Thanos: [being crushed by an enraged Scarlet Witch] Rain fire!
Corvus Glaive: But sire, our troops!
Thanos: Just do it!
Corvus Glaive: But sire, our troops!
Thanos: Just do it!
Bad Bosses in Live-Action Films.
- 6 Underground: Rovach Alimov orders the next men in line after his generals killed as they stood the most to gain in their deaths. He isn't actually sure who did it, but it's just to be safe. The men behind them he then promotes.
- The Assistant: Jane's boss is abusive and manipulative as well as a serial perpetrator of the Casting Couch. The main thrust of the film is examining how Jane's company as a whole, ultimately including Jane herself, is complicit in his behavior through inaction.
- Bad Boys (1995) gives us French gangster Fouchet, who never had pity for anyone and orchestrated several murders pretty unnecessary. He has one of his men dress up as a police officer to steal millions of dollars worth of heroin from a police station evidence lock up, and then kills him in order to create a distraction. Fouchet kills Eddie, who helped him set the heist up, for partying with some hookers and a tiny portion of the stash, and his chemistry team for "fucking with my schedule".
- Batman live-action movies:
- The Joker from Batman (1989). When he gets angry at Batman, he asks Bob — his most loyal henchman — for a gun; Bob gives Joker the gun, and the Joker kills him with it, for no reason other than he feels like killing someone.
- The Joker in The Dark Knight is arguably even worse. In the first scene, he has his gang slaughter each other, and later plants a phone bomb into one of his men. To even join the gang, there are tryouts which involve having the recruitees fight each other with halves of a broken pool cue.
- In Beverly Hills Cop III, during the opening truck chase, one of DeWald's accomplices, Taddeo, is winged by Axel and begs for help. DeWald responds by wordlessly leaning across the stricken henchman, opening the passenger door, and then calmly shoving him out to get run over by the pursuing Axel.
- Morris in Big Game shoots one of his Secret Service subordinates in the head and murders the rest by sabotaging their parachute deployment cords so they are unable to protect the president on the ground.
- Subverted in Blade: Big Bad Deacon Frost asks a lieutenant, whose losing and subsequent regrowing of arms has been something of a Running Gag throughout the movie, to hold out his hand, ostensibly to test the sharpness of Blade's Cool Sword by cutting his arm off.Deacon Frost: [examining Blade's sword] Hold out your arm, Quinn.
Quinn: 'hy, man? 'Cause they're-they're, like, all better.
Deacon Frost: Hold out your arm. Now.
[trembling, Quinn does so; Frost takes aim with the sword]
Quinn: Deak, I...
[Frost raises the sword... and lowers it]
Deacon Frost: Just kidding.
[chucks Quinn on the shoulder]
Quinn: [laughing uproariously] He was fucking with me, man! He was, like... - Blood of the Tribades: Grando, head of the priests, tortures those who fail him by making them walk on broken glass.
- Casper: Cathy Moriarty as Carrigan Crittenden does this to Paul "Dibbs" Plutzker (Eric Idle) right up to the point of killing him before getting killed herself.Carrigan: Dibs! This is all your fault, as usual. If you would have just forged the damn will.
- Mr. Tinkles in Cats & Dogs locks Calico in a building wired to explode.Mr. Tinkle: I want you to wait here.
Calico: Why?
Mr. Tinkle: Because I hate you. - Cliffhanger. One of the mooks is injured during the mid-air robbery."What do we do with him?"
"Send him to the nearest hospital." (throws mook out of the airplane) - Played for laughs in The Cocoanuts, with Groucho Marx as the owner of a Florida hotel. His Establishing Character Moment has him talking his way out of paying his employees the money that he owes them.
- In Conan the Barbarian, Thulsa Doom demonstrates his power by ordering one of his worshipers to leap to her death with a gently worded, "Come to me, my child."
- DC Extended Universe:
- Amanda Waller from Suicide Squad, while a Well-Intentioned Extremist, clearly treats both her subjects and employees horribly. Not only is she fully willing to execute her Squad just for disobedience and screw them over in the end despite after everything they had done, but also shows no qualms murdering her own staff members in order to cover up her own incompetence.
- Wonder Woman: Ludendorff murders a subordinate simply for complaining about his men being tired and hungry.
- In the made-for-TV movie Deadly Encounter, Zervasco is chasing Sam and Chis in his helicopter. He lands and an M16-toting henchman gets out and pursues the two on foot. Suddenly Sam's friend Frank swoops down in a biplane and whisks the two to safety. An enraged Zervasco gets back into the copter and takes off after them to resume pursuit... completely forgetting his poor henchman, who just gets left behind.
- Deep Cover: Felix Barbossa, the underboss of the cartel, isn't an easy guy to work for. Not only does he beat one of his minions to death with a pool cue to show his displeasure, he also despises David for no rational reason and attempts to have him murdered after rejecting his synthetic drug plan out of hand.
- Hans Gruber from Die Hard. (Ironically, blowing up the roof probably saved Karl...)
- The Big Bad Taha Ben Mahmoud from District 13 is a trigger-happy boss. So trigger-happy that his thugs are only in it for the massive money he has. When his hacker minion told him his accounts have been emptied, said minion left and the rest gun Taha down. Even then, he utters this "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner:Taha: You all are a bunch of useless dipshits.
[Mooks proceed to gun him down while he points his hands like guns to them] - Dr. Thomas from Doctor at Sea spends all his time off at social events and playing golf, leaving poor Dr. Sparrow to take all the unpleasant work and surgeries.
- Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine: The eponymous mad scientist constantly belittles and insults his resurrected flunky Igor, including the classic line "...Why must you listen to me when I'm wrong!?"
- In Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two, both Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and his nephew Feyd-Rautha are seen casually killing servants on a whim.
- The Enforcer:
- Mendoza orders the murders of almost every person who works for him (although a few survive) for He Knows Too Much or You Have Failed Me reasons.
- Rico, The Dragon, kills his subordinate Vince for showing disgust at the amount of blood in a Dangerously Close Shave murder. He also helps Mendoza kill most of their subordinates to divert the police investigation. Then, when Rico suspects Mendoza is going to kill him, he uses his his last three loyal subordinates as The Bait while hiding nearby to see if they'll be killed.
- Siegfried in the 2008 Get Smart film is a bad boss, and the film seems very much aware of this trope. In his first scene, he promptly shoots one of his men who questions what seems to be a pointless part of Siegfried's plan (blowing up a warehouse for no apparent reason after stealing stuff from it). This behavior actually has consequences for the bad boss, however, as at the end of the film he's thrown out of his getaway car and off a bridge by his own Dragon after threatening and insulting the guy and his wife repeatedly (once even implying that he intends to replace his dragon with a Rhinoceros, should he fail). He also continually insults his right-hand man Shtarker, who tells the other goons, "I'd quit, but he's married to my sister." The Dog Bites Back, however.
- Green Room: Darcy verbally, and at one point physically, attacks Gabe for acting to protect Werm after he killed Emily "under [his] roof" suggesting that Gabe should have let him go to prison instead. He also implies that the heroin that he gave to Werm and his band to take (and that, except for Werm, they are later shown to have taken) is in fact poisoned in an attempt to remove the band as a loose end.
- In Horrors of the Black Museum, Edmond Bancroft brainwashes his assistant Rick, then uses him as a test subject for a Psycho Serum and sending him out to commit murders on his behalf. This culminates in Rick being ordered to kill his own fiancée, Angela. And when Rick isn't been mind controlled, Bancroft is using him as general dogsbody and castigating him for the slightest slip.
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: While climbing up the wrecked rope bridge during the climax, Mola Ram grabs one of his own men who managed to hang on when Jones broke it and throws him down at Indiana to try to make him fall.
- James Bond:
- Thunderball: Emilio Largo has Quist thrown in his shark pool after he failed to kill Bond.
- Max Zorin mows a group of his own employees in A View to a Kill, even betraying his Dragon and lover May-Day. She survives long enough to make a Heroic Sacrifice that ruins his plan, and her last words, directed towards Bond, are "Get Zorin for me!"
- Running SPECTRE like a tyrannical dictator, Ernst Stavro Blofeld is the Trope Namer for The Blofeld Ploy, demanding absolute and unquestionable loyalty from his minions, rarely giving them a second chance, and isn't hesitant to kill anyone who fails him, defects from SPECTRE, or plans to cheat him. Discipline within SPECTRE is notoriously draconian, and to heighten the impact, Blofeld threatens to shoot a random mook, only to suddenly kill another after scaring the shit out of the 1st. For example:
- From Russia with Love: Number 5/Kronsteen looks on smugly, confident that fellow underling Number 3/Rosa Klebb is being held terminally accountable for their scheme's failure — only for the poisoned blade from Morzeny's shoe to change direction. Klebb is visibly terrified of facing Blofeld's wrath after witnessing Kronsteen's death.
- In Thunderball, the chairs in the SPECTRE conference room were rigged to electrocute any underling who displeased him, and he uses this to kill a mook who was stealing from him.
- In You Only Live Twice, Blofeld had a pool filled with piranhas in his office — complete with a bridge that underlings were forced to cross when they entered and exited.
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service: During the second ski chase, when Bond and Tracy enter an avalanche-risk area, Blofeld sends three of his men after them, before deliberately causing an avalanche only moments later that kills his men who he sent into danger for no reason.
- Diamonds Are Forever: Blofeld is okay with killing his body doubles to go Karma Houdini.
- For Your Eyes Only: Though he appears as a nameless villain because of the legal logjam surrounding the Bond franchise, Blofeld sends a Disposable Pilot to pick up his Arch-Enemy and deliberately electrocutes him mid-flight so the chopper 007 is in will crash.
- Spectre: He does it again to Guerra who was supposed to have the Pale King/Mr. White eliminated by ordering Mr. Hinx to have his skull bashed on the table and his eyes gouged out, before killing him with a Neck Snap. And the way Blofeld also deals with the Pale King/Mr. White for defecting also qualifies, as he had poisoned his cell phone with thallium so that he dies a slow but painful death, watching his own body deteriorate via radiation poisoning.
- In Judgement Night, the Big Bad kills one of his men, after the guy kept complaining about how pointless it is to hunt down and kill innocent civilians in the middle of the night. Granted, those civilians did witness them commit a murder.
- Kill Bill has several. Bill starts the series by ordering the assassination of a runaway employee... AT HER WEDDING, collateral damage accepted and expected.
- Kingsman: The Golden Circle:
- Poppy isn't nearly as close to her goons as Valentine was in the first movie, often killing them in gruesome ways for minor infractions (or in one case, seemingly just to prove that she can), resulting in her outfit being comparatively small, to the point that Eggsy and Harry are able to blow through every single one of her employees other than Charlie in just a couple of minutes.
- The President of the USA casually sends his adviser away to die with all the other infected drug users despite her working for him 20 hours per day, seven days a week. Her insane workload was the reason she got into drugs in the first place, which he doesn't give a shit about.
- Inspector Richard from Kiss of the Dragon. Rather than dive away from a grenade for instance, he just throws a chubby subordinate on top of it. When the hero escapes into a laundry chute but goes up, he tells a man to go after him. The first guy begins to go to the stairs and gets shot, then he grabs a second guy and throws him at the chute. The guy instead starts looking around, but Richard is impatient and pitches him down the chute. By the time Jet Li escapes from the hotel Richard has killed around 60% of his initial crew himself. And much like Kefka and Palpatine, just hanging around him guarantees you'll die. Not bad for a guy who's completely normal, has no superpowers or special skills and the like. He gets away with everything under the sun by being the head of the local branch of Interpol and having agents and normal officers everywhere doctoring evidence and framing other people for it and keeps those in check with blackmail. Considering how much shit would come down on him if any of them stopped protecting him, it REALLY makes his men sticking with him ridiculous.
- Kull the Conqueror: Queen Akivasha is often tormenting the priest who resurrected her by burning off parts of his face.
- Timothy in The Long Kiss Goodnight receives a call on his radio from a henchman, who sounds badly wounded, saying that he thinks he's dying. Timothy responds "Continue dying", and shuts off his radio.
- In Lord of Illusions, Nix the Puritan repays his cultists' blind obedience to him and bringing him back from the dead with burying them all alive. No, he's not their or anyone else's shepherd.
- Cobra in The Lost Medallion: The Adventures of Billy Stone doesn't like being told by a henchman that the people of the kingdom he conquered don't realize he's king. So Cobra stabs him in the neck with his poisoned fingernail, then kicks him into a fiery pit.
- Bartholomew Bogue, the Corrupt Corporate Executive Big Bad in The Magnificent Seven (2016). He treats the miners in his employ so badly that they join the townsfolk of Rose Creek to fight his army in the Final Battle. Then, he shoots Rose Creek's corrupt Sheriff, who is on his payroll, just for giving him a message he doesn't like. Finally, he orders a Gatling gun used on the town, mowing down several of his own men in the process.
- Mars Attacks!: The Martian leader smacks one of the other Martians after the female Martian assassin is killed, despite it in no way being their fault.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Captain America: The First Avenger: Johann Schmidt, a.k.a. the Red Skull, continually shows no concern for the welfare of his men, despite their fanatical devotion to Schmidt, having them chomp cyanide pills when captured to avoid giving out information on him, executing one merely for surviving an attack on a HYDRA base, and activating the self-destruct sequence at another HYDRA base when the Allied forces overrun it, not caring that hundreds of his troops will be killed in the blast
- Guardians of the Galaxy: The Collector imprisoned one of his assistants in one of the glass cages of his museum for disappointing him, and uses her as an example to another to keep her from doing a disappointing job as well. This bites him in the caboose later on, as the mistreated assistant grabs the Infinity Stone, which is known to cause extremely violent explosions when touched by living beings, in an attempt to kill both herself and the Collector.
- Subverted in Thor: Ragnarok. The Grandmaster may be a Laughably Evil despot who's forcing capture slav... er, "prisoners with jobs" to fight to the death in his arena, but he's not petty. While berating Loki and Valkyrie for the escape of Hulk and Thor, Loki interrupts him, to which his Number Two Topaz immediately hands him his "melt-stick" that he uses against enemies of the state. He's just confused why she would think that something as minor as speaking out of turn is a capital offense. Then again, he's planning a public execution if they don't bring the pair back promptly.
- Thanos in all his appearances is shown to be a terrible leader, as almost everyone who serves him in Guardians of the Galaxy betrays him at the earliest opportunity. His own children despise him, and even those who are absolutely loyal to him fear his wrath should they fail him. At the end of Avengers: Endgame, he orders his subordinate to fire on the battlefield even though many of his own troops would be caught in the crossfire just to save his own skin. A rare justified example in the last instance: the whole point of that battle was to get the Infinity Stones into Thanos's hands so he could destroy the universe. If he died, their objective failed, no matter how well the rest of his troops fought.
- Quentin Beck/Mysterio from Spider-Man: Far From Home is a downright terrible boss to his crew, repeatedly yelling at them or insulting them for not doing their jobs right and even threatens to kill them with drones over the loss of one of his projectors.
- In Soviet spy drama Miss Mend, Chichi the anti-Bolshevik terrorist boss pays a visit to his minions. A chemist tells Chichi about the poison gas he's developing to use against the Soviet Union. After the chemist gives Chichi a gas mask as a precaution, Chichi smashes the flask containing the poison gas. The scientist dies.
- From Mom and Dad Save the World comes this heartwarming scene in which Tod Spengo (Jon Lovitz) asks his mooks which facial hair he should wear to his wedding.Tod: Which do you think would be better, goatee or mutton chops?
Twin Destroyer: Mutton chops, m'Lord!
Tod: [thinks] Hmm, no. No, I don't think so. Shoot yourself in the head.
[Twin obediently shoots himself in the head]
- Spengo then decides that muttonchops would look better after all.
- Shao Kahn of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is very much the Bad Boss, getting rid of Rain and later Jade for having disobeyed or failed him
- The Mummy Returns: Neither Imhotep himself or Baltus Hafez have any problem with sacrificing their cultists in the pursuit of the power of the Scorpion King.
- Mr. Jenkins from Mutiny on the Buses. He's never in a good mood and always threatening to give the bus staff the sack.
- Casanova Frankenstein in the movie Mystery Men makes the point to the heroes that he is willing to kill his own men for no reason, just to show how tough and insane he is. What made it worse was that the particular Mooks he executed weren't even his own employees, but mercenaries who were temporarily working with him.
- In Ninotchka, Komissar Razinin is feared by pretty much all of his underlings, as he has the power to order deportations to Siberia.
- Paycheck: Wolfe guns down one of his thugs for being overpowered by Jennings.
- Two from Pirates of the Caribbean:
- Davy Jones in the Dead Man's Chest and At World's End films is feared even by the mussels clinging to his ship, which retreat into their shells at the sound of his approach, employs a sadistic Bo'sun to motivate his crew with a whip, and forces a man to whip his own son rather than let said Bo'sun do it.Maccus: You'll trust us to act in your stead?
Jones: I'll trust you to know what awaits should you fail! - Blackbeard in On Stranger Tides maintains his crew's fear of him by never letting them see him, employs zombies to keep them in line, burns a man alive for taking part in a mutiny, and plays a Russian Roulette game with his own daughter to force Jack to obey him. His crew are shown to be a lot happier once Barbossa kills Blackbeard and takes over his job.Blackbeard: If I don't shoot a man every now and then, they forget who I am.
- Davy Jones in the Dead Man's Chest and At World's End films is feared even by the mussels clinging to his ship, which retreat into their shells at the sound of his approach, employs a sadistic Bo'sun to motivate his crew with a whip, and forces a man to whip his own son rather than let said Bo'sun do it.
- In Preservation, the leader of the psycho teens isn’t particularly nice to his cohorts. When one of them wants to give up on looking for Wit and go home, the leader steals his inhaler and starts drowning him in the stream until he complies to stay.
- Red Water: Rick tells Ice to kill Jerry once they retrieve the money, even though Jerry spent five years in prison rather than testify against Rick. Despite being Rick's cousin, Ice himself feels that Rick is a poor employer who "paid me chump change and treated me like a scrub."
- Road House: Zigzagged by Brad Wesley. He beats the stuffing out of one of his Mooks for failing to strong-arm Dalton and then berates him for bleeding too much, and sure enough, the guy still shows up to work for him every day. Then again, it's also indicated he pays them very well and regularly throws parties for his boys with Hookers and Blow, so there's plenty of incentive to work for the scumbag.
- Clarence Boddicker from RoboCop. When one of his men is shot in a bank heist, upon finding him he asks him, "Can you fly, Bobby?" He then has him thrown onto a police car that was pursuing them.
- The bandit chief from Seven Samurai is a ruthless man who doesn't have the patience for deserters and kills one or two of his men for trying to abandon him.
- The old Western Shango has a Big Bad Duumvirate of a Mexican bandit and a Confederate officer. While the bandit seems to care for a degree to his men — he repeatedly brings up in anger that it's always his men who suffer the casualties — the Confederate simply couldn't care less about his men and throws a knife into the back of one of his own guards just to make his Frame-Up of the film's hero slightly more convincing.
- Shoot 'Em Up: Mr Hertz. Shoots one of his own wounded henchmen because he was using him for cover and his labored breathing was ruining his aim. Also plugs another already wounded-in-the-ass mook in the other cheek because he let a "bum" get away with the baby.
- In Spy, Disk-One Final Boss Raina is such a Bad Boss that her security detail is quickly reduced to being entirely CIA moles, the rest being killed for failure. It extends to aspects of being a boss beyond keeping them alive as well. At one point a minion tries to kill her for never remembering his name, angrily declaring that he's called Fredrick... and she still forgets his name mere moments later.
- Stargate: Ra does not tolerate failure from his subordinates — fatally so.
- Commander Kruge from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, who kills his lousy tactical officer when the guy over-performs, destroying a vessel instead of disabling it. The Klingon Promoted guy who takes over knows better than to mess up similarly. Later, however, Kruge is devastated when Kirk orders the Enterprise to self-destruct, killing almost all of Kruge's crew.
- Star Wars:
- Darth Vader, the Trope Namer and the Trope Codifier for You Have Failed Me. While prone to Flanderization, as he only kills two subordinates (in the films anyway), he would have killed the officer that mocked the power of The Force had Tarkin not intervened, and the palpable fear that nearly everyone around him exudes indicates he at least has a strong reputation for this. In the Disney canon, it's mentioned that among Imperial officers, he's not known for bothering with a court-martial when it comes to discipline. In The Empire Strikes Back, Vader force-chokes Ozzel to death for pulling out of lightspeed too close to the surface, and after the Millennium Falcon eludes Imperial Star Destroyers, Vader chokes Captain Needa when accepting his apology.
- In Return of the Jedi, Vader indicates that Emperor Palpatine is less tolerant of failure than Vader is about this. Moff Jerjerrod's visible reaction gives a good indication of how horrifying that prospect is.Moff Jerjerrod: But [The Emperor] asks the impossible! I need more men!
Darth Vader: Then perhaps you can explain it to him when he arrives.
Jerjerrod: [visibly pales] The Emperor's coming here?!
Darth Vader: That is correct, Commander. And he is most displeased with your apparent lack of progress.
Jerjerrod: We shall double our efforts!
Darth Vader: I hope so, Commander, for your sake. The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am. - Kylo Ren is slightly better about this, usually opting to take out his frustrations on the environment around him rather than his subordinates. However, at one point in The Force Awakens he does become enraged enough to telekenetically drag a First Order officer across the room and choke him. In The Rise of Skywalker, he grabs a man and throws him around the room for expressing caution to the idea of joining forces with Palpatine.
- Tank Girl: The Big Bad Kesslee kills a loyal minion/doctor because she couldn't repair his face. So, downloading him into a holographic projection of his head is somehow an improvement. He also kills a competent captain of his men, because he hadn't yet captured a small area of land. Maybe if he didn't kill all of his competent people, he would have survived.
- Under Siege 2: Dark Territory: Mr. Penn rips out the throat of one of his subordinates after the latter suggests just splitting before the hero, Casey Ryback, comes for them. Earlier on, he casually shoots another of his men after he's been set on fire to ensure that the burning man doesn't damage any of their high-tech equipment.
- When Trumpets Fade, an HBO original movie about the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest, features a Bad Boss as its protagonist. Private Manning's unit nearly gets wiped out, but Manning survives because he's a coward, so he gets promoted to sergeant and is given command of the raw recruits who are brought in as replacements; he orders one of them to take point on a patrol on his first day, so that Manning can save his own skin. He then leads a group of these same raw recruits to destroy an enemy artillery installation in exchange for a promise that he will be removed from combat duty on psychological grounds if he succeeds. In the course of the mission, one of the two raw recruits, equipped with a flamethrower, runs away, so Manning shoots the fuel tank of the 'thrower, setting the private on fire. While that man is burning to death, Manning turns his pistol on the second flamethrower-equipped private and orders him to charge. While the mission succeeds, only Manning and that one soldier make it back. This gets Manning promoted to lieutenant.
- Per his characterization in the comics, Magneto's leadership in the X-Men Film Series is often revealed to be this, most notably in the original trilogy (and in particular during X-Men: The Last Stand). His callous abandonment of longtime Dragon Mystique after she is depowered foreshadows how willing he is to kill her in the prequel film X-Men: Days of Future Past (admittedly to save all of mutantkind). Even in X-Men: First Class he shows shades of this, stylizing himself as the Drill Sergeant Nasty to the titular first class. There's a reason why, when Magneto makes his We Can Rule Together speech at the end, Mystique is the only one to take him up on the offer.
