Conservation Of Ninjutsu / Film

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• 13 Assassins both justifiably invokes and averts this trope. The thirteen are almost all skilled samurai, who have either participated in real duels and battles or have been trained by those who have, whereas 99% of the small army they must face have no real experience. The outcome - they kill everyone, but nearly all of the group dies.
• The Alien franchise both uses and justifies this trope. Alien has one Xenomorph Drone terrorizing a ship of miners, and Alien³ has one Xenomorph Runner menacing a prison colony. Aliens (the second installment) and Alien: Resurrection (fourth installment) feature entire hives of Xenomorph Drones that just seem far easier to kill off. The in-universe justification is that there was rather weak weaponry present and the Explosive Decompression potential the Alien's Hollywood Acid blood posed in the first film, and also absolutely no weaponry whatsoever present in the third film. The lone specimens were explicitly every bit as vulnerable to gunfire as the hordes, but pose a much more grave threat without any guns available.
  • Aliens is one of few cases where this trope actually doesn't make the enemy any less menacing or threatening. They're in big enough hordes to be gunned down easily, but still able to hold the upper hand for 90% of the movie due to the combination of their surprising intelligence and sheer numbers.
• Avengers: Age of Ultron has this especially bad. The large hordes of "upgraded" Ultrons in the film's climax manage to prove less of a threat to the Avengers than the small number of prototypes (who very explicitly aren't a Super Prototype) encountered early in the film. It's possibly justified: They were taken by surprise, ambushed, fought in close quarters, and were without their body armor, weapons, and fantastic tech gear (Examples: Hawkeye's special arrows and Black Widow's spacesuit that seem to leave her strong enough to physically take on robots).
• Batman Begins skirts the edge of this trope. Bruce Wayne only fights one member of the League of Shadows during his escape (all the others were too busy dodging explosions); still, one might wonder how Bruce was the only ninja to escape the exploding dojo. (The answer: he wasn't). When he takes up the Batman mantle officially, he is able hold his own against four ninjas at once. This is Lampshaded to a certain degree with Batman's training as its designed to teaching him how to face vastly superior numbers, and Ducard even declares Bruce his greatest student.
• Subverted in Black Widow (2021), where Natasha at first is able to hold off a whole class of Black Widows...for roughly a minute. They use their superior numbers to overpower her even after she decides to just shoot them (non-lethally), and they only stop when Yelena intervenes. Bonus points for doing the standard Mook Chivalry thing where most of them just stand around waiting for openings or trying to flank her ^note and/or observing her fighting style, on account of being intelligence agents, and are explicitly told to "make her suffer", and they still manage to beat her silly.
• Averted in A Bug's Life. Flik is well aware of the fact that even the mightiest grasshopper can't defeat one hundred ants, and one hundred grasshoppers can't defeat one thousand ants.
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier has both titular characters mow down several mooks easily, and only have a truly difficult battle with each other. It's justified in that Cap and the Winter Soldier are the only enhanced beings in the movie — everyone else, while extensively trained in combat and dangerous in their own rights, are still baseline humans.
• In The Chronicles of Riddick Toombs attempts to invoke this by going after Riddick with a four man crew, but Riddick takes a very dim view of this, and dispatches them easily.
  "A four man crew for me? Fuckin' insulting."
  • He comes with more people next time. Just five. And Riddick allows himself to be captured.
• In Commando, when Ahnold comes across Arius after mowing down countless soldiers simply by pointing his gun in their general direction and firing, his aim suddenly deteriorates into that of the countless soldiers he just killed. Luckily for him, Arius's aim is just as bad, and after a few moments of the two firing at each other and missing while twenty feet from each other, Arnie kills Arius. Bennett, Arius's Dragon-in-Chief, is a vastly more cunning and formidable opponent than either Arius or his dozens of soldiers; Arnie has to provoke him into fighting one-on-one rather than just using his daughter as a human shield; even then, he almost wins.
• In Dawn of the Dead (1978), Roger and Peter frequently punch out and knock back zombies with ease when facing them all at once. And then a lone zombie "disguised" as a mannequin catches Roger off guard and has to be dispatched without any ease at all.
• At various points in the Dollars Trilogy, Clint Eastwood effortlessly guns down three or more men with his trusty pistol. The only times where there is any doubt of him being successful is when he's only facing one or two opponents.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: Xenk the paladin is able to easily dispatch a huge group of Thayan assassins on his own. But the last one standing, their leader Dralas, ends up being much more dangerous than all of his subordinates put together, proving to be a challenging foe for Xenk.
• Equilibrium: In the final fight scenes, Preston is surrounded by six elite mooks and takes them down in about five seconds flat. There follows a duel with The Dragon ... well, kind of, since, in defiance of the trope, The Dragon, who fought Preston to a draw in a sparring match earlier in the movie, is taken down with three invisibly fast swipes, the last one of which ends with The Dragon's face getting sliced off. And then comes the Big Bad, who has more ninjutsu than any of his men combined, and who matches him gun for gun in the movie's final duel.
• Evil Dead
  • Ash only fights one deadite at a time in the first two films. He ends up getting thrown into a lot of shelves when facing a single one. But once he has to fight a whole army of deadites in Army of Darkness, he conveniently gets a sword and starts slashing them up left and right.
  • He also took a serious level in badass near the end of Evil Dead 2. As can be seen in the theatrical ending to Army of Darkness, single deadites aren't much a problem for him anymore either.
• In Face/Off it seems that all FBI agents, cops, security staff, and special agents are inept at facing off against Castor Troy. In just the opening shootout, Castor offs FBI agents single handedly with just two pistols (and at one point a shotgun he takes from a dead SWAT officer) until Sean Archer has a chance to face him one on one (for some reason the dozens of other agents stay out of the action - but then again, Archer's pursuit of Castor is more or less driven by personal issues). Castor reduces these agents to mere red shirts all throughout the film, when in reality said agents should be much better trained to have the upper hand in a gunfight. Not even the SWAT teams are immune as many of the agents shot dead during the shootout at Dietrich's loft are wearing paramilitary gear and submachine guns. Seriously, the Los Angeles FBI field office has to be running short of men to adequately staff it by the end of the movie.
• Despite being a singular entity, the purple-skinned hydra from Disney's Hercules perfectly demonstrates the general nature of this trope in microcosm. During the first half of his duel with the titular hero, the hydra only has one head, but said lone head manages to spar with Hercules on even ground, knock his sword away, hurl him into the the air using an unconventional move, and then swallow him whole. It would've won if Hercules hadn't gotten his sword back the moment before. After that, though, the hydra grows countless new heads that don't dodge (granted now they know they don't need to), miss their mark, bite and crash into each other, and rarely try anything other than lunging at Hercules. Plus, help from the body is their only available method of regaining control of the fight once the heads become especially numerous.
• The assassins in Hero (2002) effortlessly carve through thousands of palace guards in order to reach their target, the Emperor, who by himself is much tougher than his men. This being a Wuxia film, this is hardly surprising, as the assassins' abilities are the very model of a Charles Atlas Superpower.
• Indiana Jones
  • In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy fairly easily takes out half a dozen Nazis on the truck transporting the Ark. But he nearly gets killed when there's just one Nazi left.
  • When Indy faces multiple mooks in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, he knocks each of them out in quick succession, but when a single mook tries to garrote him earlier in the film, it leads to a not-so-quick struggle.
• In I, Robot, Will Smith's character Spooner is able to survive and utterly destroy two massive truckloads worth of corrupted robots during the highway sequence, but the scene gets really serious when he realizes that there is one (albeit handicapped) robot leftover. Partially justified in that he defeats the two truckloads worth of robots with Car Fu and his gun and the single robot he faces unarmed.
  • There's a scene in the film where the older model NS4s try to protect Spooner from the new NS5s and just get the crap kicked out of them, regardless of numbers. They do manage to slow them down, though.
• Iron Man 3: In previous films when Tony only had one suit it was virtually invincible. When he attacks with a dozen they get torn torn to bits in short order and he keeps swapping them out. Sort of justified in that they were fighting super powered mooks and they were all prototypes Tony had put together as stress relief.
• The trope is played straight in any of The Karate Kid movies whenever Mr Miyagi gets involved in a fight. Three, four guys, one big Caucasian guy ... doesn't matter. Old guy always wins.
  • Arguably an extreme case of Cool Old Guy, since he fights one-on-one in the second movie, and it still lasts seconds, without him not even having to land a hit. When the same opponent comes back in the third movie with a friend, they actually manage to fare better (meaning they still get mercilessy curb-stomped, but they last a bit longer).
• In Kill Bill Volume 1, the Bride is able to slice through the numerous Crazy 88 members like butter with her superior katana, only having trouble when she faced the General and Gogo Yubari one-on-one. The last two weren't technically Crazy 88's, rather they were co-dragons, but there's nothing to distinguish them from O-Ren's other Mooks aside from the fact that they had names and fought the Bride one-on-one.
• In Kung Fu Hustle this trope is mixed in with a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, the Axe Gang that attacks Pigsty Alley in the so numerous, that they can't really fight without getting in each other's way. It's to the point that those in the back can only uselessly fail their axes around menacingly rather than actually attack due to fear of accidentally hitting their own guys. Thus the slum's fighters are really only realistically fighting maybe three guys at a time.
• Any Bruce Lee movie, where he's outnumbered 80:1; and when they use weapons, he whips out his nunchucks to do things the lazy way. Lazy, as in "smart". Funnily, in real life Lee noted he would have used guns if available, but that doesn't look as cool.
• In The Legend of Hercules, Hercules and his friend Sotiris have to fight a gladiator named Humbaba; it takes a while, and Sotiris is injured. That means that Hercules will be alone in his next fight, against the top six gladiators in the world. And...he one-shots each of them, with the whole fight being quicker and easier than the two-on-one fight with Humbaba.
• The Lord of the Rings
  • Aragorn faces dozens of orcs at a time throughout his adventures. The only time he seems to be having any difficulty is fighting one-on-one with the Uruk-hai leader and the troll.
  • A single troll was giving the entire group of heroes a hard fight in The Fellowship of the Ring in a rare heroes vs. villain example.
• In the Mega Man (Eddie Lebron) Fan Film, the Blue Bomber gets into a confrontation with all six robot masters at once before the individual fights begin. Fighting the whole gang is no problem, but alone we get real fights. Elec Man nearly kills Mega Man, until he gets saved by Blues/Proto Man.
• Ninja Assassin plays with this trope a bit. Raizo needs about 2 minutes work to take down a lone ninja, but when faced with dozens later, he is able to take down several. However, all of his fights with multiple opponents end with him severely injured and only surviving through luck or a rescuer, whereas he comes out of his one-on-one fights unscathed.
• In a rare example of this trope being used against the good guys, the titular characters of "Ninja Cheerleaders" go through large groups of big mean men like it was clearance day at Macy's, but are completely overmatched by a single Dark Ninja during the climactic battle of the film.
• Oldboy (2003). On the very impressive one-take scene in the hall, the main character takes on countless mooks by himself aided only by a hammer. Sorta justified in that the main character spent over 10 years working out and practiced fighting, whereas the extent of practice the gangbangers he faced had was probably limited to intimidating people with weapons. And he didn't make it out unscathed.
• In The One, it is a law of the multiverse that "power" is spread between the different incarnations of a person across universes, and criminal abuse of this has naturally ensued. The Big Bad and sort-of Evil Twin to the hero partakes in killing off their "other selves", such that by the final fight both are superhumanly capable.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, toward the end when the pirates find themselves outnumbered and outgunned and standing off against the East India Company's hundreds strong fleet it turns out that the EIC only bothered to send one ship into combat — Davy Jones's ship. The rest stood back and didn't bother joining in the battle. It kinda makes sense to send an extremely powerful and essentially immortal ship to do battle with a single pirate ship, especially if you can take the other ships alive when they surrender. saves lives, saves money, and it's just good business.
• The Princess: Most of the mooks attack the princess singly, to be easily killed. At one point though she's cornered by many and in real trouble, having to jump down several stories with one as a cushion.
• In The Princess Bride, Fezzik admits to falling prey to this trope when he starts having trouble fighting the Man in Black.
  Fezzik: I just figured out why you would give me so much trouble.
  Man in Black: Why is that, do you think?
  Fezzik: Well, I haven't fought just one person for so long... I've been specializing in groups, fighting gangs for local charities... that kind of thing.
  Man in Black: Why should that make such a difference?
  Fezzik: You see, you use different moves when you're fighting half a dozen people than when you only have to worry about one.
  • Later subverted when Fezzik and Inigo are discussing the castle defenses they need to get past; both readily admit that, even between the two of them and with their respective prodigious combat skills, they could not take on thirty guards at once, and subsequently decide to seek out a strategist (the Man in Black) to figure out a way in without having to fight.
• Resident Evil: Afterlife. Numerous clones of Alice are used almost as cannon fodder whereas one is the epitome of badass.
• In Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Scott has little trouble mopping the floor with Lucas Lee's (the second evil ex's) stunt team, while only being able to defeat Lee by goading him into doing an insanely dangerous stunt on his skateboard. It helps that the stunt team only seem to be competent when they're on camera.
  • Repeated just before the battle with Gideon. Scott effortlessly mops up mooks en masse before settling into a one-on-one Boss Fight that goes wrong.
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: Miles Morales, a relatively-inexperienced Spider-Man fighting alone, ends up taking on hundreds of other Spider-Men from across the multiverse, many of whom were the main characters of their own superhero adventures, and winning. Downplayed in that Miles only manages to run away and escape the other Spider-Men chasing him rather than beating them all in a fight (still an impressive feat), and that the other Spider-Men aren't that used to fighting en-masse and get in each other's way.
• Played with and lampshaded in Spy Kids, when two good guys are easily overpowered by two robots... then later in the film, four good guys come up with a plan under the assumption they can hold their own against 500 of those same robots. Luckily. Floop ends up reprogramming them to render them harmless just in time.
  Gregorio: I'll take the hundred on the right… Ingrid, you take the hundred on the left. Carmen, hundred center-left. Juni, center-right. It'll work. It'll work.
  Juni: That's 500 total, Dad. We need one more person. (Cue Machete bursting through a window to join them.)
• In Starship Troopers the bugs are incredibly strong when there's just one or two of them in the screen, with close range and concentrated fire from multiple machinegun-equipped soldiers being required to kill them. When the troopers are defending the fortress, they can just spray down hordes of the same bugs with the same rifles that barely worked before.
• Star Trek (2009) movie:
  • Any time a group of ships appear, be it Klingon or Federation, count on them getting wrecked. A single ship, especially if it's named Enterprise, is going to kick ass. This is hilariously evident in the series even moreso (see TV examples). In the film, the one and only time that happened was when everyone was showing up without a clue that there was an enemy, and the same ship could have wrecked the single ship too at that time, even with warning.
  • Inverted in a deleted scene from the same movie; right after we see the Narada destroy the Kelvin, a large number of Klingon ships decloak and are able to capture it. (Granted, the ship had been somewhat damaged already.) Later, it's flipped again, Uhura picks up the Klingon transmission that a Romulan vessel wiped out over 40 Klingon ships during their escape.
  • Star Trek Into Darkness: Several squads of heavily-armed Klingons vs. three Starfleet main characters. Three guesses who wins and the first two don't count. And you're wrong. The heroes only "win" because Khan shows up and saves them for his own mysterious purposes, because one genetically superior augment beats two regular humans and a half-Vulcan.
  • Inverted then Played Straight again in Star Trek Beyond: Enterprise vs. Krall's swarm? Enterprise is obliterated. Franklin vs. the same swarm? Franklin kicks their ass, thanks to learning their weakness.
• Star Wars:
  • Probably the only time in that the Imperial Stormtroopers were at all capable was when fighting a large number of rebel troops — both in the opening scene of A New Hope, and in the invasion of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. After that, when they were just fighting Luke, Han, Chewie, and Leia, they became the infamously poor marksmen they are remembered as. Ewoks count as heroes in this example.
  • Related, the Trade Federation Droids only kill Jedi when there's a whole army of Jedi, as Attack of the Clones shows. In the same sequence, Jango Fett pretty casually shoots a Jedi and kills him but when it comes to fighting Mace Windu, he is much less fortunate.
  • The Jedi being overrun by Clone Troopers in Revenge of the Sith is another example of Jedi getting gunned down en masse, only for the named Jedi to easily survive and fight the troopers off (mildly justified in that the Troopers still had the element of surprise on their side, whereas Obi-Wan lucked into surviving their first attempt on his life, and they never had it at all regarding Yoda).
  • Take the scene in Revenge of the Sith where Mace Windu and three other Jedi are attempting to arrest Palpatine. Palpatine instantly kills the first Jedi, then kills the second right after. The third Jedi survives for maybe five more seconds before also getting killed. Now that there is one more Jedi left, Mace manages to overpower Palpatine after a epic battle (though he may have let him). Mace Windu is, after all, Badass Incarnate.
  • There's also TIE Fighters, though this is more easily justified. The Expanded Universe explicitly references one of the common justifications on this page—that a large number of starfighters have to be more careful when fighting a smaller number of starfighters—and then justifies it further by Rebel X-wings having shields and TIEs not (which itself tends to lead to higher survivability for the Rebel pilots, who thereby learn from their mistakes).
  • Another Expanded Universe example: After the Brotherhood of Darkness imploded magnificently after Ruusan, Bane was left to rebuild the Sith. Instead of building a large army of Dark Side wielders, and dealing with the Chronic Backstabbing Disorder that came with it, he chose to take just one apprentice. Once the apprentice learned all they needed, they were to slay their master, take a new apprentice, and the cycle begins anew. Arguably, since the Sith lasted 1000 years under this idea, and it was the Sith dynasty that spawned Palpatine, it was the most successful. It's implied in the books that he got the idea from Revan's holocron. Not surprisingly, one of BioWare's writers was behind the Bane books.
  "Only two shall there be, a master and an apprentice: one to embody power and the other to crave it."
  • The above could also be applied to the end of Return of the Jedi, wherein Luke is the last living user of the Light Side of the Force, thus the only person channeling its power in concentrate, enabling him to defeat two Sith whose purposes are divided (it helps that Darth Vader is having a Heroic BSoD of the Conflicting Loyalty variety).
  • Justified in the case of certain styles of Lightsaber combat, such as Form 1 (Shi-Cho), which is geared towards fighting multiple opponents and battlefield situations, but does poorly in single combat against a trained opponent (unless said opponent is using the same style or similar, such as Form 7 Juyo) because it emphasises sweeping offences at the expense of defence. Jedi Master Kit Fisto, for example, regularly cut through entire armies while fighting and was regarded as a master lightsaber combatant, but he was defeated by Asajj Ventress, a dangerous Sith assassin and Jedi killer, but one who was regularly bested by other high-level Jedi duellists such as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker; on the flip side, Fisto had little issue fending off the even more dangerous Jedi killer General Grievous because the latter was Multi-Armed and Dangerous...which meant, fighting Grevious was like fighting multiple opponents at once, exactly the sort of engagement Fisto was optimised to fight against.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) averts this, surprisingly. While the Turtles are able to defeat individual Foot Ninjas with ease (and Raph takes out a small group at once thanks to the element of surprise), a large group of them at once beats Raph nearly to death and forces the other three to retreat. Played straight later where the Turtles defeat an army of ninjas but then have trouble against The Shredder alone. Although with Shredder, it's played with: The Foot ninjas were intentionally leading the Turtles to the rooftop where he was waiting and partially tired them out so he could take them on fresh. He stepped in after his ninja were beaten and fights defensively using minimal movements and turning the Turtles' aggression against them, making him the freshest and most conservative fighter. But as the fight drags on, this approach starts to fail him; he is fighting four skilled opponents half his age, as Leonardo draws first blood, something that we never saw Shredder do to the Turtles. Shredder admits the Turtles might have won eventually with only the loss of one turtle.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), the four turtles and Splinter have no problem fighting off the numerous Foot soldiers but have significant trouble when it comes to fighting Shredder. Justified in that Shredder is far better trained and stronger than the average Foot soldier.
• When Optimus Prime fights Megatron in Mission City during Transformers, he gets his ass beat. When he fights the upgraded Megatron, Starscream and Grindor at the same time in a forest during Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, he holds up pretty well and manages to kill Grindor, and take off Starscream's arm in the process. It's implied that Optimus held back in the first since there were bystanders, whereas he could cut loose in the sequel, proven in the forest battle where Optimus revealed he has two swords. In a real world justification, ILM wasn't too sure about the CG effects in the first film, so they kept the robots in the background. They went into the sequel knowing the CG was viable. Also, Optimus lost the second fight, fatally, when Megatron snuck up on him while he was finishing off Grindor.
• Van Helsing has Conservation of Vampirism: the main antagonist is Count Dracula and his trio of Brides are his dragons, all four of them being credible threats throughout the movie, though obviously the Brides are picked off over the course of the story with Drac himself being the final boss. It's played completely straight around where the second and third acts meet: there are suddenly hundreds of vampires who serve Dracula attending a masquerade ball at his summer home and they all converge on the heroes. It just so happens that they have a secret weapon to use again such a huge number of vampires, teased early in the film, and this obliterate that army of vampires more or less instantly. And it's awesome.
• Briefly discussed in The Warriors with regards to The Orphans:
  Swan: Numbers?
  Fox: Full strength, maybe thirty.
  Vermin: Thirty's a hell of a lot more than eight.
  Ajax: Not if they're wimps. And I'm getting sick of this "running" crap.
• At the start of X-Men: Days of Future Past three Sentinels make a total party kill with one only losing an arm. For the finale even after bottle necking the ships with stormy weather and an exploding aircraft the remnant still destroy more Sentinels than at the start.
• You Only Live Twice. The massive army of ninja is slaughtered when it initially attacks Blofeld's lair. They become incredibly effective after Bond and Tiger Tanaka takes a hand and help out.
• Happens in every Zatoichi film. The smaller the group is, the bigger threat they are. Also in the group of useless mooks, there is one skilled samurai/ronin, who is the biggest challenge and poses the greatest threat, though that is frequently inverted, sometimes the "Elite Mooks" go down as easily as the rest.

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