine against a wall.
• A particularly brutal version occurs in I Stand Alone, in which the butcher main character pummels his pregnant girlfriend in the belly repeatedly, most likely killing their baby.
• Irreversible (same director): a lethal beating with a fire extinguisher. "Beaten to a pulp" doesn't begin to describe it.
  • This has to be reiterated, it's like most of the other examples combined and turned up to eleven.
• Layer Cake:
  • Morty delivers one to his former accomplice whose incompetence resulted in his being imprisoned for a decade for a crime he didn't commit. It's filmed from the victim's point of view!
  • The protagonist gets a brief but very efficient one from Gene before he has a chance to tell him that the reason he killed Jimmy was because Jimmy was a police informer who was planning on screwing them both over. For a little extra Nightmare Fuel, consider that the thing in the freezer that Gene was banging XXXX's face on was probably the Duke's frozen corpse.
• Gangster Number One has a scene where the Villain Protagonist brutally beats someone to death, and the scene is filmed from the victim's perspective.
• In Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker nearly falls into The Dark Side by delivering one to Darth Vader, using his lightsaber like a baseball bat and chopping off his hand. Minutes later he receives one from Emperor Palpatine using Force Lightning.
• Jesus Christ himself takes one of these in The Passion of the Christ. For pretty much the entire movie until he gets crucified, which isn't really a beatdown because it's worse.
• The Constant Gardener sees Justin Quayle beaten to a pulp by two hired thugs in his hotel room—deliberately muffled by a children's sing-along playing on the TV.
• Officer Alex Murphy was on the verge of apprehending some miscreants in the first RoboCop movie, when he was ambushed and shot. His bullet-proof vest withstood the impact of the bullet, and so the villains laid into him with bullets and shotgun blasts in a two-minute torture session; they blew off his hand and eventually the back of his head. What remained of him was turned into Robocop. To rub things in further, Robocop himself is subjected to a similar bout of prolonged gunfire later in the film, and is almost killed, but this time at the hands of his former colleagues in the police force.
• For the scene in The Departed where Billy Costigan beats up the two Italian guys in the store, the script called for the most brutal beatdown in any gangster movie ever. Up against movies like Casino, Goodfellas and The Godfather, you couldn't call it the worst, but it is pretty bad.
• Short Circuit 2, when Johnny 5 gets beaten to a robotic pulp. Understandable that no one put this one up yet as it was the cause of much childhood scarring for those subjected to the movie as children.
• United 93's climactic end begins with a Zerg Rush of passengers surging forward towards the cockpit. The first terrorist to go down is pretty thoroughly Curb Stomped and beaten to death with a fire-extinguisher.
• Happened to Raphael in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, when a mob of Foot clan members take him down and then beat him into a coma. He only survives because the other Turtles are able to get him out of there and nurse him back to health (and this takes a long time). Several of the Foot Clan also wind up on the receiving end of this when the Turtles escape in the fight that ensues soon after said beatdown (the biggest fight in the movie thus far) and Tatsu proceeds to take out his rage on them for their failure. One of the Foot, a guy named Shinsho, is beaten into much the same state as Raph was for trying to stop him.
• In the Stargate Verse film The Ark of Truth, Mitchell gets one of these from the Replicator Merrick. Intercut with scenes of the Priors torturing Vala and Daniel and of Teal'c trying to get to Celestius with a hole in his back to up the violence level.
• Near the end of the film The Ninth Configuration, Stacy Keach's character is having the stuffing beat out of him by a motorcycle gang. This is the moment that he remembers that he is not an army psychologist, but a deranged marine known as Killer Kane. Kane gets up and proceeds to deliver an epic, murderous unarmed beatdown to all the biker scum present. Makes one guy scream like a little girl. He grabs a biker chick's hair and rams her head against a wall, breaking her neck. Ouch.
• In The Dark Knight Saga, while we know he won't ever actually kill Batman, the Joker makes clear in their final confrontation he's also not going to hold back until Batman is down for good (or so he thinks). The growls from the Joker while he beats the crap out of Batman with a crow bar are chilling.
• Although we don't see much of it, the main character in |Twenty One gets caught counting cards by Morpheus and suffers a pretty convincing beating while tied to a chair. He also hints that he'll "put a hammer to the side of his face, then kill him", as honest as a sinner on trial, if he ever gets catches him again.
• The baseball bat scene from Inglourious Basterds.
  • Buch from Pulp Fiction kills an opponent in an off-screen boxing match.
• In Once Were Warriors, the character Jake Heke is the toughest guy in the neighborhood and has serious rage issues. He delivers a number of beatings to people who piss him off, including his own wife.
• Panic Room features a pretty gruesome beatdown, and leaves the guy almost completely incapable of walking, moving or speaking. It actually becomes quite funny later on, though, as he's tasked with so much stuff to do, when he probably couldn't even take a shit if he tried.
• Debatable, but considerable, Arnie takes one of these in Predator.
• In Saw 2, Jigsaw, with cancerous brain trauma, takes a hard earned beating from Donnie Wahlberg.
• Rocky, in every. single. movie.
• In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Eddie Valiant during the final battle suffers several beating from Judge Doom who, being a toon endowed with inhuman strength, tosses him around like a rag doll.
• In The Warriors, the first 10 minutes of the film shows a guy getting elbowed to death.
• Nicolas Cage gives a self-traumatizing beating to one of the men responsible for creating the snuff film in 8MM, Pistol-Whipping the bastard to death.
• Cherrybomb: During the film's crescendo, Crilly beats Malachy to a bloody pulp. Luke then leaps to Malachy's defence and beats Crilly over the head with a metal bar, ultimately killing him.
• The Space Opera version of this happens in Star Trek II the Wrath of Khan, when Khan springs a completely one-side ambush on the Enterprise, and blasts her so badly over several minutes that Kirk has to surrender in order to get a chance at his heroic comeback.
  • Kirk later returns the favor.
• Universal Soldier: Regeneration; The main villain played by U.F.C. Champion Andre "The Pitbull" Arlovski pulls this out IN SPADES. Rapid-fire punches? Check. Rapid-fire punches TO THE FACE? Check. Rapid-fire punches to the face that may be complemented with a protract-able blade from the lower arm upwards? Check.
• Sephiroth effortlessly fends off Cloud before kicking him into a building in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. In the "Complete" version, he actually kicks him through the building, proceeds to block every hit of Omnislash, impales Cloud through the chest like he did at Nibelheim, tosses him into the air, stabs him repeatedly, & then slams him back down into the concrete a few dozen feet below. That scene, of course, isn't enough to clue people in that Cloud isn't joking when he says, "In terms of skill, I could never win."
• In The Lion King 2, during Zira's first attack on Simba, several lions leap on him, maul him, knock him down a cliff, and then follow after him and maul him further. He survives, but he ends up collapsing from exhaustion after barely escaping.
• The Killer Inside Me: Lou gives one of these to both Joyce and Amy in graphic, prolonged, horrific scenes. And they both die. Except not really, because Joyce is revealed to be alive at the end, although disfigured--and then he immediately kills her for real.
• In Punisher: Warzone, Frank Castle does this to Jigsaw after the latter kills his sidekick, Micro. Justified because he had only one bullet left which he spend on Loonie Bin Jim. It involves him beating the guy with a bottle, kicking him while he's down and, finally, impaling him with a steel pipe and burning him.
  • Castle's fight against Loonie Bin Jim, which happened right before this scene, is practically two of this tropes put next to each other: First, Castle gets kicked in a Dynamic Entry, then his enemy proceeds to kick him, bite him and dodge all of his punches, while telling him crazy things about kidney failure. Understandably, Castle is rather pissed after getting repeatedly kicked in the groin, so he throws Jim against a wall with enough force to nearly crash it, before beating him further up. Jim only manages to escape by throwing shards of glass in Frank's eyes.
• In one of the final scenes in Casino, Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and his brother Dominick set up a meeting in a cornfield after things have calmed down with the Mafia. Unfortunately, the bosses are still upset about the role Nicky played in the collapse of their Vegas operation; so, Nicky and Dom are met by a gang of thugs who proceed to beat Dominick to a bloody pulp while making Nicky watch, and toss him into a freshly-dug grave. They then proceed to do the same thing (and worse - at one point, it looks like they cave Nicky's skull in) before tossing him into the same grave and burying them alive.
• Brick reaches its climax with the forces of Tug and the Pin shooting it out (and with the cops, when they arrive), and Tug violating the truce that they'd met under by savagely beating the Pin to death with his bare hands. All that is actually seen is Tug's fist flying in the dark, and Pin's screams and pleas for help. The Pin is frail and physically disabled in some way, and Tug is a heavily muscled bruiser, making this a horribly one-sided fight.
• Jensen Aimes has found the man who killed his wife. Not so good for the man.
• This happened between Col. Vidal and the hunter's son in Pans Labyrinth, in one of the most Squick-tastic Grievous Bottley Harm examples in modern film.
• Godzilla ends up receiving one in Terror of Mechagodzilla, which features long scenes of Mechagodzilla just throwing everything it has at Godzilla and King Caesar. Rather terrifying, even considering very dated special effects.
  • Mechagodzilla delivers one to Anguirus at the start of the film as well, firmly establishing himself as a total bastard. Destoroyah, one of the most hated villains in Godzilla's Rogues Gallery, delivers one to Godzilla Junior, earning himself the ire of everyone who watched the film.
• Kick-Ass: Dave and Big Daddy are on the receiving end of one in the film's Darkest Hour; this example also crosses over into Cold-Blooded Torture as they were both tied up and helpless.
  • The fight between Hit Girl and Frank might also count after Hit Girl is knocked nearly unconscious and Frank continues to punch her (an 11-year old, no less) in the face savagely two more times.
• In Nocturna, the Cat Shepherd's confrontation with the Shadow. It flings him around like a rag doll, all while the Cat Shepherd is barring the way to Tim and the North Star, urging and shouting encouragement to Tim to get over his fear. The Shadow is only stopped when Murray and Tobermory manage to run by and distract it with Murray's light, whereupon the Cat Shepherd proceeds to (seemingly) die.
• Drive. Ryan Gosling. The elevator.
• 100 Feet contains a fatal beatdown of the protagonist's Love Interest by her husband's ghost. Towards the end, the ghost's face becomes visible because it's been headbutting the guy so hard that it's gotten drenched in his blood.
• In Deathly Hallows, Voldemort vs. Harry after they both lose their wands.

Literature

• Voldemort lays a savage one on Harry in Harry Potter.
  • Harry forgets about magic and simply bum-rushes Sirius Black in Prisoner of Azkaban—and it works! Without Lupin's intervention, Harry would likely have killed Sirius.
  • The trio disarm Snape so hard that he flies several feet and loses consciousness.
• In Dan Abnett's Gaunts Ghosts novel First & Only, Jantine Patricians attack some Ghosts with this, including Kick Them While They Are Down; they kill three and render a fourth Ghost critical, and a fifth Ghost escapes only because they take him alive.
  • In Ghostmaker, when Gilbear walks the picket and disapproves of how he finds two Ghosts, he inflicts a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, including Kick Them While They Are Down. Fortunately, Corbec interrupts.
  • In The Armour of Contempt, a gambling den sets out to beat Merrt to death in one of these.
• About halfway through The Pendragon Adventure, in The Rivers of Zadaa, Saint Dane amuses himself by taking the form of a Giant Mook among the local military and effortlessly knocking Bobby around. This isn't it. Bobby, strapped for any physical response, gets under Saint Dane's skin with an impromptu Hannibal Lecture about how this is only a diversion from all the times he has failed, and how, in the end, he is destined to lose. In response to this, Saint Dane loses his cool the first time in the series, goes completely berserk, and beats Bobby within an inch of his life.
  • Just to drive home how bad it is, Bobby spends a great portion of the book recovering from said Beatdown. His doctor and Loor specifically point out that normally it would take months for him to recover, and he'd never get full functionality from his body again, but beats the odds and somehow recovers fully. At first the only thing he could move without extreme pain was his toes.
• In Graham McNeill's Warhammer 40,000 Ultramarines novel The Killing Ground, in their third ordeal, Leodegarius defeats Uriel and Pasanius, knocking Pasanius unconscious and leaving Uriel unable to rise. Uriel, angry that this man, who should have fought beside them, is going to kill them, tells him to Get It Over With. Whereupon Leodegarius tells him that the ordeal is to lose, because the only way they could have defeated him was the use of warp-based powers. Failure has shown that they don't have them -- and they are promptly hauled away from medical treatment that restores them to fitness within hours.
• In Turn Coat, book 11 of The Dresden Files, Wizard Listens-To-Wind delivers one of these to a Skinwalker, which is a nigh immortal, semidivine shapeshifter that feeds on magic. He does so in a Shapeshifting duel, eventually making the Skinwalker turn into a minor Eldritch Abomination and fly away screaming.
  • The only person we know of who was able to kill one was Morgan, who did so by leading it on a chase that ended in Nevada, where he went into the Nevernever and stranded the Skinwalker there. The Skinwalker was then hit by a Nuclear bomb test.
  • Harry Dresden himself is not a stranger to being on the receiving end of these. An especially brutal example is during Grave Peril, where he experiences that being captured by Red Court Vampires isn't fun.
• Ender's Game has the eponymous hero deliver two of these, both to boys bigger and stronger than he. Ender doesn't pick either fight, but neither of his opponents is prepared for Ender's thorough Combat Pragmatism, and he really, really doesn't like bullies. They both end up dead.
• In the original Redwall, it may not happen to a hero, but it's jarring enough. So far, we've only seen normal battles in a siege, and most of the plans have been sort of comic-book level: climbing over the walls via a tree, tunneling under, etc. Then Cluny finds out he's been betrayed by the fox "healer" he keeps around, and simply has his henchmen beat her and her son, stab them to death and dump the corpses in a ditch. Her son survives, unfortunately.
  • Another one happens to a vermin Mooks in Rakkety Tam, who is sent to scout out Redwall. He runs into a Long Patrol hare that's famous at boxing, and confidently thinks he can kill the "big rabbit". The hare in question beats the ever-loving snot out of him, partly as revenge for ten other hares that were killed and eaten by the mook's boss, and second for calling him a rabbit. This also happens to heroes, from time to time.
• Gabriel's brutal beatdown of the captured Lymond in Pawn in Frankincense, the fourth novel in Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles.
• A common theme in the Star Wars Expanded Universe X Wing Series. Since it's kinda a war, shooting an enemy in the back while pretending to be one of their allies is a lot more acceptable than in other settings, but things like enhanced Ewoks wanting to slaughter unarmed scientists for torturing them is frowned upon. The Starfighters of Adumar book takes this to its logical conclusion; Turr Phennir's compliance with highly formalized and regulated but fatal beatdowns is monstrous, while Janson's beatdown of a man he disarmed to save a woman's life is a glorious Crowning Moment of Awesome.
• The 1632 series feature the character of Quevedo in the Cannon Law. He is massive pain in the ass who orchestrates a number of plots to sack Rome and murder the pope. He eventually confronts Ruy Sanchez, the man who trained him long ago and is currently trying to save the pope. Ruy merely takes advantage of a flaw in Quevado's fighting style that he (Ruy) never bothered to fix and stabs him in the throat.
• Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: Jack Emery receives this from three men with presidential gold shields while his friend Mark Lane could only watch helplessly in Payback. After the three men do this to reporter Maggie Spritzer's dog and Jack's reporter friend Ted Robinson in The Jury, Jack gets to return the favour...with a little help from some ninja friends of his! Also, the Sisters or Vigilantes do this to Karl Woodley in The Jury because he did this to his wife Paula Woodley. There's sure a lot of beatdowns!
• Onyesonwu delivers one to Aro in Who Fears Death when he refuses to train her for the third time.
• Hypatía Belicia Cabral, the mother of Oscar from The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is viciously beaten in her younger years for having an affair with the husband of Trujillo's sister. After working her over with fists, the dictator's thugs used nightsticks. Her injuries were listed:

Her clavicle, chicken-boned; her right humerus, a triple fracture; five ribs, broken; left kidney, bruised; liver, bruised; right lung, collapsed; front teeth, blown out.

• • And she survives.
  • Thirty years later, Oscar gets an equally brutal beating from two other police thugs for trying to pursue a relationship with a prostitute that a captain was in love with. He also survives, barely.

Live Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer seemed to get this a lot the first time she fought a Big Bad:
  • Buffy's and Glory's first fight; Buffy only got away because Glory was careless about the architecture.
  • Buffy and her first fight with a turokhan.
  • Faith whaling on Buffy in "Who Are You?"
  • Caleb whaling on the entire Scooby gang and potential slayers in "Dirty Girls".
  • Faith on some random vampire after he mentioned Kakastios' name, another vampire who brutally killed her watcher in front of her.
  • Oz after Veruca has (quite literally) hit his Berserk Button, which is Willow.
  • Buffy herself dishes one of these out to Spike in season 6, when she apparently really needs to blow off steam. Spike just lies back and takes it, and the bruises last for a couple episodes after.
    • This happens to Spike fairly often, actually, possibly because of his penchant for pissing off things that are bigger than him, and because he's tough enough to bounce back up from it.
• Star Trek: The last duel between a captured Worf and the Jem'Hadar commander running the prison camp. Worf's refusal to quit even in the face of such a relentless example of this trope garners him rather a lot of respect in the commander's eyes: "I cannot defeat this Klingon. I can only kill him, and that no longer holds my interest."
  • This happens after Worf (and Martok, though we never see him fight the Jem'Hadar on screen) are badly injured and exhausted after days of fighting the Jem'Hardar as part of a Dominion training exercise. Most of the previous fights—at least the ones we see—end with Worf killing his Jem'Hardar opponent with his bare hands.
  • Colonel Kira has handed out a few no holds barred beatdowns over the course of the series. One notable example includes Way of the Warrior Part 2, in which Klingons have boarded the station. One of the Klingons who beamed into ops stabbed Kira in the kidney. Kira pulls the dagger out of her back and then beats the crap out of the guy who put it there.
    • She also dished one out to Damar.
  • Sisko gives them out often enough that SF Debris theorizes that he solves all his problems by punching them.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation has a Federation fleet attempting to stop a Borg cube from reaching Earth. Barely breaking stride, the cube destroys 39 Federation starships.
• An example that led many people to guess he was the Big Bad for season 1 of Veronica Mars was when Aaron Echolls beat the hell out of his daughter's abusive boyfriend. To the soundtrack's strains of "That's Amore." It was awesome, and yet hard to watch.
• Two words: Jack Bauer. Every time a villain gets his hands on Jack, you know it's not gonna be pretty.
• The Firefly episode "Objects in Space" is one long, drawn-out version of this, where Jubal Early proceeds to systematically beat up everyone on the ship who even tries to stop him (or looks like they might possibly try to stop him at some indeterminate time in the future). Fortunately, River and Mal manage to outsmart him.
  • Also happens in "Jaynestown," to Simon at the hands of Jayne's old partner.
    • The final fight (if you can call it that) between Jayne and said partner is also pretty one-sided and wince-inducing.
  • In "Shindig", there is a swordfight variant of this as Mal takes on Atherton Wing, and proceeds to nearly be cut to ribbons by his superior swordplay. He comes out the other end in pretty bad shape.
• In Lost, season four, the Complete Monster, Keamy, tracks Ben down to The Orchid's underground level and starts searching for him, uttering a villainous monologue as he does so, but then he makes a mistake by talking about how he, just a few episodes ago, murdered Ben's daughter in cold blood right in front of him. Ben, who is hiding away, hears every single word of what Keamy says, and, after Keamy converses with Locke, he gets his payback- Ben leaps out of a locker, viciously beats Keamy to the floor with a nightstick, and stabs Keamy twice in the throat with his own knife, all the while yelling in a feral rage, "You killed my daughter!" Keamy got what was coming to him.
  • All the more great as Ben is typically the victim of these no holds barred beatdowns. Particularly vicious ones were by Sayid in Season 2, Jack in Season 3's finale, almost had one from Sawyer in S4 and an especially brutal and bloody one in S5 from Desmond no less. Who previously never lashed out in such a violent manner, but there ya go. Never mess with the Scotsman. Even nice guy History teacher alternate universe Ben got one, once again from Desmond. Though in a school parking lot this time.
  • Sawyer got his fair share from Pickett in Season 3. And Locke beat 7 shades of shit out of Mikhail in one of his many Crowning Moments of Awesome
  • And then there's Jack and Sawyer beating the absolute living shit out of each other in the Season 5 finale.
  • And then there's the Smoke Monster's Temple rampage in season six.
• Oz - In spades.
• Super Sentai and Power Rangers sometimes have one of these near the beginning of the series when the Big Bad or The Dragon deigns to pound the Rangers flat in person, before ultimately deciding that they are Not Worth Killing. This editor remembers Rio from Gekiranger and Wolzard from Magiranger pulling at least one of these each.
  • The Monster of the Week will occasionally end up on the receiving end of one of these.
  • Mighty Morphin' Season 1, where Goldar, Scorpina and the Green Ranger work together to take down the Megazord.
• In the penultimate episode of Angel, Marcus Hamilton beat the everloving shit out of Drogan and Illyria. It was the only time that Illyria had ever been injured on the show.
  • The Beast also beats the shit out of Faith in Season 4.
    • The Beast also punishes Angel and his pals when they face him on top of a building. This fight ends with Angel being stabbed through the neck and then thrown off a very tall building.
• In Babylon 5, Sheridan gets one of these in "The Face of the Enemy" after Garibaldi sells him out to the Clarke regime. The sequence, one of the most elaborately shot in the series, is powerful and disturbing in the way it contrasts Sheridan's messianic, larger than life image with the objective hopelessness of his situation, using multiple Hope Spots and Sheridan's refusal to give in. The Passion of the Christ goes to the same well. Marcus's fight with Neroon in "Gray 17 is Missing" also comes close to this trope, though Marcus does get a few good hits in before being pounded into the deck.
  • An earlier episode has Londo arranging for Lord Refa to meet his end this way at the hands of angry Narns. Ironically, his primary motivation was something that Refa hadn't even done. Don't worry. Refa was a Complete Monster who had done more than enough to earn his fate.
    • An element of perverse comedy is added to the scene because Refa's death is accompanied by a gospel song about Judgment Day called "The Rock Cried Out No Hiding Place"
• In Rescue Me, Tommy delivers one of these (with several people trying to hold him back) to his brother Johnny when he discovers the latter has been sleeping with his wife. At one point he puts his head through a car window.
• In the 100th episode of Criminal Minds, Aaron Hotchner goes toe-to-toe with The Reaper. We've already seen the Reaper clean Hotch's clock in "Nameless, Faceless", but it's different this time: Foyet has just killed Hotch's wife, Haley, and made it clear that if Hotch doesn't stop him, he'll kill Hotch's six-year-old son Jack next. Hotch empties his clip into Foyet, then, when it's revealed that Foyet was wearing full-body armor, throws him through a table and beats him to death with his bare hands. It takes Morgan to finally pull Hotch off. A hell of a way to invoke Not So Stoic.
  • Previously, an unsub whose daughter had been killed while he was in prison kidnaps father/daughter pairs, then forces the fathers to beat other kidnapped men to death or watch their daughters be murdered. Ordered to finish off an already-stunned opponent, one father has no choice but to keep slugging his helpless foe, pleading "I'm sorry" with every blow.
• In The Wire, Michael asks Chris Partlow to kill his stepfather, Devar. Normally Chris carries out hits in a dispassionate manner, killing with a headshot. However, it's implied that Devar has sexually abused Michael, and upon hearing Devar admit to raping other inmates in prison (or at least, that's what Chris takes from it), Chris beats him to a bloody pulp, spitting on the corpse afterwards.
  • Most fans assumed because of this that Chris was also abused as a child. (This was later confirmed through Word of God)
• On Supernatural, Castiel delivered one of these to Dean Winchester, when Castiel caught him attempting to surrender, which the angel considered a betrayal.
  • In 4x16, when Alastair unexpectedly freed himself from the devils-trap. And having been tortured by Dean for a few hours, he was quite pissed to put it mildly.
  • In the season 5 finale, Dean puts himself on the receiving end of such a beatdown when he refuses to leave his brother while Lucifer is possessing Sam. Lucifer takes his annoyance at the interruption of his fight with Michael out on Dean. It's...pretty ugly. And heartbreaking, because Dean just lets him do it and keeps saying "Sammy? It's OK, I'm here. I won't leave you."
  • In 6x13, a soulless-Sam gives one to a cop who's grown suspicious of his cover.
• In True Blood the semi-heroic Sam Merlotte gives a brutal beating to Crystal's meth-dealing daddy. In his own bar, in front of his regular customers. Who are, inevitably, horrified.
• John Foster uses one of these to beat Freddie to death with a baseball bat in season 4 of Skins. Word of God says Cook gives one right back as season 4 ends.
• In Episode 35 of Kamen Rider Kuuga, Go-Jaraji-Da, a particularly nasty Grongi with the ability to cause encephalitis in his victims, pushes the kind and good-natured Yuusuke Godai too far with his sadistic actions. Cue Yuusuke ramming Go-Jaraji-Da's head into the pavement. Repeatedly.
  • It does not stop there. Next he runs the Grongi over with his bike, then drags the Grongi to somewhere safe, and then proceeds to brutally finish the monster with a rage-driven Rising Calamity Titan.
• There are at least two examples of this in the first season of The Walking Dead, and there aren't even any walkers around when they happen.
• Smallville, Season 10, episode 10: Earth-2 Lionel Luthor, delivers a brutal one to Clark, turning on a Green K light, and then trying to beat him to death with a belt.
• In Season 5, Episode 9 of Dexter when Dexter beats Barry while telling Barry where he is punching Barry, and why it hurts so much.
• In Deadwood, Charlie Utter hands out a very brutal beating to the much larger and more intimidating Woolcott, with much kicking while down. Charlie has just found out that Woolcott had murdered three people the day before; the beating was more than warranted.
• The first episode of The Shadow Line has Jay Wratten brutally beating one of Bob Harris's men in a lift for insulting him, as part of him Establishing Character Moment.
• Gene Hunt has a special way of police investigation that usually ends in this trope. One of the most terrifying encounters is in Ashes to Ashes series 2 episode 3, where activist Adrian Mansfield is defiantly taking Gene on verbally with some astute observations about political violence while receiving a pummeling in the gents' loos.
• Elliot Stabler has been known to hand these out occasionally, especially when the case involves child abuse. Notable instances include Confession in which we see the aftermath of Elliot's rampage after a pedophile posts a picture of Stabler's underage daughter on his website, and Ripped, in which Stabler beats a former partner unconscious in a courthouse bathroom after witnessing the man abuse his son.
  • Ripped establishes that the man had been taking steroids for an extended period of time prior to Stabler's beatdown.
  • It's worth noting that after Stabler beats the pedophile, Olivia supports her partner but is disturbed by his actions. Fin, who had been angry with Stabler for a few episodes, forgives him after witnessing this, marveling at his restraint. He explains to Olivia that had it been his child, he would have actually killed the pedophile. Seriously, don't mess with kids around the SVU crew.
• When Arthur catches Lancelot kissing Guinevere on Merlin he completely loses it. The fact that it's essentially a children's show means that there is no blood or serious injury, but the audience is left in no doubt that the two would have killed each other had Merlin and Guinevere not intervened.
• Played for laughs in 1000 Ways to Die in the segments "Wrin-killed" where a thief tries to snatch a purse from a old lady only to get the crap beaten out of him by her until she breaks his neck and "Lac-Toasted" where a flasher torments a group of mothers until they fight back

Music

• Zebrahead's "Karma Flavored Whiskey". Woo, if you don't know it, just listen. It's the perfect example of this.
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKS8-oSLnvo
• Disturbed's "This Moment" initially appears to be the one singing taking it. Then things change.
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NXt4e5ydac
• Murdoc pulls a few of these on 2D through the ages, most prominently in the recent iTunes session interviews. Not only does Murdoc fight with, and beat the living crap out of 2D, but he also drugs him into submission. All on tape.
• Meshuggah's "Perpetual Black Second" is about the perpetrator of such a beatdown reflect upon and regretting one.
• The band Throwdown have the implications of this in each of their songs, especially "We Will Rise"
  • In fact it was used in a real Anime amv about the neglected Flame of Recca where Recca is being beaten within in an inch of his life by Kukai. Unfortunately it has been pulled off of youtube.
• Jim Croce seems to have specialized in songs about these during The Seventies. Specifically, 'Bad, Bad Leroy Brown' and 'You Don't Mess Around With Jim.'

Professional Wrestling

• This is a common practice in Professional Wrestling, especially in high-profile Heel Vs Face matches. Of course, the Heroic Second Wind moment is coming... however, sometimes it might take a Squash Match or two for that moment to come.
  • After Kane unmasked he turned on his former tag team partner Rob Van Dam. Inevitably when this thing happens between wrestlers, they get put in matches, in this case several, and Rob did nothing but get thrown, slammed, punched, choked, and stepped on. The only match in their series Rob actually won was a steel cage match, where you need to escape to win. When Kane tossed the helpless Rob through the cage, the referee counted it as Rob escaping.
  • Another inverted example had a cage match between Vince McMahon and Stone Cold Steve Austin. Austin beat Vince so bad and so bloody the match had to be stopped and McMahon had to be wheeled out on a stretcher, but then Austin jumped on the stretcher to continue punishing his boss.
  • General example: Any match involving one of the members of DX eventually devolved into this. For a while, this happened EVERY SINGLE SHOW.
  • Specific example: Shortly after Stone Cold Steve Austin's infamous 'accident', The Rock was in a match with The Big Bossman. Bossman pulled his usual Heel tactics, which resulted in the Rock snapping and beating him, the ref, several MORE refs, and the paramedics into states that greatly resembled comas with anything and everything he had on hand. Leaving him standing in the center of the ring, staring about wildly with a pile of destroyed humanity all around him.
    • The point was to cast suspicion on The Rock for Austin's accident, you see.
• During the kayfabe (pre-mid 1990s) era, when most wrestling TV programs pitted top and mid-level talent against jobbers, a promoter would sometimes push a villain as an unstoppable Monster Heel by having him continue beating jobber wrestlers (and sometimes anyone else) well after the brute could have scored a victory. The idea was always to demonstrate the heel's power—and often, devastating impact of his offensive arsenal—and (the main goal) rally the fans to call upon the promotion's top babyface to demand a match with the heel and give him his comeuppance.
• Though the referees stopped her before it went too far, at Survivor Series 2004, Lita was well on her way to unleashing one of these on Trish Stratus, having already smashed her face into a chair, the ring steps, beaten her with the chair, pummeled her in the face, and was choking her by the time several refs were finally able to pull her off. Even at that, she still managed to get away from them and go back for more.
• Mick Foley has given and received many of these in the course of his career.
• As has The Undertaker.
• The Nexus are infamous for giving these.
  • Notable, as it's an entire group of eight people delivering these to an unfortunate victim. To say it's like watching a pack of wolves devouring their prey is, quite frankly, an understatement.
• The Big Show gave one to Ricardo Rodriguez to the point that Kane had to stop him. He later gives one to Mark Henry who doesn't take it lightly.
  • However Big Show did try to warn Mark Henry.
  • And since then Mark Henry has been doing this to everyone who crosses him.
    • Then Big Show came promptly returned the favor.
• CM Punk did this to Jeff Hardy after his heel turn. After defending the World Heavyweight champion against John Morrison on WWE Smackdown towards the end of July 2009, CM Punk came to "congratulate" him, only to set him up for an ambush and utterly destroyed Jeff Hardy. This started a feud that ended in Jeff Hardy being "forced" out of the WWE.
• Randy Orton
• The Two Man Power Trip (Triple H and Stone Cold) delivered an absolutely hellacious beating to the Hardy Boys and Lita. It's pretty uncomfortable to watch, especially as they humiliate and destroy Lita with a chair...not that they needed the chair.
• Upon his return in 2011, Kane has been dishing these out to John Cena, as well as his pal Zack Ryder.
  • He gave a lot of these over the course of his career.
• Brock Lesnar especially his match with John Cena at Extreme Rules 2012.

Tabletop Games

• In the Hong Kong Action Theatre supplement To Live and Die in HK, one of the Signature Moves that a character can have is "Heroic Comeback." In addition to being used for Heroic Second Wind moments during climactic fights, it can also be used after the character has been on the receiving end of one of these in an earlier scene, with the + 5 bonus to hit the guy who kicked his ass for the rest of the movie being used for some much deserved payback.

Video Games

• Jaron Namir delivers one to Adam Jensen at the beginning of Deus Ex Human Revolution. The beat-down is so bad, it forces Adam to become augmented in order to survive.
• Volgin to Snake in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Over Snake knocking out Volgin's gay lover in order to steal said lover's uniform, no less.
  • Honestly, between that, all the stuff The Boss did to him, the torture scene, and so on, the whole mission could feel like one. Hence his near-death experience.
  • Used again at the end of Act 3 of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots between Snake and Liquid Ocelot, though Ocelot does do a lot of bragging about his evil plan while doing so.
  • Also in the cutscene just before the final boss fight, when Ocelot straddles Snake and starts pummeling his face into meat until he needs another stimulant injection.
• Rare hero example: Captain Price to Khaled Al-Asad in Modern Warfare 1. If you look around during the beating, the other hardened SAS officers—who've fought their way through hundreds of enemies to capture Al-Asad—keep having to look away.
  • This is less this trope, and more Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique.
  • And General Shepherd to Captain Price at the end of Modern Warfare 2. He'll actually kill him if you can't stop the fight in time.
  • At the end of Modern Warfare 3, Price delivers one to Makarov culminating in his death. It's immensely satisfying.
• Jack to Andrew Ryan in BioShock (series). Andrew uses a posthypnotic command word to compel Jack to beat him to death with a golf club, to demonstrate that Jack has no free will. It might also be a form of Suicide by Cop, however.
• Alexia does this to Wesker in the original version of Resident Evil Code: Veronica. In the Updated Rerelease, Wesker managed to get a couple of punches in. Later on, Wesker does this to Chris as well, but he deserved it, considering he went after Wesker unarmed.
  • • Since pulling a gun on Wesker worked so well the first time.
  • Wesker also did it to Claire.
• Happens in Breath of Fire III in your first fight against Balio and Sunder. It's framed as a playable Hopeless Boss Fight, adding a personal touch to the brutality.
• Rare heroic example in Shadow Hearts: Covenant, when Yuri, the Godslayer, who has beaten reality destroying demons to death with his fists, confronts the man behind the big conspiracy of the second half of the game; a fat, old, dying Japanese politician. He promptly flies into an Unstoppable Rage, and beats the crap out of the man. Then he kicks his grandson flying when he tries to defend his grandpa, and starts beating the old man again when he tries to beg for his grandson's life. He snaps out of it eventually, but the old guy spends the rest of his short life in a hospital. Whether the beatdown is Moral Dissonance or a Crowning Moment of Awesome depends on whether you think the old guy crossed the Moral Event Horizon or not really.
• Eternal Darkness has a villain-on-villain version in the battle between the rival Cosmic Horrors Ulyaoth and Chattur'gha. While each of the gods' battles have a pretty clear winner, there is at least a fight. Ulyaoth on the other hand, takes its enemy to pieces through use of teleportation portals, so Chattur'gha starts the fight by getting blasted with its own fireball, and ends by trying to crawl away on what remains of its limbs before being chopped in half by another portal.
  • The same could be said for when Chattur'gha battled Xel'lotath. I mean, he ripped her to shreds and devoured her!
• Every battle in Dwarf Fortress ends in one of these if the loser doesn't get cut in half and sent flying across the screen or lose his internal organs to a crossbow bolt. The only other end is a creature getting knocked out and methodically dismantled by his opponent.
  • In early DF2010 releases, there were a few... bugs... with the new damage system not being able to effectively decide death conditions. Since combat will only end when one party is dead, the ensuing No-Holds-Barred Beatdown could easily continue for more than a season, resulting in every single bone and organ in the victim's body being damaged until the combat system finally got around to calling them dead.
• God of War II—After his battle with the Colossus, Kratos can barely muster the strength it takes to walk, and Zeus seizes the opportunity to toss him around before impaling him with his own godhood. And there is nothing you can do to stop him.
  • ...yet.
  • God of War III features this from a first person view. The first is from Poseidon's view as Kratos slams him around. The second is from Kratos' view as he beats Zeus to death with his own hands. And continues.
  • As you're doing this, blood splatters on the screen. You can continue indefinitely as the screen becomes covered in blood. The only way to continue with the game is to stop killing Zeus.
    • Y'know what? Pretty much all of the boss fights in God of War qualify.
• In Gears of War 2, when an enemy soldier is in a downed state, you have the option to put your weapons away and punch the living shit out of them until they stop breathing in a satisfying scripted animation. Granted, they're already heavily wounded, and it only takes three punches to kill them.
  • In Gears 3 you're able to repeatedly tap Y to prolong the beatdown. For the COG, you repeatedly punch the enemy while they are down, like in Gears 2, but you can hold it for about 10 seconds, and it culminates with you punching their head into meat chunks. As a Locust, on the other hand, you rip off their arm and beat them to death with it for about 10 seconds.
• This is what happens to your character in Left 4 Dead if a Hunter pounces on you. And only another survivor can save you from certain death.
  • Also what happens if a Tank incapacitates a survivor and decides to keep punching.
• Pretty much what happens whenever you activate God Hand in... God Hand. You're invincible and your attacks are unblockable, faster, and stronger.
• In World of Warcraft, you the player (and 9 or 24 of your friends depending on the setting) team up with an NPC to deliver one to The Lich King during his boss fight. It does help that said boss can't fight back because Tirion broke free of Arthas's Ice Block, ran up behind Arthas, jumped into the air, and shattered Frostmourne, releasing all the souls imprisoned inside it including the one of Arthas's father, King Terenas, who proceeds to resurrect the entire raid. All of this is pure Fanservice to the players.
  • Just imagine Yogg Saron calls out Finish Him!!
• Before his Face Heel Turn into the series Big Bad, Sigma of Mega Man X was on the receiving end of one of these. A powerful Maverick was reported to be on the rampage and Sigma decided to deal with the threat by himself so that no one else would be endangered. Even though Sigma was easily the most powerful Reploid model at the time, the Maverick readily tore his sword-arm off and gouged one of his eyes out before beating him to a pulp. Sigma only won because of a "moment of weakness". Said event was actually what caused Sigma's Face Heel Turn. And the Maverick? He became the hero known by the name Zero.
• One of the Consume animations from Prototype is a very literal example of this trope. Mercer simply throws his luckless victim to the ground and beats the shit out of him/her until all that's left is a pile of easily consumed meat. Thankfully, all you see is the shower of bloodspray from the beating. The other Consumes aren't quite as literal, but are much worse since you actually get to see every gory detail. On a slightly less bloody note, it's possible to beat down a tank with the Hammerfist power. Mercer in general doesn't hold anything back when he fights.
• In Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Dog does this to a Strider by jumping onto its head, punching it incessantly as it stumbles around, and finally tearing open its armored exoskeleton and pulling its brain out. Generally considered more of a Crowning Moment of Awesome than gorn because Dog is Alyx's Robot Buddy and the Strider is a giant evil cyborg bug-thing.
  • Dog also gets another at the end, after Eli gets killed by an Advisor. Granted, the Advisors get away, but one of them's pretty badly wounded.
  • The backstory of Half-Life 2 had a huge example on a planetary scale: the Seven Hour War between the nations of Earth and the Combine. It lasted seven hours and...well, we lost.
• Just about every sync kill in Dawn of War does this. Generally involves a unit pounding on its adversary several (dozen) times with a blade of some sort, then pulling out a ranged weapon and blowing it away. The Space Marines enjoy bringing an enemy to their knees and kicking them in the face with a giant armored boot, Commissars pull out a laspistol and do it execution-style, Dark Eldar Mandrakes just keep on stabbing. The variations are many.
• This happens to Kreia in flashback in Knights of the Old Republic 2. Despite the violence in the rest of the game, this scene is the most visceral, consisting mainly of a large man beating the hell out of a defenceless old lady.
  • What makes it even more brutal is that she doesn't start a defenseless old woman. He literally beats the Force out of a Sith lord, until it is just a matter of beating the hell out of an old woman.
• In The Godfather, this is generally what ensues when you render someone helpless by grabbing him or her. The sequel builds on this with Pummels and Executions.
• In an example that makes up for its lack of gritty gore by sheer shock value, near the end of The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker, Ganondorf at one point just starts pummeling Link, showing every single reeling effect it has on the young child. Considering the light-hearted tone and graphical style of the game, it comes as a surprise.
  • The whole scene is pretty dark compared to the sunny, colorful artstyle of the game. It works incredibly well for it.
• Although the flashiness masks the brutality somewhat, this is pretty much what happens in all combo videos.
• The Secret of Monkey Island ends with LeChuck literally punching Guybrush from one end of Melee Island to the other as Guybrush tries to come up with a way to beat him. This happens again in the final episode of Tales of Monkey Island, with Guybrush getting pummeled around LeChuck's ship.
  • The second game features a variation: instead of beating on Guybrush, LeChuck instead repeatedly stabs a voodoo doll of our hero.
• Taokaka from BlazBlue has the "I'mma Beat The Crap Outta You!" Distortion Drive, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • And then there are the Astral Heats. Ragna, Taokaka, Hakumen, Litchi, and Valkenhayn's are all long combos that leave their victims extremely dead.
• In Dungeon Keeper, you can slap your creatures (or captured enemies) to death.
• Pretty much any freeroaming Rockstar game will let you do this.
  • There's nothing stopping you from beating a little kid to the point of blacking-out in Bully.
  • And you can pretty much shoot and kick the shit out of anybody you want in GTA, not to mention if you've already driven them into another car first with the awesome Euphoria engine.
  • But of all Rockstar games, The Warriors definitely takes this trope as the icing of its massive controversial cake. You can lay blows into people that would cause internal bleeding to a fucking rhino. Not to mention give them enough smacks to the face with bricks, bottles, bats, crowbars, and cash registers that, if the game was realistic enough, would no longer result in a head at all to lay your cruelty down upon.
  • Not to mention, once their health is low enough (which, if you've done the above, probably is), you can enter a scripted scene which lays down a ruthless as shit series of attacks. Say, for example, we use Cleon's, and beat our victim to the ground, then jump on their spine and then twist our lower body to ensure no further use of legs whatsoever in the victim.
    • We then, (for some reason, can actually) pull our victim to their feet, and throw them in front of a fucking train.
    • Did we mention that the victim was a teenaged girl who just happened to get kicked out of her boyfriend's apartment a little too late at night?
• You can do this to enemies in Oblivion, since hand-to-hand attacks damage fatigue as well as health, and having zero fatigue causes enemies to fall over, after which you can gradually beat them to death while they're down. It takes a lot longer than just killing them normally though. But since the game is full of complete monsters, killing them this way is very satisfying.
• In Persona 3, there is a mechanic where enemies and allies may fall over after certain attacks. If every enemy is on the ground, the player is prompted to trigger an "All out attack," with the party members beating up on the damaged and off-guard enemies.
  • It returns in Persona 4 and in both versions it only works when both the Protagonist and at least one other party member are on the field and aren't incapacitated. If you finish off the enemy party with it, it ends in a giant skull-shaped mushroom cloud.
• Johnny Gat of Saint's Row delivers one in the game's sequel. After Shogo, the so-called leader of the Ronin, shows up at Aisha's funeral demanding a fight, the player character chases him down and drags him to a VERY pissed off Gat. Gat then delivers a smackdown on the punk, breaking his leg and punching his head through a tombstone. He then buries him alive. The lesson here? Do not screw with Johnny Gat.
• Virgo delivers this to the Phoenix in the middle of stage 7 in RefleX.
• A direct allusion to this trope by Maya Schroedinger (Wild ARMs 3), who says this to Virginia after saving her and her party from Asgard (who did OHKO them): I, Maya Schroedinger, will crush you to the ground, no holds barred. Just remember that.
• In the prequel to Dissidia Final Fantasy, Duodecim, this is pretty much Feral Chaos's EX Burst. Most everyone else gets a flashy standard attack for theirs... but Chaos i