One-Man Army/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
John Preston, from Equilibrium

Examples of One-Man Army in Film include:

  • The newest Starship Enterprise from the 2009 Star Trek takes the concept of One Starship Armada to ridiculous extremes. Nero's ship the Narada wrecks an entire squadron of Klingons, a Starfleet armada, and finds spare time to blow up implode a planet. Guess which starship defeats it all by itself?? Seriously, it's as if any ship with the name Enterprise is made of badassinum alloy.
    • To be fair, there was the teensy matter of the black hole weakening the Narada...
      • Precisely, the other ships were destroyed before even knowing what they were up against. Enterprise just took out the weapons fire aimed at a certain something also from the future which took the Narada out as above.
    • Also, Nero deliberately lets it live so Spock can watch Vulcan implode. If he hadn't recognized the ship as the Enterprise, he would have just blown it up, too.
      • Really this trope belongs to the Narada if anything. See above.
        • In the words of Will Riker, Luck looks out for fools, children, and ships named Enterprise.
  • The Bride from Kill Bill single-handedly defeated the Crazy 88 gang.
  • Rambo.
    • In the fourth movie. He's a methodical commando taking apart the Communist occupation force one by one in First Blood Part 2, and he gets a lot of help in Rambo 3.
    • So far, Rambo has killed over 250 people, including background information given in First Blood. There's a reason why he's considered the western ur-example of a one man army.
  • Detective John McClane, from Die Hard 2 onwards.
  • Mister. Smith. Confirmed kills: 141. Some with carrots. It gets even more awesome if you consider that he didn't even needed explosives or machine guns, only carrots, handguns and his impropable aiming skills. Considering we don't know anything about his past for sure, Smith might have racked up considerably more kills. Oh, and he was the unabomber.
  • Bryan Mills, Badass Grandpa on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge in Taken. He's not just a One Man Army, but a One Man Army that couldn't give less of a shit about what constitutes a fair fight. He has 32 confirmed kills, not counting the Mooks he just beats up. Don't know if the fire extinguisher incident is counted, though.
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger in any of his 1980's (and some later) appearances. If he isn't slaughtering his way through the Hyborian Age as Conan the Barbarian, he was mowing down endless waves of mooks in things like Commando and Eraser.
    • In Commando, Matrix kills 81 baddies. Including one incident of failed diplomacy, a guy whose neck he broke in public without anyone noticing, and the funny guy he said he'd kill last. He lied.
    • This, incidentally, makes the titular alien hunter in Predator that much more badass. Imagine Arnold concentrating his entire One Man Army power... on one guy. That's basically the third act of Predator.
  • Cleric John Preston has 118 confirmed kills in the movie. His record lies at 53 people in a single fight. And we don't know how many people he killed before the movie began.
  • Any and all Jedi tend to the One Man—or being—Army trope, though they really only achieve it if they're main characters—otherwise they tend to die.
  • The One Man Army versus spawn point of Agent Smiths. Place your bets.
  • Zhao Yun, Zhang Fei and Guan Yu in separate scenes of the first part of John Woo's Red Cliff.
  • Man on Fire: A kidnapping ring, including corrupt Mexican police, run rough-shod over the citizens of Mexico City and defy all attempts to stop them. Thus, they are completely unprepared when John Creasy unleashes a One Man Curb Stomp Battle on them and kills dozens of them in short order.
    • Somewhat subverted in this movie, though. John Creasy never attacks an armed group head-on and out in the open. Instead, he ambushes his prey or infiltrates their locations, then unleashes hell.
  • Bond. James Bond.
  • Frederick Zoller from Inglourious Basterds killed around 300 soldiers with the aid of a good vantage point to pick them off with.
  • River Tam in Serenity. Also a classic example of Waif Fu.
  • While he often has friends or an army on his side, Aragorn certainly kills enough Orcs in battle to qualify, and was very much this trope for part of the battle of Amon Hen in the first film.
    • Aragorn has killed 60 enemies on-screen, but this also includes some Elite Mooks, and he certainly killed much more enemies during off-screen fighting scenes. Just remember the many war sequences. Gimli and Legolas aren't so bad either, as both claim to have killed each like 40 Uruks during the battle at Helms Deep.
    • That still only counts as one!
  • Tik-Tok from Return to Oz is a literal example of this trope, even calling himself OZ's "army". This looks patently ridiculous at first glance, with him appearing to be a clumsy copper boiler with a head, two spindly arms and thick legs that make him slower than a glacier... and then you see him single-handedly wipe the floor with a LARGE pack of wheelers who are pure Nightmare Fuel until this point in the story. Then as the rest of the wheelers flee, he grabs one in a chokehold and mercilessly interrogates him.
  • Half the reason Dom Cobb hires Eames for his team is because Eames is an expert forger who can take any form he wants in the dreamworlds. The other half is because Eames is an absolute badass who can hold off most of an army of militarized subconscious projections.
  • The Punisher, as mentioned above, perfectly fits this trope, and in the movies, this is no different. Special mention must go to Punisher: War Zone, the NOT sequel and third Punisher movie. Frank Castle kills over 70 baddies, using various guns, grenades, chairs, knifes, a metal pipe and his fists. On one occassion, he kills a bad guy with a single punch, literally punching straight through his face.
  • Raizo from Ninja Assassin kills more than 45 people on screen. Doesn't sound like much, compared to some other people on this page. Unless you consider that all of them were ninjas themselves. His kills include his former Master, who certainly had Charles Atlas Superpowers. Raizo also possesses magic regeneration abilities, to make things even more awesome.
  • Evelyn Salt, from the film Salt. A one-woman special forces unit, she is able to single-handedly take out squads of specially-trained security agents and other operatives hot on her tail, improvise a cannon of sorts from a fire extinguisher, cleaning chemicals and the leg of a table, jump off bridges and land on the roofs of trucks unscathed, and fashion darts from freshly-milked spider venom - amongst other things.
  • In Mulan, the titular character singlehandedly defeats a majority of the Hun army and then, upon discovering that a few still survived, got their leader killed. With fireworks. As The Nostalgia Chick put it, Mulan is "the only Disney Princess with a body count. In the thousands."
  • In Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch the One Woman Army is Baby Doll in the first "Dance" sequence in which she beats up a group of Samurai with guns. On her own. Did I mention they are at least twice her size.
  • Each of The Avengers is one of these, but special mention goes to The Hulk, who is all but explicitly called one when Tony Stark and Loki are facing off.

Loki: I have an army.
Stark: We have a Hulk.