The demise of Ted Levine's character in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is low on subtlety, but it's also the most entertaining scene. The road to a fourth Jurassic Park was a long one for fans of the series. While Jurassic Park III was a success back in 2001 it was also the lowest-grossing, with reviews criticizing its paper-thin story and reliance on corny humor. The biggest problem with developing Jurassic Park IV was finding a decent premise since there are only so many times a group of human characters can logically become stranded on a remote island with cloned dinosaurs.
This led to some wild swings in development, such as John Sayles' now infamous screenplay involved a mercenary training a team of human/raptor hybrids for rescue and assassination missions. Eventually, director Colin Trevorrow inherited the saga with Jurassic World featuring a fully-operational park being destroyed by the arrival of a hyper-intelligent hybrid dinosaur. The sequel grossed over $1.6 billion worldwide, which is the kind of number that guarantees a sequel. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom would arrive in 2018 from director J. A. Bayona - with Trevorrow on script duties - and saw protagonists Owen and Claire heading back to Isla Nublar to save the dinosaurs before they're destroyed in an impending volcano eruption.
The pair are later doublecrossed when it's revealed the dinosaurs are being retrieved so an evil businessman can sell them at auction. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has an odd structure with the first half being a more standard Jurassic Park adventure, before evolving into a gothic horror with a dinosaur running amok in a huge mansion. The sequel received mixed reviews for this reason as it veered from tone to tone and made big leaps in terms of plotting. One sequence everyone seemed to enjoy was mercenary Ken Wheatley's fateful encounter with the Indoraptor.
The Indoraptor is Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom's latest hybrid, which is being sold as a weapon. Wheatly is played by Ted Levine (The Silence Of The Lambs) and he and his men are the ones hired to take the dinosaurs off Nublar, with raptor "Blue" considered a high priority. Wheatley is initially friendly enough with Claire and Owen's team, though he's revealed to be quite ruthless and has a hobby of collecting dinosaur teeth. While Wheatley is very much a one-dimensional henchman, the hammy relish Levine takes with the role makes him an entertaining addition to the series.
His hobby proves to be his undoing when he encounters the caged Indoraptor. He tranquilizes the hybrid and enters its cage - feeling confident the beast is unconscious - and sets about removing a tooth. This results in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom aping Looney Tunes, as the Indoraptor's tale raises ominously behind Wheatley, who turns around in suspicion. The dinosaur then opens an eye and straight-up smirks at the audience, before pretending to sleep again. After toying with its prey long enough, the Indoraptor grabs Wheatley by his tooth extracting arm and bites it off, swallowing it whole before giving the sobbing mercenary a moment to ponder his mortality before killing him.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom may have been messy tonally, but Ted Levine's death scene is one of the few times the movie's blend of comedy and horror really landed. It fully embraces the cartoonishness of the scene, with the smirking Indoraptor being a delightfully daft breaking of the fourth wall.