If movie characters were real, who would survive and what would be left of them?

THEY’VE SURVIVED PLANE CRASHES, EXPLODING BUILDINGS AND PSYCHOPATHIC SURGEONS. BUT IF THIS CAST OF MOVIE HEROES AND VILLAINS WERE REAL, WOULD THEY HAVE MADE IT TO THE CLOSING CREDITS OR DIED EN ROUTE? TOTAL FILM CONSULTS DOCTORS AND MEDICAL EXPERTS TO SEE WHAT WOULD HAVE ACTUALLY HAPPENED…

DIE HARD 1988

Off-duty New York cop John McClane (played by Bruce Willis) is caught in the middle of an armed heist in a Los Angeles skyscraper. Taking on an army of gun-toting bad guys, he has a vested interest in helping to escape and free the hostages, as he’s married to one of them. On call: Dr Ram Moorthy, Head and Neck Surgeon.

INJURIES

35 MINS: Hits his head against a wall and falls down stairs. “The plasterboard is likely to have caused some bruising but because he landed on top of the other guy, he may have sprained something.” 48 MINS: Falls down a lift shaft, hangs by his fingers. “Rock climbers have managed to do that, but for someone who’s not a trained climber that’s a very lucky occurrence. That kind of fall prevention could have dislocated his shoulder and broken fingers.”

1 HR 13 MINS: Blows up a lift shaft. “He’s looking at burns from the fireball, explosion shrapnel, and a burned airway which can cause swelling and potentially be fatal. The noise would have given him a ringing head. It’s debatable if he’d have had his full senses to continue.”

1 HR 15 MINS: Glass cuts his feet to ribbons. “The blood loss might not be as significant as it looks.” 1 HR 45 MINS: Repeatedly kicked in the head and face. “This could have caused fractures to the facial bones like his jaw and his cheek. He could’ve been knocked unconscious and damaged his teeth.”

1 HR 47 MINS: Shot in the shoulder. “There’d be a fair amount of blood loss and I’m not sure how mobile his arm would be with a shoulder injury, or whether he could put someone in a headlock with it. Couple with blood loss from his feet and other injuries and it doesn’t look good.” 1 HR 51 MINS: Jumps off an exploding building and crashes through a window. “He lands on his torso so he might be at risk from the plate glass window plus further damage to his feet from kicking it.”

DR RAM’S DIAGNOSIS “More than likely John would have lost consciousness from blood loss and I’m not sure whether he’d have been able to defeat the bad guys. I think he would’ve died during his final battle with Carl when he was kicked in the head and shot.” LENGTH OF FILM 2 HRS 11 MINS TIME OF DEATH 1 HR 47 MINS

HALLOWEEN 1978

In the first of the 10-movie franchise, student Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) is stalked by a masked and mute Michael Myers, who escapes a secure mental hospital to wage war on his old neighbourhood. On call: Dr Hannah Barnham-Brown, Student Doctor at St George’s University of London.

INJURIES

1 HR 2 MINS: Michael lifts post-coital Bob off the ground with just one hand then stabs him. “If you’re that strong, the lift won’t do you much harm, but you might pull a tendon.” 1 HR 16 MINS: Michael’s stabbed in the neck with a knitting needle. “It didn’t hit an artery or blood

would be gushing like a fountain. I think it hit a muscle and didn’t go in very deep.” 1 HR 20 MINS: Michael’s eye is wounded by a coat hanger. “When the mask comes off, his left eye looks odd and it’s not clear if it’s been pulled out or imploded in his head. More likely, the coat hanger went down into the side of the eye socket but not the eyeball itself, causing tissue swelling.” 1 HR 21 MINS: Michael is knifed in the chest. “The knife was massive and went up into his chest with a lot of force, so his left lung has almost certainly collapsed and his heart has probably been damaged too. He could easily have dropped down dead from this.” 1 HR 23 MINS: Michael’s shot six times and

subsequently falls from a balcony. “The chances of survival are non-existent. He takes one bullet to the left shoulder then a burst of five to the chest before falling 15 feet below. He’d have suffered multiple spinal fractures with spinal cord damage, possibly breaking a vertebrae in his neck leaving him a quadriplegic. But he was almost certainly dead before he fell.”

DR HANNAH’S DIAGNOSIS “Being knifed, he would’ve probably ended up with a cardiac injury and almost instantaneous death. If not, the gunshots would definitely have killed him and the idea of him getting up and escaping afterwards is laughable.” LENGTH OF FILM 1 HR 31 MINS TIME OF DEATH 1 HR 21 MINS

CRANK 2006

Hitman Chev (played by Jason Statham) is double crossed by his employer and injected with a synthetic drug that slows down his heart. To extend the hour of life he has left, he must keep his adrenaline flowing in a series of stunts. On call: London-based A&E doctor, Dr Ranj Singh, regular on ITV’s This Morning.

INJURIES

1 MIN: Chev’s been injected with the drug. “Drugs exist that could potentially antagonise your adrenal gland but not ones that’d last to the point where it kills you.” 32 MINS: He uses a defibrillator on himself. “This would’ve given him a heart attack and stopped it beating altogether.”

37 MINS: He’s thrown from a motorbike. “He would have sustained a neck injury, broken vertebrae, arm and leg fractures, a spine fracture, a head injury.” 42 MINS: He puts his hand under a toaster. “It would have caused significant third-degree burns and tissue damage.” 1 HR 18 MINS: Chev falls from the sky, bounces off a car and lands on concrete. “He’d have died on first impact from that height.”

DR RANJ’S DIAGNOSIS “Theoretically there are some explainable parts of Crank but it’s been stretched beyond realistic proportions. In real life, the drug would have had no effect whatsoever, but using the defibrillator would have been the first thing to have killed him.” LENGTH OF FILM 1 HR 28 MINS TIME OF DEATH 32 MINS

THE RAID 2 2014 The sequel to the 2011 massacre and martial arts thriller once again finds cop Rama (played by Iko Uwais) fighting for his life, and with a few hundred henchmen. This time he’s undercover and banged up behind bars to take down corrupt police chiefs and underworld gangs. On call: London Registrar Dr Keir Shiels, star of BBC Three’s Junior Doctors.

INJURIES

14 MINS: Scraps with 24 fighters. “He’s only actually hit three times. He blocks a lot of punches and aside from a couple of swipes to the stomach, he’d suffer just bruising to the chest and back.”

17 MINS: Punches a wall repeatedly. “He would’ve fractured his knuckles and broken all his metacarpals which would’ve taken six weeks to heal, so they’d have prevented him from doing anything else in the rest of the film.”

30 MINS: He has a tussle in a muddy prison compound. “He sustains a knife injury in his right shoulder blade, which could’ve punctured the upper lobe of his lung. That’s not a fatal injury though – it’d just reduce his ability to breathe and run.” 1 HR 32 MINS: He’s attacked in the back of a car. “They stab him in the leg repeatedly without tearing his jeans, so I assume he’s wearing some Kevlar denim weave. Any superficial injuries might need glueing.” 1 HR 37 MINS: Rama gets a meat cleaver to the shoulder. “It’s a shallow slash in the same place he was previously stabbed that would’ve reopened his old injury. Even though he cleans it, it’s a sitting duck for septicemia.” 1 HR 51 MINS: A kick to the kidney. “This would’ve ruptured his kidney and bled and he’d need three weeks of bed rest to stop him bleeding to death.” 2 HRS 5 MINS: A bat to the leg, face and spleen. “The head injury would have knocked him out or made him woozy, and a spleen injury would have killed him within an hour or two.” 2 HRS 11 MINS: A blade tears his leg apart. “He’d have damaged all the tendons and would have trouble standing up.” 2 HRS 14 MINS: Gets a shotgun wound to his groin. “There’s a nasty bleed from one of two arteries so it’s a fatal injury.”

DR KEIR’S DIAGNOSIS “After punching the wall repeatedly, Rama wouldn’t have been capable of doing anything else. He’d have been crushed in the prison compound fight, and unable to remove the knife from his back or grapple weapons from anyone’s hands. The reason he’s dead is because he’s got a temper so it’s all his own fault.” LENGTH OF FILM 2 HRS 30 MINS TIME OF DEATH 30 MINS THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 2009 A German doctor kidnaps three tourists to create his masterpiece, a conjoined triplet called the human centipede. But first he has to surgically graft them together, mouth to anus. On call: Doctor Williams and Doctor Ford, A&E Clinical Fellows.

INJURIES

43 MINS: Patients’ teeth and tendons are removed and grafted to one another. “The procedure isn’t an anatomical impossibility, however, it’d take hours and hours per patient, require full anaesthesia and management of the patients’ airway. Doing it alone is near impossible.” 45 MINS: The centipede wakes up. “Pain would be secondary to the shock and distress. The cuts to the patellar ligament would cause significant pain, swelling and inflammation. They’re immediately walking on their knees – such severe pain would warrant morphine.”

53 MINS: The man gets kicked twice in the face. “A full power kick can equate to being in a high-speed road accident. He could suffer facial bone or skull fractures or traumatic brain injury if the impact was hard enough.”

55 MINS: The man defecates into the second person’s mouth. “Faecal coliforms such as E. coli are present in human faeces which would increase risk of infection to the receiver. She’d gag and vomit. As there’s nowhere for the vomit to go, she’d likely aspirate it into her lungs or choke on it. Aspiration would cause pneumonia and florid bacterial sepsis would set in.”

1 HR: Her scars contain pus. “Unhealed, uncleaned wounds will rapidly become infected, then necrotic and the tissue would break down completely. But none of them would survive long enough for this.”

1 HR 18 MINS: The head of the centipede slits his own throat. “He cuts his carotid artery so he’d rapidly bleed out and almost immediately lose consciousness due a drop in blood pressure.” 1 HR 24 MINS: With the first and last one dead, only the middle one survives. “With sepsis and an infection in her wounds, she’d die shortly after the woman behind her. She would be disorientated and confused due to the rampant infection so it’d be a horrific death.”

DOCTORS WILLIAMS AND FORD’S DIAGNOSIS “The chances of all three surviving the operation without the complications of blood loss or lack of ventilation are slim. Even if they had survived, the centipede would tear apart at the wounds, infection would set in and we’d expect all three to be suffering sepsis in the first 24 hours which untreated would kill them all. But we doubt the human centipede would ever make it off the operating table.” LENGTH OF FILM 1 HR 32 MINS TIME OF DEATH 43 MINS

SKYFALL 2012

James Bond (Daniel Craig) is presumed dead after a train-top plunge into a river following a botched MI6 operation. But when HQ is blown up, Bond resurfaces to take on an ex-agent gone rogue. On call: Student Doctor Bertie Garbutt, from St George’s University.

INJURIES

7 MINS: Bond is shot in the chest.“He’s shot with a depleted uranium shell and the sheer weight of them would’ve caused a lot more damage. It would’ve caused air in the chest cavity that made his lung collapse and the exit wound would have shattered his shoulder blade.” 12 MINS: Bond is shot, falls off a train roof and lands in a river 80m below. “This could sever his spinal cord or break his neck. And he might have drowned.”

31 MINS: Bond removes a bullet from his shoulder. “He risks blood loss, lack of consciousness, he’d have nerve and muscle damage and the infection risk is huge. And having depleted uranium shell fragments in his shoulder for a couple of months would greatly increase his cancer risk.” 1 HR 54 MINS: There’s gunfire and grenades at his Skyfall estate. “The explosions from incendiary grenades would perforate his eardrums.” 2 HRS 2 MINS: Bond sinks into icy water. “Fighting means he would use oxygen quickly so it’s improbable he’d get out in time. Hypothermia would set in very quickly and he’d struggle to move.”

DR BERTIE’S DIAGNOSIS “Sorry, but Bond would not have survived until the end of the film. A depleted uranium shell going at any kind of speed would’ve passed straight through him, turned his lungs inside out and killed him.” LENGTH OF FILM 2 HRS 23 MINS TIME OF DEATH 7 MINS

CAST AWAY 2000

When a plane carrying Chuck Noland (played by Tom Hanks) crash lands in the South Pacific Ocean, he’s washed up on a desert island. And there he remains, alone, for four years until he builds a raft and is rescued by a passing freighter. On call: Dr Joe Taylor, Lecturer of Medicine at Worcester College, University of Oxford and Engagement Manager at Candesic, the healthcare consultancy.

INJURIES

24 MINS: The plane crash. “While only one in 11 million will die as a result of a plane crash, Chuck has a 76 per cent chance of a fatal injury once his plane suffers catastrophic damage.”

38 MINS: No water. “The average fluid content of a coconut is 250ml, and the minimum amount a person would need in a tropical climate is 1.5litres each day. Dehydration is clearly a danger, but on day four when he pees, his urine stream seems pretty strong and not too concentrated, so he’s found an adequate source of fluids.” 42 MINS: Razor sharp rocks cut his legs. “If they go untreated, they could well prove problematic. However, he’s often in unpolluted sea water, which can help clean wounds and promote healing, so Chuck’s risk of infection will be reduced.”

44 MINS: His legs shake. “There’s evidence of a tremor in his left leg which could be indicative of an electrolyte imbalance. That suggests his coconut diet is proving inadequate.”

48 MINS: Mental state. “Chuck displays an unusual, almost psychopathic, lack of fear and an irrational obsession with locating the body of his pilot. I’d suggest Chuck was suffering from delirium, again likely due to an electrolyte abnormality, which is incredibly dangerous and ordinarily requires urgent medical attention.” 2 HRS 11 MINS: Exposed to the sun on his raft. “Chuck is clearly at risk of dehydration but providing he survived that intense period and the associated physiological shock, the long-lasting effects are no different to you and I recovering from significant sunburn.”

DR JOE’S DIAGNOSIS “After surviving the plane crash, it’s not that unbelievable Chuck could survive the island’s environment. The biggest danger isn’t the elements but psychological damage by virtue of isolation – there’s clear evidence of him preparing for suicide. But I think he could have definitely lasted until the end of the film from a physical health standpoint.” LENGTH OF FILM 2 HRS 23 MINS TIME OF DEATH NONE – HE SURVIVES!

HOME ALONE 1990

There’s more violence in this Christmas classic than most festive favourites as Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci play bungling burglars Marv and Harry, who plan to rob the McCallisters’ home. But son Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) saves the day with ingenious traps. On call: London Registrar Dr Keir Shiels, star of BBC Three’s Junior Doctors.

INJURIES

1 HR 13 MINS: Harry’s shot in the groin and Marv in the face by an air gun. “The pellet is unlikely to penetrate Harry’s jeans and might have just bruised him. Marv’s lucky it didn’t hit his eye – it could’ve been a brain damaging injury.” 1 HR 14 MINS: Both Harry and Marv slip on icy stairs. “The fall, surface and impact means Harry would’ve broken a number of vertebrae rendering him unable to walk again. Marv rattles down his stairs with less of an impact. But the falling crowbar would have bruised his head.” 1 HR 16 MINS: An iron falls two storeys on to

Marv’s forehead. “He’d have fractured several bones in his face – some would’ve been smashed to pieces and need surgery. With enough impact to the front of the head, he could have a bleed between the skull and the brain which is potentially fatal.” 1 HR 17 MINS: Harry burns his hand on doorknob. “It’s superficial but it could become infected.” 1 HR 17 MINS: A nail goes through Marv’s foot.

“It tetanus looks and worse limping.” than it is but there’s the potential for 1 HR 18 MINS: Harry’s head catches fire. “His scalp had a minor to moderate injury. The redness indicates a strong nerve supply which is a reassuring sign.” 1 HR 20 MINS: Harry and Marv slip on toy cars, landing on their backs. “This is the worst injury for Harry as his back is already fractured and this would break it apart, leaving him paralysed from the waist down and incontinent.” 1 HR 21 MINS: Swinging cans of paint knock them off their feet. “Marv already has a facial fracture so the can will mush it up even more. They landed on the back of their heads with such force, it might’ve broken their necks.” 1 HR 23 MINS: Harry is crowbarred in the chest. “This might have induced a heart attack. But cracked ribs puncturing a lung is more likely.” 1 HR 26 MINS: They’re whacked in head by metal snow shovels. “Both face fractures and bleeds.”

DR KEIR’S DIAGNOSIS “Marv and Harry would probably have died from their injuries five or six hours after the film ends. However, Kevin would have died from massive head injuries at 35 minutes when he fell climbing shelves. Everything, including a large fish tank and heavy rock, landed on his head.” LENGTH OF FILM 1 HR 43 MINS TIME OF DEATH NONE! THEY SURVIVE, BUT NOT TO THE SEQUEL.