Image via Complex Original
The adult human skull is a hard protective shell that looks out for the brain, the body's command center. It can withstand a considerable amount of abuse, but a speeding bullet? A bit beyond its capabilities. So it's rare that a person gets shot in the head and walks away from it. Unless that person is in a movie.
Take Bangkok Revenge, martial artist Jon Foo's (Tekken) new action drama, in which a young boy looks on as a team of masked gunmen shoot and kill his parents. Not ones to leave a potential witness or vengeful survivor, they pop his top as well, only instead of killing him they merely destroy the part of his brain that feels emotion, so when he's all grown and trained in ass-kicking he doesn't feel the slightest remorse for beating anybody associated with the crime to death. That is what's known in the hit man community as a fail.
With head trauma on the brain, Complex gives you even more people who couldn't be brought down by a bullet to the bean: 15 Movie Characters that Survived Getting Shot in the Head.
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Written by Justin Monroe (@40yardsplash)
Wood Harris as Ace in Paid in Full (2002)
There is no such thing as dibs or legacy in the drug game. That doesn't stop Calvin (Kevin Carrol), a former big-shot drug dealer who goes to prison, from claiming that Ace, his girlfriend's brother who took his spot when he went away and gives him a low-level gig upon his release, needs to make him a crew leader and relinquish control of his territory.
Unable to get his blocks back, Calvin instead lays in wait at Ace's apartment and attempts to rob and murder him with several shots, including one to the noggin. Ace pulls through only to have his lughead associate Rico (Cam'ron) visit the hospital and tell him to "pull your skirt down" because he's thinking of quitting the life. Easy to say without a bullet wound to the head, B.
Hugh Jackman as Logan/Wolverine in X2 (2003)
Assuming you're not the sensitive metrosexual whose day is ruined by a little weight gain, there's a definite upside to having a virtually indestructible adamantium metal alloy coating on your skeleton. For Wolverine it comes in handy when, in a standoff with police, the cops wait for him to retract his bone claws, then shoot him in his metallic skull, which stops the bullet cold. Blessed with mutant healing powers, he's left with not so much as a scar. Which is all to say that it's cool if Wolverine rides a fixie without a helmet, but your fragile ass had better strap on.
Harrison Ford as Henry Turner in Regarding Henry (1991)
There is apparently a part of the brain that causes a person to be a dick. When a robber (John Leguizamo) shoots unscrupulous asshole attorney and philandering husband Henry Turner in the chest and head while he's trying to buy some late-night smokes, the frontal lobe trauma and brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation turn him into a far more sympathetic mute cripple amnesiac.
As Henry regains his powers of speech and movement, his new simpleminded appreciation for everything endears him to his wife, daughter, and pretty much everyone but his mistress and other former fellow d-bags, who he abandons for a life filled with love. So, you see, there's no relationship therapy that can compare to a good braining.
Christian Slater as Clarence Worley in True Romance (1993)
The bloody, climactic shootout at a drug deal in writer Quentin Tarantino and director Tony Scott's criminal romance claims the lives of a snitch, a coke-copping director, his armed musclemen, and several cops and mobsters.
Despite taking a bullet to the eye and appearing dead, Clarence, a former comic book store employee who's dealing drugs he accidentally stole so he can relocate to Cancún with the love of his life, former hooker Alabama (Patricia Arquette), wakes up and is able to slip past police as they blast it out with the remaining gangsters. Don't ever let somebody tell you love isn't the most powerful force on Earth.
Jon Foo as Manit in Bangkok Revenge (2012)
As a boy, Manit witnesses gunmen killing his parents. The assassins put a slug in the youngster's cranium as well, but it fails to end his life. What it does do is damage the part of his brain that's responsible for emotion, allowing him to later put martial arts training to use on their asses without being deterred by pleas for mercy.
Michelle Rodriguez as Luz/Shé in Machete (2010)
In Robert Rodriguez's exploitation action thriller Machete, Luz, a taco truck proprietor also known to illegal Mexican immigrants as Shé, the leader of an aid movement called the Network, fights to protect her people from a racist border vigilante, Von Jackson (Don Johnson), who goes so far as to gun down a pregnant woman in the name of his cause.
When Luz and Jackson meet, he blames her for the attempted assassination of border fence proponent Senator John McLaughlin (Robert De Niro) and claims "an eye for an eye," blasting a bullet into one of hers before leaving her to die. Presumed dead, she makes a triumphant (and sexy) return in the final showdown sporting a badass black eye patch to match her badass black leather bra and general badassness.
Thomas Wodianka as Micky in Snowman’s Land (2010)
Nobody compliments somebody by calling them hard-headed, but in the case of Micky, a thrill-seeking, eccentric hit man in German director Tomasz Thomson's dark comedy Snowman's Land, it is clearly a positive attribute. To him, the adjective applies literally, thanks to a metal plate in his head, and while protecting a gangster's house in the Carpathian Mountains, that bane of airport security screenings comes in handy when fist and shotgun shell would cave in his skull.
50 Cent as Marcus in Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005)
Based on the life of its star, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Get Rich or Die Tryin' tells the story of Marcus, a drug dealer who works for local kingpin Majestic (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) but dreams of pursuing rap stardom as Young Caesar. When he tries to exit the game, his unwilling employer arranges for a gunman to take him down. Shot nine times, once in the head at close range, Marcus lives, donning a bulletproof vest at his big rap show until his people kill Majestic and he can literally and figuratively shed the weight of his former life.
Geena Davis as Samantha Caine/Charly Baltimore in The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
In director Renny Harlin's darkly comedic action thriller, a Pennsylvania mother and schoolteacher who washed up pregnant on the Jersey shore eight years earlier suffering from amnesia discovers that she was a CIA assassin named Charlene "Charly" Baltimore. The amnesia, it turns out, was the result of being shot in the head and tossed into the sea. Unfortunately for the conspirators who did her dirty, her memory, like her cold-hearted ass-kicking skills, return with a vengeance.
David Duchovny as Special Agent Fox Mulder in The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998)
In the first, and far better, of the conspiratorial X-Files movies, Special Agent Fox Mulder dials paramedics to treat his partner, Special Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who lays unconscious after a bee sting transmits a virus to her. When the driver of what appears to be an ambulance arrives, he shoots the FBI man in the head and takes off with the attractive redhead.
In another example of poor aim and follow-through, the slug merely grazes Mulder's temple, knocking him out but allowing him to exit the hospital he wakes up in and eventually track down his partner in Antarctica, where she is being stored in a lab that is actually, go figure, a giant alien spacecraft.
Robert Carlyle as Renard in The World Is Not Enough (1999)
Like Jay-Z said on "Friend or Foe," you draw, better be Picasso. Evidently MI6 agent 009 was neither the best artist nor the best shot, as the bullet he fired at KGB agent-turned-terrorist Renard lodged in his brain but failed to kill him, instead destroying his senses, making him impervious to pain, and pissing him off to the point of detonating nuclear bombs. What do you expect when you take away a man's ability to enjoy some rough sex?
Arnold Schwarzenegger as Terminator in The Terminator (1984)
James Cameron's Terminator is the ultimate slasher villain. First dreamt up as a robot torso clutching kitchen knives and dragging itself from an explosion, the menacing metallic sci-fi action icon is a relentless cyborg assassin that will never stop in its pursuit of a programmed target until either they are dead or its battery runs dry.
Not even a shotgun blast to the head can stop the Terminator sent back in time to 1984 from post-apocalyptic 2029, when war rages between man and machine, to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), mother of mankind's future resistance leader—ironically conceived with the flesh-and-blood soldier (Michael Biehn) he sends back in time to protect her. Head scrambled? It's a lot easier to survive such a mind blow when you've got a metal endoskeleton beneath your living tissue.
Ed Norton as The Narrator in Fight Club (1999)
In David Fincher's adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's book, the Narrator, a former office drone, discovers that his buddy, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), an anti-materialist who freed him from his complacent cubicle life and is plotting to blow up credit card company buildings and destroy debt records that shackle consumers, is actually his own dissociated personality.
To reclaim his body from Tyler, who holds him at gunpoint when he attempts to stop the bombings, the Narrator eats the gun, which was in his own hand the whole time, and blasts a non-fatal hole through his cheek. Tyler's shit is blown loose and the Narrator lives on, fully in cognizant control of his actions, to watch as the explosives detonate. Schizophrenic win-win.
Uma Thurman as The Bride in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
A woman's wedding is supposed to be a joyous occasion when everyone celebrates her and gives her gifts with which to start her new, married life. In writer-director Quentin Tarantino's revenge flick Kill Bill, the Bride, a pregnant ex member of an assassin team led by her former lover Bill (David Carradine), gets showered with lead instead of rice as her old cohorts slaughter her wedding party. Bill puts a bullet in the wounded woman's skull right as she tells him that he's her baby's daddy and leaves her for dead, comatose.
When she wakes years later, the Bride is anything but blushing as she sets about dispatching every last one of the bastards who ruined her special day.
Peter Weller as Officer Alex J. Murphy/RoboCop in RoboCop (1987)
To say that Detroit PD officer Alex J. Murphy "survives" after a gang of criminals he's pursuing gets the jump on him, tortures and riddles him with bullets (including a parting shot to the dome), doctors pronounce him dead, and the Omni Consumer Products corporation that runs law enforcement uses his body to create an experimental cyborg cop is a stretch.
Yet, a spark of the man and his memories remains amidst the metal in the titular hero of director Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi action classic. And with his badass new robot body and semi-automatic hand cannon he's able to take revenge on the thugs who took him away from his wife and son. By the end of the flick his human side overrides his uptight programmed computer side and he refers to himself not as RoboCop but as Murphy once more.
