Tiresome tropes: Facial recognition of a dead guy

I watched David Leitch's Bullet Train the other night, which I quite enjoyed. It plays on a long post-Tarantino tradition of playful violence and guys with nicknames. In fact, the movie even has a guy nicknamed The Wolf. But instead of seeming tired, it still works, when done right.

The thing that is tired, though?

The bit where someone holds a phone up to the face of a dead guy in order to access its contents. 

Bullet Train was at least the 137th time I've seen this in a movie, though to be fair, the "dead guy" in this movie was only unconscious at the time.

The thing I find funny about this trope is that each screenwriter seems to present it like it's a new and exquisitely clever idea, in conversation with our modern use of technology. When in fact, a dozen other movies that same year have the same moment.

(Note: It's actually not really a trope, but a device. But I have an occasional series on this blog -- there has been one other -- called Tiresome Tropes, and I like the alliteration.) 

An interesting thing is that even as tired as this feels, it's got to be relatively new. The internet tells me that facial recognition software in phones as a means of proving the owner's identity only started around 2011, and only became widespread in November of 2017 with the release of the iPhone X. That's less than eight years into which to pack 137 films references. So not only have these screenwriters been unoriginal, they've been busy.

By the way, this trope is a close cousin of the "cut the thumb off the dead guy to get his thumb print on the access panel to the high-security area" trope.