Curb Stomp Battle / Film

---

Animated

• In the sequel Aladdin: The Return of Jafar, Genie Jafar utterly curb-stomps the weakened Genie — during his Villain Song no less!
  • Sa'luk in Aladdin and the King of Thieves dishes out one during his own Villain Song. When he returns to the 40 Thieves' lair after selling them out and tries to manipulate the handful who avoided arrest, they initially refuse and attack him, but he casually decimates all of them with his bare hands. This, plus the song, rallies the remaining thieves to his side.
• In Back to the Outback, Dave, Lucifer, and Beelzebub kick Chaz’s butt quite handily, causing him to frantically call to his son to throw him a rope so he can get the heck out of there.
• The short film Bambi Meets Godzilla. Emphasis on the "Stomp" part of "curbstomp battle"
  (Splat!)
• Batman: Under the Red Hood: The final showdown between Batman and Red Hood turns into this. At first, it seems that Jason is holding his own, cutting off Batman's utility belt and laying a few hits. But then Bats torches his gadgets, and reveals he's been holding back. The resulting bathroom fight scene comes dangerously close to a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown with the Dark Knight on top, with Batman very close to losing it altogether.
• The Death of Superman, like its source material, has Doomsday wrecking the entire Justice League. And this one's the Big 7+. A few heroes do get in some hits, like Flash, Batman and Wonder Woman, but by the time Superman steps up to the plate, they've been pulverized. Even Luthor, armed with Powered Armor, is no match for the beast.
• The finale of The Great Mouse Detective pretty much amounts to Ratigan slapping Basil around like a rag doll while Basil flees in terror. Of course, being Basil, he manages to win.
• Hercules (Pure Magic) has the title character win the first Olympic Games easily, even when holding back (running most of a race backwards and at less than full speed) or playing with a handicap (holding the rope in tug-of-war with only one hand while several other contestants combine their strength against him).
• The Incredibles:
  • Once the Omnidroid v.8 fixes Mr. Incredible's back when trying to pull him apart, the battle turns and Mr. Incredible quickly makes short work of the robot.
  • The updated Omnidroid v.9 prepared for Mr. Incredible's second island visit quickly overpowers him and is just about to slice open his neck before Syndrome intervenes.
  • Because Syndrome's zero-point energy gauntlets allow him to trap an opponent in a stasis field, he quickly overpowers the Incredibles.
  • Once the Omnidroid v.10 identifies Syndrome as a threat it quickly overpowers him due to Syndrome's lack of actual superhero battle experience.
• Kung Fu Panda:
  • In one of Tai Lung's first scenes, (the one that firmly establishes him as a badass) he single-handily escapes from his own Tailor-Made Prison while taking down the hundred or so rhino guards in his way.
  • This happens twice in the flashback to Tai Lung's backstory. First, when he goes on a rampage through the town for the first time, Master Shifu tries to fight with him, but fails in doing so. Seconds later, Tai Lung is defeated by the old Master Oogway, who simply touches several nerves on his opponent's chest, paralyzing him.
  • Later, after discovering the secret behind the Dragon Scroll, Tai Lung furiously attacks Po with the forbidden technique (which can instantly incapacitate anyone). What was the effect of this action? Laughter. Po thought he was being tickled, then after kicking Tai Lung's butt few times in a comical fashion, he uses the Wuxi Finger Hold technique. Which is considered too powerful to be taught, but he does it anyway. The best part? Master Shifu didn't teach it to him. He figured it out.
• Kung Fu Panda 2:
  • Up until the climax, Shen uses his cannons to dish these out. Once he fires one, the battle is over.
  • Po faces down a fleet of Lord Shen's ships, all of which start firing cannons at him. He effortlessly catches the cannonballs and throws them back with enough force to disable the whole fleet.
• In The Lion King (1994), Nala easily defeats Simba twice as cubs. The first time, when the two are arguing over who deserves credit for how they lost Zazu, Simba suddenly lunges at her, only for to easily flip him and pin him down, and playfully tease him. Immediately after this, Simba shoves her off him, and upset that she beat him so easily, he tackles her from behind while she is distracted, but accidently sends them both tumbling off a nearby hill. As they are both rolling down, Nala is playfully laughing the whole way, while Simba is visibly struggling to stay on top of her. Once they reach the bottom, she once again flips and pins him no problem, and smuggly rubs her victory in his face, smirking down at him and taunting him "pinned ya again." This is subverted later in the film when they fight a third time as adults. Though Nala ultimately still wins, the fight is much more evenly matched, and she is taking it much more seriously. Simba finally manages to beat Nala later and pin her, but by complete accident.
• Megamind: Titan gives one to Megamind during their first "battle". To Megamind's surprise, Tighten's plan isn't to defeat him and take him to jail, but to outright kill him.
  Megamind: Well done! I thought that battle went really, really well! I mean, I have a few notes.
  Titan: Notes?
  Megamind: But they can wait. You can take me to jail now.
  Titan: Oh no, no, no. I was thinking more like the morgue. You're dead!
  Megamind: (terrified) Woah, woah, woah. This isn't how you play the game.
  Titan: Game over.
• In Moana, Tamatoa delivers a big one-sided beatdown to Maui after the first verse of his Villain Song, "Shiny". Not once does Maui get in a hit on the giant crab.
• Two examples in Mulan:
  • The first one (which isn't seen but heavily implied) between the Huns and the Chinese army. Based on the aftermath Mulan and her friends see, it didn't go very well for the Chinese troops.
  • Mulan herself later delivers one to the Hun Army when she uses a rocket to cause an avalanche, destroying nearly all of the Huns in the process.
• Jack's confrontation with Oogie Boogie in The Nightmare Before Christmas is ridiculously one-sided; Jack is never fazed by Oogie's attempts to stop him, and defeats Oogie with casual ease. Foreshadowed by Oogie's Oh, Crap! reaction when he first sees Jack in his lair.
• Played for Horror in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. At the beginning of the film, Puss meets a wolf who is a bounty hunter, whom he starts to fight. The wolf defeats him with ease, as he's able to effortlessly dodge all of Puss's attacks, knocks his sword out of his hand multiple times, and even comes close to killing Puss, with his one of his sickles coming into contact with his head. Puss escapes, but this loss traumatizes him for most of the movie. He runs into the wolf a few times, with which he immediately tries to run away from him. What makes this even scarier is that the wolf is actually Death, and he wants to kill Puss personally for recklessly wasting all of his previous lives. After Puss’s Character Development, however, he's able to confront Death once again, only this time, he actually puts up a fight.
• Recess: School's Out Implied at the beginning. Benedict's goons are apparently so well-trained that they manage to destroy security at a military base within the course of 30 seconds. If one listens closely when the two technicians inside the base attempt to secure the tractor beam, they can hear the sounds of terrified guards screaming as the goons plow their way through.
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964): Happens when Rudolph challenges the Bumble in his own lair to save Clarice and his parents. The monster breaks off a stalactite and proceeds to show Rudolph just how outmatched he is by knocking him out in one hit.
• Somehow it's Shaggy of all people handing out one of these in Scooby-Doo! Legend of the Phantosaur. At one point he undergoes hypnosis to try and resolve his Lovable Coward tendencies. When his hypnotic trigger kicks in, Shaggy turns out to quite the badass, single-handedly clearing out an entire Bad Guy Bar with a combination of Deadly Dodging, Improvised Weapons, and Good Old Fisticuffs. Notable in that Fred points out that hypnosis does not actually make people do things they wouldn't or couldn't be able to do without its influence...suggesting that Shaggy would be able to kick a lot of ass if he wasn't such a non-confrontational scaredy-cat normally.
• 'Shrek'':
  • Shrek beats dozens of Lord Farquaad's knights in about a minute with almost no help.
  • Fiona single-handedly defeats Robin Hood and his band of merry men. It comes off as a surprise for Shrek, who didn't expect her to put up a fight considering the norms of the fairy tale formula the movie was parodying.
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie:
  • The beginning features the penguins throwing snowballs at Bowser and his Koopa army, but only one big snowball knocks out a single Koopa. Kamek easily tosses them aside with his magic and Bowser unleashes a fire breath to level the penguins' castle.
  • Mario does not fare well against Donkey Kong who manages to do a Punch Catch on Mario and puts Mario on the run. That is, until Mario gets the Super Bell, allowing him to return the favor to the Kong and win the match.
  • At the very end, Mario is forced to bear the brunt of Bowser's wrath, the Koopa King now in full Villainous Breakdown mode, not even getting the chance to fight back and getting real injuries for the first time in the movie. Peach, Donkey Kong and Toad all try to cover him while he's down, but none of them fare any better, if at all. However, once Mario and Luigi get the Super Star, they turn the tables on the enemy and easily destroys Bowser's legions and trounce Bowser without breaking a sweat.
• Tarzan has the two Big Damn Heroes moments late in the film. Terk and Tantor rescuing Tarzan and the Porters from Clayton's thugs on the ship gets special mention.
  Terk: (on Tantor's back) You are an animal!
• The War to End All Wars – The Movie: The "Dreadnought" segment depicts the fatal encounter between the armored cruiser HMS Black Prince and a battleship squadron of the German High Seas fleet on the morning of the Battle of Jutland. Black Prince opens fire while trying to flee, but is ludicrously outgunned and goes down with all hands with barely any effort on the Germans' part.
• In Ralph Bakshi's 1977 film Wizards, the final battle between Avatar and Blackwolf is a darkly humorous (yet dramatic) example.

Live-Action

• In The 13th Warrior has this as a surprise. One of the hero warriors seems to be getting his ass kicked in a duel. Then, just as he seems to be on the brink of defeat, he casually dodges his opponent's blow and lops his head off. The entire fight was a Curb Stomp Battle that he pretended was close to teach a specific faction to not underestimate their group.
• The ABCs of Death: The "U" segment. Angry mob vs cornered vampire. Bet on angry mob.
• Alien Nation: Averted when George Francisco stops a Newcomer from giving Matt Sykes a beating that would have at the least severely injured Sykes.
• Aliens sets the Colonial Marines up as well-trained, hardened badasses who will probably fare much better than the crew of the Nostromo. With the exception of 3 grunts and a junior officer who didn't even go in with them, they last about half an hour from making first contact with the enemy. For most of the first fight they barely have any idea where the enemy even is.
  • However, it should be noted that after initial chaos, they did manage to reorganize, regroup and fight back, killing quite a lot of aliens in the process. When Ripley pulled out her Big Damn Heroes moment, they were in the middle of organized retreat, with Hicks helping out Hudson, while Vasquez and Drake covered their backs, killing any alien that tried to come close.
• Alita and Grewishka's third fight in Alita: Battle Angel is easily this. The fight is easily one-sided in Alita's favor, as she manages to fend off Grewishka's attacks with the Damascus Blade before eventually slicing him in half.
  • Nearly all of her fights are curbstomps. Alita vs. Romo? Poor sod doesn't even get a hit in. Alita vs. Nyssiana? Alita literally crushes her head against a steel door. Alita vs. Grewishka, the first time? She kicks his arm off and defeats him in seconds. Alita vs. Zapan? Zapan is left humiliated and without a face. Alita vs. Upgraded Grewishka?... Well, Grewishka wins, but she was still holding her own, and she only lost because her civilian body couldn't handle the extremes she needed to push it into. Upgraded Alita vs. an entire room full of Spider Tanks? Alita destroys them all without breaking a sweat. Upgraded Alita vs. Upgraded Grewishka? Grewishka is practically an Anti-Climax Boss this time. Is it still awesome to watch? Yes.
• American History X is the Trope Namer: Derek attacks three black men trying to steal his car, two of them armed, with nothing but a handgun and the element of surprise. He shoots two of them, drags out the third before he can escape, forces him to bite the curb, and then stomps down hard on the back of his head and kills him. This cruel and murderous attack is what gets him thrown in prison.
• In American Meltdown, the CAG team storms the nuclear plant and effortlessly guns down all of the terrorists (except Khalid) before any of them can even get a shot off.
• In The A-Team, Pike literally believes himself to be the toughest guy on the planet and takes great pleasure in beating down an (at the time) pacifistic B.A. Baracus. At the end of the film, B.A. promptly shows him how wrong he is in this belief.
• In Avatar the first major fight is this, with the RDA wiping out the Na'vi Hometree (and, unbeknownst to them, killing their leader in the process) without so much as a single casualty. Indeed the only downside to that fight for them, beyond seriously pissing off the Na'vi, is causing a couple of Heel Face Turns in their own troops.
• Back to the Future Part III: Marty vs. Buford. The only punch Buford lands on Marty after he gets up from Faking the Dead ends in Buford clutching his knuckles due to Marty's impromptu bulletproof vest. Marty, on the other hand, pummels him silly.
• In Bad Day at Black Rock, Spencer Tracy delivers an epic beatdown to a thug played by Ernest Borgnine. Made all the more awesome by the fact that Tracy's character is a Handicapped Badass, and he is literally fighting the thug singlehanded.
• Battle: Los Angeles: The initial alien attack only becomes a curb stomp once the Attack Drones show up and steal air superiority from the humans. At the end of the movie, after Nantz's team takes out the drone control center, the Battle in Los Angeles turns in humanity's favor. It's also implied that LA is one of the few areas on the planet that humanity is actually holding out against the invaders, as the aliens are shown to have taken control of several other cities around the globe, including Paris, which is a couple of hundred kilometers inland from the coastline.
• Battlefield Earth doesn't actually show the alien invasion, but it is said that earth's militaries only lasted nine minutes against the "gas drones" that the Psyklos unleashed.
• Similarly, the death of Lo Pan in Big Trouble in Little China. It's all in the reflexes!
• Blade does this after drinking quite a lot of blood in both the first film and the sequel.
• Blade Runner 2049: a do or die struggle between Luv and K in his attempt to rescue Deckard.
• Boogie Nights features a literal example in which Rollergirl demonstrates an alternate use for her skates.
• The title character from The Book of Eli does this to most of the bad guys he comes across.
• In Captain Phillips the pirates, in a small boat, end up facing three US warships. The pirates lose.
• In A Christmas Story Ralphie knocks down the bigger and older bully Scut Farkas and proceeds to sit on him and pummel him.
• Early on in Chopper, the titular character wants to be the boss of his prison wing, but another prisoner called Keith has that status. Chopper tries to taunt Keith into attacking him, but it doesn't work. So one day, Chopper enters the exercise area where Keith is walking up and down, stands there for a moment visibly working himself into a murderous rage, and then runs up to Keith and stabs him repeatedly in the face, screaming at him. He then walks away, immediately calming down, and watches as Keith slowly bleeds out, then comes over and asks Keith if he's all right, even offering him a cigarette. Keith dies of his wounds and Chopper becomes the new top man.
• The Dark Crystal: In his bid to become the new Emperor, the Chamberlain accepts the challenge declared by the General. He picks the Trial by Stone, a clear trial of strength, despite having the strongest, most aggressive and least withered of his fellow Skeksis as his opponent. It goes exactly as you would expect.
• In their first fight in The Dark Knight Rises, Bane absolutely crushes Batman. He lets Batman hit him many times with his most powerful blows and gadgets only to show Batman that there's nothing he can do to beat him, and by doing so, break his spirit. Then he starts fighting back and for the rest of the fight, Batman is in desperation mode, trying everything to slow him down but nothing works. Eventually Bane takes Batman and cracks his mask while it's still on his face and, in a recreation of one of the most iconic moments in comic-book history, lifts him up over his head and breaks his back over his knee. He ends the fight by ripping the mask off completely and throwing it away.
  • At the end of the film, Batman repays the favor. It ends with Bane on the floor in excruciating pain. It helped that this time Batman knew how to fight him.
• In the introductory scene in Darkman, warehouse owner Eddie Black and his dozens of workers thoroughly frisk Durant and his small handful of goons. Eventually, it is revealed that Durant had an ace up his sleeve, the wooden leg of an invalid gang member was actually a machine gun. With some creative acquiring on site after the initial volley of bullets, it is revealed that most of Durant's gang is left standing (possibly one casualty). The only one left standing on the other side is Eddie himself (and not for much longer).
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Man of Steel: Possibly so much so that it doesn't even count, but when the military was going after the Kryptonians...
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Doomsday against Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, for the most part. His fight against the Trinity involves him hurling Superman around like some rag doll, before focusing back on Wonder Woman, while Batman can only duck and hide when she isn't around. It takes all of Wonder Woman's strength and combat abilities to even match Doomsday, and she still regularly gets smashed through buildings and rubble.
  • This is all the more humiliating for Batman, as mere moments before he opened a very large can of whoop-ass on approximately 10 mooks in a warehouse and was probably feeling somewhat confident.
  • Wonder Woman (2017): Diana versus the German soldiers after Steve blew up the airplane.
  • Zack Snyder's Justice League: The resurrected Kal-El vs the Justice League, Superman wins, also his fight against Steppenwolf.
  Superman: Not impressed...
• Deadpool: Deadpool fighting Colossus. Barehanded. Most of the "fight" consists of a bemused Colossus watching Deadpool break his appendages against his impervious metal body.
• In the Polish film The Deluge, Andrzej Kmicic not only makes the mistake of challenging Michał Wołodyjowski, the Small Knight to a sabre duel, but also displays Suicidal Overconfidence. Wołodyjowski spends the next several minutes humiliating Kmicic in various ways, from firing a multi-layered insult his way, to spinning his sword mid-battle while Kmicic watches, to flinging Kmicic's sword off into the distance with a little flick (a trademark trick of his). Kmicic is left to realize he's nothing more than a nuisance to Wołodyjowski and eventually just pleads with the colonel to Get It Over With to let him preserve some dignity.
• In Dracula Untold, Vlad's first battle against the Ottoman army after gaining his powers is against 1000 men. He kills all of them with no problem and then mounts their impaled bodies on stakes as a message to Mehmed.
• Dune: Part Two: The entire Final Battle is a one-sided affair and gets portrayed almost as an afterthought or foregone conclusion - Paul Atreides/Muad'Dib's fanaticized Fremen forces effortlessly steamroll the Harkonnen and Sardaukar forces (who can't do anything against the weaponized sand worms) in only a few minutes of screentime.
  • Once Gurney Halleck manages to catch up to Rabban during the final battle, he swiftly overwhelms his Harkonnen nemesis in a brief exchange of blows before fatally running him through.
• Lee vs O'Hara in Enter the Dragon. We're led to believe that O'Hara will put up a reasonable fight, being The Dragon and all. Instead, he doesn't even get the courtesy of getting a punch in. (Well, he gets a kick, but Lee is just too quick for him.)
• Fantastic Beasts:
  • Newton Scamander demonstrates beneath his meek attitude he is worthy of being Albus Dumbledore's protege by easily defeating three executioners without a wand! With little help from a Swooping Evil, he literately one shots a guard with a punch and then turns a woman executioner's spell against another while barely breaking a sweat. Later on, Newt vs 3 Aurors lasts only moments as he almost instantly knocks all of them out with no help from his Swooping Evil this time.
    • In the second film, he dispatches a trained Auror sent to tail him with a single nonchalant spell.
  • Tina Goldstein demonstrates why she was considered an excellent MACUSA Auror by taking down an angry Theseus Scamander, a well-known war hero, with ease, her calm making their fight realistically one-sided.
  • The Dreaded Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald has thus far been able to utterly stomp any opponent he fights despite of numbers and handicaps due to being very nearly on par with Albus Dumbledore, the world's greatest wizard, demonstrating he's the true most powerful dark wizard in history (even more formidable than Voldemort, who can at least be challenged by master-level wizards and witches) and the second best wizard in the entire series.
    • During the first film's opening scene, he utterly vaporizes five Aurors — Professional Mage Killers hunting him personally — with a single spell. Even as Graves, while limiting his magical abilities and not having the Elder Wand, he is still so far above anyone else in the first film that he makes his fights look humiliatingly one-sided, the only one who even puts up any semblance of a fight being Newt himself, who of course still gets beaten pretty handily. After only moments, he has Tina on the ground by launching a car at her after repelling all her attacks as if it was nothing When Tina tries to stop Grindelwald from hunting Credence, he easily repels all her spells before launching a car at her that leaves her stunned. Later on, without using any destructive spells, just by traditional dueling, he quickly overwhelms up to 30 Aurors, downing several of them, and would have easily beaten them had Newt not surprised him and bound him.
    • In Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Grindelwald with the Elder Wand proves to be literately unstoppable. Without even using any flashy spells, he takes down the Aurors on the carriage stylishly and then with just one hand using the Wand while the other was controlling a group of Thestrals, he kills off several Aurors with a single spell. Later on, he utterly defeats an entire group of Aurors and almost kills Newt and Theseus while making the whole thing look more like a game using a ring of blue flames he conjured. Finally, when Leta tries to fight him, it takes only a second before Grindelwald burns her to death.
  • In Fantastic Beasts The Secretsof Dumbledore, Dumbledore, in a perfect example of The Worf Effect, easily counters anything Credence fires at him before he ends their fight by just blasting him away with wandless magic. Theseus and Eulalie are also able to take down multiple acolytes of Grindelwald with ease and hardly breaking a sweat, and Yusuf easily defeats an entire group with a single spell.
• Leeloo in The Fifth Element vs a large array of mooks.
• The 2011 remake of Footloose has Chuck and his goons show up to Bomont's prom. Two of them grab Renn's friend Wilard and hold him down and start punching him, and he doesn't fight back until his girlfriend tells him to. A few seconds later, he beats the ever living hell out of them, his girlfriend starts to take out another goon, and then Renn arrives and knocks Chuck out in what has to be the most failed attempt at a mugging in Bomont's history.
• The final punch-up in The Forbidden Kingdom. The audience sees it coming, but the gang leader certainly doesn't.
• In G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, the Cobra attack against the NATO convoy is a perfect example. Every shot from the Cobra gunship annihilates a NATO vehicle, their heavy machine gun bullets just bounce off of it, and when they fire missiles at it the gunship spins around in midair and shoots the missiles down. Once the Cobra Vipers disembark, they perform an Unflinching Walk through assault rifle fire. It doesn't turn into an actual fight until the Joes arrive.
• The final fight scene in Gladiator is a great example of this trope done well, when mortally wounded Maximus methodically, painfully, and extremely satisfyingly takes Commodus apart in front of the entirety of Rome, with Commodus landing only one minor blow early on.
  • The first battle counts as well. The Romans were able to rout most of barbarians before the lines even met with barrage of flaming projectiles. We only see a handful of Romans perish (mostly to a single big guy with a giant axe), while any Germans that fought were ripped to shreds.
• Godzilla:
  • Godzilla's fight against his In Name Only counterpart "Zilla" in Godzilla: Final Wars is famous for being the shortest fight in Godzilla history. 13 SECONDS. Watch it here. Take into account, however, that his fights against series staples, such as Gigan and Hedorah (teamed with Ebirah, no less) are not much longer and follow the same pattern. The only monsters to give Godzilla a hard time are Gigan II and Monster X, and earlier, Anguirus, Rodan, and King Ceasar (both tag team battles). While Toho was probably trying to "prove" how superior their Godzilla was to the first American iteration, they end up making him into a nigh-invincible monster of Super Man-esq proportion with no weaknesses. Whether you felt this was a good thing or not often determines whether you enjoyed the film.
  • Godzilla was on the receiving end when Monster X changed into Keizer Ghidorah. Gotengo's interference was all that saved him.
  • From the minute Godzilla gets free in Final Wars, to almost the very end could very well be considered this. This whole movie seems dedicated to this trope in general, the earth itself even gets it.
  • Any time Godzilla is on screen in Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack qualifies as well. The first monster he encounters is Baragon, who was suffered severe badass decay (the monster was originally introduced as the main antagonist in Frankenstein Conquers the World and was actually a fairly durable kaiju capable of breathing fire), whom Godzilla then proceeds to kill in a fight so horrific human onlookers are notably revolted. Mothra and Ghidorah together don't fare much better against him, and he easily defeats them both in a matter of minutes. Unwilling to allow Godzilla to escape the trap they've laid for him in Tokyo, the combined forces of the JSDF (units of the JGSDF scattered throughout the city and two battle cruisers) unloaded on Godzilla with everything in their arsenal. Godzilla seems vaguely annoyed by this and proceeds to wipe out 90% of them with his atomic beam in less time then it takes to read this sentence. The only reason it isn't a complete massacre is because those little guys with rifles are just too small for him to actively hunt, and Mothra ends up sacrificing herself to protect the JMSDF Aizu, the last significant Japanese military presence in the city. To make matters worse, the way the massacre is staged it only seems to have been so Godzilla could lure Mothra close and finish her off before she could flee. Not destroying Aizu does end up having negative consequences for Godzilla in the end, however.
  • In Godzilla (2014), the first battle between Godzilla and the male Muto at Honolulu goes this way. Godzilla supposedly beats the tar out of it due to his superior size and strength, forcing the male Muto to flee. He also beats the heck out of the female in the final battle until the male joined in.
• In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Aberforth Dumbledore squares off against a massive swarm of Dementors heading towards the castle... and drives them all off with an explosive Patronus.
• An example occurs in the Hitman movie. Even ends with a very literal and abrupt curb stomp by 47. Most others in that movie are curb stomp battles as well, but not so literal.
• The climax of House involves Roger simply shoving a grenade into Big Ben's ribcage while the latter delivers panicked, ineffectual threats, after Big Ben accidentally rendered himself completely unable to hurt Roger by taking his son hostage and making Roger overcome his fear.
• In The Hunger Games, the battle between Thresh and Clove could be best described as "one-sided". He grabs her by the throat and Clove's smugness satisfyingly melts away into terrified panic as she screams for help, before he finishes her by repeatedly smashing her up against the cornucopia's outer wall and strangles her to death.
• Two examples in Hussar Ballad:
  • Guerrillas attack on the French supply unit. They clearly outnumber French guards and are generally better fighters, so, of course, they prevail. Truth in Television: a common tactics for Russian guerrillas was to attack supply units or any other French units with little protection; if those happened to have more guards, guerrillas would just quickly retreat.
  • French marauders' ambush of General Balmashov. He only has a few guards who give a good fight, but are quickly disposed of.
• I, Robot: The NS-5 robots vs the NS-4 robots. The NS-4s are woefully outmatched by their successor models, and the few who manage to damage the NS-5s pay for it with a limb getting torn off.
• In Independence Day, after the city destroyers laid waste to some of earth's largest metropolises on July-2, on July-3, air forces from across the world launched separate offensives to combat the Alien Invaders, with the story focusing on Black Knight squadron from MAS El Toro flying to attack the ship hovering over Los Angeles. Thanks to the invaders' protective shields, only captain Steven Hiller was able to leave the combat zone alive.
  Radio newscaster: Reports are coming in that this air battle has repeated itself across the globe, with the exact same results.
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword, a Middle Eastern group tasked with protecting the Holy Grail, ambushes a German/Hatayan column in the desert seeking it. However, they are armed only with bolt-action rifles against German troops who have hand grenades, machine guns and a tank. Naturally, they are all killed quickly, only succeeding in slowing the column.
• Most of the fights in Ip Man that the titular character is in. The film was explicitly meant to glorify him and be all nationalistic. The opponents he Curb Stomps usually were Curb Stomping their opponents before he shows up. In the final fight against General Miura, Ip Man caps off by pinning the other guy against a pole and going to town with a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown while scenes of his practice on a training dummy are interposed.
  • To give you an idea of just how one-sided the fight against Miura was, the General managed to land two clean hits on Ip the entire fight, and he is the only person in the film who manages to land one on him at all.
  • The second film introduces Twister, an Ax-Crazy British boxer who wants to prove the superiority of western fighting over Chinese martial arts and beat the elderly Master Hung to death in the ring while he was having an asthma attack. When Ip gets to fight him, he beats the racist bastard to within an inch of his life.
• In the first Jackass film, Johnny Knoxville is pitted against Butterbean, a professional boxer. Knoxville lands one hit (When Butterbean let him get a shot in out of pity) and got knocked out with a concussion.
• Jurassic Park (1993) ends with a fight between the Tyrannosaurus and the lead Velociraptor. Three guesses who wins.
• In Jurassic Park III, The Tyrannosaurus Rex, previously the most fearsome dinosaur of the series, is taken down in only a minute by the Spinosaurus.
• The Indominus Rex from Jurassic World brutally beats down anything that tries to oppose it, be it ACU troopers, InGen contractors, an Ankylosaurus, a herd of sauropods, or Owen's raptors. It takes the combined might of a T. Rex, the surviving raptor, and a mosasaur to finally take her down.
• Mr. Miyagi's fight with Johnny and the other Kobra Kai, in The Karate Kid. Also, his fight with Kreese, is almost a Single-Stroke Battle.
  • In The Next Karate Kid, he does the same to Dugan, as does his new pupil to the Dirty Cop who made her life a nightmare.
• Kate sees this in the final fight between Renji and Kijima, which is set up as a duel between experts but decided within seconds.
• Big Daddy does this in Kick-Ass when he storms the Big Bad's warehouse and kills about eight men very quickly and brutally, without so much as a scratch on him, all of which was later viewed on hidden camera.
  • Earlier in the plot, Hit-Girl kills a whole group of criminals led by Rasul to save Kick-Ass.
• The final fight between the three protagonists and Sam at the end of Kidulthood. Sam spends a few minutes beating the hell out of Trife, when he gets attacked from behind by Jay, who is thrown on the floor and beaten down in under a minute, before Sam shoves the third protagonist aside with little effort. The other twenty or so people present are too scared to anything. Although, when Sam attacks Alisa, Trife Curbstomps him back.
• In Kill Bill:
  • The Bride's fight against Pai Mei in the second film ends in her only loss besides her "fight" against Budd, and boy is it a big one. She fails to land a single hit on him with a sword or unarmed, and losing her temper, she tries to blindside him with a rock. Wrong move. He effortlessly catches her by the wrist and nearly breaks her arm, and he only relinquishes his grasp once he is satisfied with making her plead.
  • After much build up, the Bride vs. Bill is over in seconds. She actually catches his sword in her sheath and then just uses the Five Point Palm Exploded Heart Technique on him. He takes the loss and his inevitable death quite well, mind.
• In Kingdom of Heaven, the King of Jerusalem, despite being warned against it, marches his army across the open desert away from water sources. By the time they actually reach the battlefield, they're in terrible shape, and the Saracen army destroys them. This is Truth in Television: the real Battle of Hattin played out similarly.
• Kingsman: The Secret Service:
  • Harry versus a bunch of louts early in the film. He creams them all without so match as getting a hair out of place.
  • Lancelot vs several of Valentine's goons in the opening of the movie, trivially taking out half a dozen men.
  • Harry again the church massacre. Conservative estimates put his kill count at around forty.
• Last of the Mohicans: Magua, who throughout the film has shown himself to be a total badass by killing pretty much everyone he wants to kill, squares off with Uncas (himself a pretty fair badass) for the fate of a pretty girl and kills the poor boy with ease. Then Uncas's elderly father rushes forward for some payback, and takes Magua apart in seconds.
• The Last Starfighter has these all over the place. Alex almost gets curb-stomped by the first assassin to show up at his home (until Centauri shows up and rescues him), convincing him to go back and fight, until he finds out the Rylos got so thoroughly curb-stomped in his absence that he, Grig, and their prototype Gunstar are the only defense left for the entire Star League. Only after he curb-stomps a few enemy spy ships does he realize that he really IS good at this, and manages to curb-stomp the entire Ko-Dan armada (including the command ship) in about two passes.
• When the four bullies in Let Me In try to mutilate or drown Owen, his vampire lover Abby comes into the swimming pool, gives a loud cry of rage and kills the four bullies one after the other by tearing them to pieces.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • The Two Towers: A battalion of treeherders vs one of the two most powerful wizards in the world, with the wizard having home-fortress advantage. The ents win. Helped that most of the wizard's army was away doing their own curb stomp.
  • The Battle of Helm's Deep starts off as a curb stomp for the defenders as the Uruk-hai got past every defense and killed most of the defenders. The battle turns into a curb stomp for the Uruks, however, after Gandalf and the Rohirrim show up. Granted the defenders still manage to kill plenty of Uruk-hai, the only reason it's a curb stomp is because there are only a few hundred defenders against 10,000 Uruks.
    • Even more of a curb-stomp in the Extended Edition when the surviving Uruk-hai run into the Huorn forest.
  • The Dead Men of Dunharrow at the Battle of Pelennor Fields in The Return of the King.
  • In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Thorin receives one from Azog the Defiler, whose giant mace and warg slam Thorin into the floor without him getting a single hit in.
• The Big Bad of The Lost Skeleton Returns Again vs The Dreaded Magdraklorp. The Skeleton zooms to the attack, and just barely manages to finish his Badass Boast.
  The Skeleton: Get ready for the battle of the century!
  Magdraklorp: [crush]
• The Magnificent Seven (2016) has Red Harvest vs. Denali. Denali is set up as Bogue's dragon and Red Harvest's Evil Counterpart, Red Harvest intervenes with Denali coming after Emma, and you think you're going to get a long battle of the two Badass Native warriors going at it. Nope. Denali gets all of two good moves in before Red Harvest pokes him full of holes, snaps off a Pre-Mortem One-Liner, and kicks him down a balcony to his doom. The entire thing lasts maybe sixty seconds, if that.
• John W. Creasy, played by Denzel Washington, vs. oh, pretty much the entire corrupt Mexico City police force in Man on Fire.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Iron Man: Tony Stark's Power Suit vs. a group of batshit crazy terrorists armed with powerful automatic weapons, grenade launchers, and tanks = Ridiculously easy Stark victory, usually in under 6 full minutes. The more he upgrades the armor, the more epic the curb-stomp.
  • Iron Man 2:
    • Those mooks didn't stand a chance against Black Widow.
    • Neither did the Hammer drones.
  • In Thor, The Destroyer does this to the Warriors Three and Sif. When Thor arrives, he turns the tables around. The same thing happens earlier when Thor fights (flies straight through the head of) the giant ice monster.
  • Thor: The Dark World:
    • Kurse defeats Thor in a few hits without sustaining visible damage, and even bats his hammer away! It's only when Loki activates Kurse's own black hole grenade that he is defeated.
  • Thor: Ragnarok:
    • Hela does this to almost everyone that fights her! Even the entire Asgardian army! Only Odin could defeat her.
    • At the climax, once Thor fully unlocks his Shock and Awe powers, he handily defeats the rest of Hela's army single-handedly, taking several mooks down with each hit.
    • Hela is on the receiving end when Loki revives Surtur with the Eternal Flame. Her and the entire realm of Asgard were destroyed!
  • The Avengers:
    • Loki delivers one to Captain America after he drops down to defend German civilians. It's only when Iron Man in his Powered Armor intervenes does Loki surrender.
    • Loki is on the receiving end of one when he makes the monumental mistake of trying to intimidate the Hulk with boasts about Loki's godlike status and powers. What follows can only be described as the Hulk picking Loki up by his legs and literally wiping the floor with him.
    Hulk: Puny god.
    • Early on in the movie, Black Widow decisively delivers a curb-stomp beating — while tied to a chair — to a group of Russian terrorists after revealing her ploy to spill their plans.
    • Outside of his scene with Loki, most of the scenes regarding The Hulk are played VERY seriously. Early on in the film, the Black Widow almost unloads a clip into Bruce Banner because he purposely surprised her with an angry shout. Later, one of the core parts of the plot involves the very existential threat that the Hulk would pose to the heroes if he got loose, to the point where Banner relates that he couldn't even kill himself because the Hulk won't LET him. And when Banner finally loses control and comes after Natasha (again) it's one of the most harrowing threatening experiences she's ever had... his pure and endless rage threatens to kill them all. At this point in the movie, The Hulk is seen as a deadly top level threat that NONE of them could handle. At least until Thor joins the team, who proves very able to stand up to Hulk in a fight (though they're interrupted before we find out who would win).
  • Guardians of the Galaxy:
    • The future members of the Guardians vs the prison guards of the Kyln. It quickly turns into a Mook Horror Show for the guards.
    • Drax vs Ronan on Knowhere. Drax is handily defeated while only landing a few minor blows on Ronan, who serves here as a Wake-Up Call Boss.
    • Yondu vs an army of Ronan's faceless soldiers. Thanks to the Yaka Arrow, Yondu slaughters all of them in seconds, without even moving.
  • Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Steve vs an entire elevator of Mooks. Despite the overwhelming odds against him, Steve knocks out all of them and escaped the elevator.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2:
    • Ego wipes out the entire Sovereign fleet at once when they're pursuing the Guardians.
    • Rocket against the Ravagers. He defeats them all easily until Yondu personally intervenes (at which point, the fight immediately ends in Yondu's favor).
    • Yondu, Rocket, and Baby Groot slaughter the entire mutinous Ravager fleet with ease. Yondu's use of the Yaka Arrow here makes his use of it in the first film look like small potatoes.
  • Avengers: Infinity War:
    • In the first scene of the film, Thanos delivers a virtually effortless beatdown to The Hulk, quickly establishing the threat he poses.
    • In the Battle of Wakanda at the film's climax, Thor's arrival immediately turns the tide of the battle in favor of the heroes, taking out dozens of Outrider mooks with one hit. It gets to the point that the Outriders start trying to run away from him, only for him to destroy their ships one by one.
    • In the Battle on Titan, Thanos fighting Iron Man is a Hopeless Boss Fight. Thanos by then has 4 Infinity Stones and Tony is just a man in a powered suit. Furthermore, Thanos had taken out all of Tony's other allies and it's clear that Tony's trying a desperate Last Stand. It's a brutal, hopeless battle with Tony barely managing to draw blood.
  Thanos: All that for a drop of blood?
  • Captain Marvel (2019):
    • Talos catches up to Fury in the S.H.I.E.L.D. base's basement, and though Fury is able to disarm him, he's no match for Talos in hand-to-hand combat and is soon on the ground.
    • The space battle against Ronan's fleet. Just as Kevin Feige promised, Carol is indeed the most powerful hero of all, and she trashes the enemy with almost contemptuous ease, destroying them like a force of nature and sending even an established badass villain scurrying away with his tail between his legs.
  • Avengers: Endgame:
    • After spending the previous movie curb-stomping the heroes, Thanos of all people ended up getting the receiving end of this trope right in the opening of the movie where the heroes quickly ambushes him and quickly subdue the Mad Titan before they cut off his arm and eventually his head. Of course, Thanos by this point has already destroyed the stones which severely wounds him even further and he doesn't even want to fight back anyway as he has already accomplished his mission with no way of undoing his fingersnap.
    • Happens again later on when The recently-revived Wanda Maximoff shows up and uses her powers to absolutely dominate 2014 Thanos, terrifying the latter to the point where he has to order his ship to basically carpet-bomb the area with its weapons, without regard for any of his own forces in the area, in order to force Wanda to back off.
  • Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: The villain of the movie, Wanda Maximoff, utterly demolishes the Illuminati of Universe 838, killing them all in horrifically brutal fashion to establish just how terrifyingly unstoppable she is. And this is after she completely demolished both the Illuminati's Ultron Sentries and the Sorcerers of Kamar-Taj.
• The Matrix trilogy:
  • Neo's final battle with Smith in The Matrix. After running from the Agents during the whole movie, Neo finally becomes the One and transcends physical fighting. He's able to defeat Smith literally with one hand behind his back, without even looking. There's some snapback in the sequels, where Neo is no longer able to instantly defeat any Agent, which is handwaved as "Upgrades". Even still, we're not expected to see them as a legitimate threat.
  • Any fight with any character other than Neo against an Agent ends up this way with the Agent doing the beat down.
    • The best example of this is Morpheus's first encounter with Agent Smith. We are previously shown Morpheus being one of the best human martial arts fighters when he trains Neo. Agent Smith, however, effortlessly beats down Morpheus.
  • The Battle of Zion in The Matrix Revolutions. The humans appeared to be holding their own until the Sentinels swarmed en masse and annihilated most of the city's defenses within 30 seconds. The rest of the battle was just the Sentinels mopping up survivors.
• Mortal Engines:
  • Anna completely wipes the floor with the slaver guards of Rustwater despite being heavily outnumbered.
  • Subverted when Shrike takes on the Anti-Traction Leaguers; it's brutally one-sided at first, as Shrike's strength, speed and endurance mean even Anna's attacks just bounce off him - but once they realise a physical assault won't work, they use guile and teamwork to distract him long enough to plant a grenade on his leg, which temporarily disables him.
• The raid on the Slavic village in The Northman. None of the defenders can so much as land a hit on the berserkers, and their deaths are quick and savage. The Vikings are no more merciful to the civilians in the town.
• In a comedic example, Everett McGill from O Brother, Where Art Thou? picks a fight with his ex-wife's fiancée and ends up getting punched repeatedly while he fails to land a single blow. Of course, it doesn't help that his fighting stance leaves him wide open.
• The One shows Yulaw taking on an entire SWAT team and beating them up in a matter of seconds. It helps to have Super-Strength, Super-Speed, and Jet Li's ass-kicking skills.
• In Ong-Bak, the first "fight" Ting has in the underground fight club is this to the point of hilarity. Main character Ting sees the criminal he's been trying to track down across the room, so he starts walking directly towards the guy. This leads to him stepping right into the fighting circle in the middle, which effectively means he's challenging the guy who just won his last fight. Over Ting's objections they start the fight, the other guy takes a swing at Ting, and Ting takes him out with a single, enormous knee to the chest. Cue the Stunned Silence from all the spectators and bettors in the club.
• In Only God Forgives, Julian puts up a noticeable struggle to even lay a single punch on his opponent, Chang, without any success. Chang meanwhile does not even break a sweat while effortlessly pummeling Julian into a beaten and bloody pulp.
• In Pacific Rim, Striker Eureka's battle with Mutavore. The Kaiju never landed a single hit and Striker finishes her off with missiles in less than a minute. Though according to the novelization, Mutavore utterly thrashed two Jaegers on her way to Sydney. This was to highlight how powerful Striker Eureka was.
  • An Offscreen Moment of Awesome in Mako's memories where Coyote Tango defeats Onibaba.
  • In the prequel comics, the first Jaeger-prototype Brawler Yukon demolishing the surprised Karloff.
• The Kraken attacking the merchant ship in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest can hardly be called a battle. It resembles the Kraken grabbing into the ship for a snack of sailors and then crushing it like an empty soda can once it's finished.
  • Though the maelstrom battle with Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is extremely long, the same cannot be said for the fight with the film's Big Bad, Cutler Beckett. Both the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman (now under Will's command) fire at Beckett's ship with their cannons, killing him and sinking it rather quickly.
• Happens to Castor Oyl in the live action Popeye movie when he signs up for one round with a professional boxer — you wouldn't really expect it go go any other way though, especially when said boxer is named Oxblood Oxheart.
• In Predator, Arnold's commando team is shown curb-stomping a group of South American rebels. This is intended to make the Predator itself that much more formidable as it proceeds to curb-stomp them one by one.
• The Princess Bride: The book makes it more explicit: Inigo Montoya kills four of the best swordsmen in the world. In five seconds flat. The book actually states that the fourth man was dead before the first hit the ground. This actually happens in the film as well, though the first man had to stagger a bit before dropping to accomplish it.
• In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones is faced with a skilled swordsman in the midst of a more involved fight/chase scene. Obviously too fed up to deal with him at the moment, Indy pulls out a gun and shoots him, effectively putting an end to the fight before it could get started. The legend is that it was initially scripted to be a sword vs. whip fight, but Harrison Ford was suffering badly from diarrhea and improvised to cut the scene short and remove any potentially unpleasant running around.
• The battle of San Francisco bridge in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. A bunch of apes, up against SWAT troopers with automatic weapons would seem like this for the side with guns at first glance. But Caesar sees straight through the killzone the humans lay out on the bridge, and sends Buck and Koba to lead some of the apes under the bridge and through the fog to close the gap and flank them. Caesar then creates a ruse to fool the troopers into letting down their guard, before giving the signal for a mass attack. Completely surrounded and unable to take on a full rush of Lightning Bruiser apes, the human forces are soundly beaten and sent running with almost no casualties on the apes' side.
• The battle between the SEALs and Hummel's forces in The Rock.
• In the Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson film Rules of Engagement, the Recon Marines sent to evacuate the American embassy are under fire from the crowd in the embassy courtyard and pinned down. The officer in charge of the evacuation team tolerates it for a lot longer than he had to, but once he saw how many weapons the crowd had and that they were clearly out for blood, he orders his Marines to "waste the motherfuckers!" His Marines then proceed to utterly shred everyone in the crowd. This could also be listed under Bullying a Dragon.
• Apollo Creed's fight against Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. Apollo, being past his prime, was no match for the juiced-up Soviet.
• Steven Seagal is known for his characters dealing these out due to Seagal's fondness for playing an Invincible Hero. The trope is almost averted in Marked for Death — Screwface is one of the few (only?) villains to actually give Seagal any real trouble.
• The Sacketts: In the showdown at the end of the film, the Sacketts and Cap kill the Bigelow brothers and their minions pretty easily.
• Serenity (2005): River defeats both a room of thugs in a Bad Guy Bar as well as a horde of reavers with barely a scratch on her.
• The swordfight between Chon and Rathbone in Shanghai Knights is this. Chon had no chance of defeating Rathbone and only wins due to a unexpected turn of events.
  • Wu Chow, the other half of the Big Bad Duumvirate, also completely dominates Chon earlier in the climax, only losing due to Lin's Combat Pragmatism.
• Sienkiewicz Trilogy: The 'duel' between Kmicic and Colonel Wołodyjowski in Potop. After spending three minutes having every one of his blows parried, being disarmed once (and being allowed by his opponent to go pick up his sword again) and having his opponent refuse to even attack him with intent to kill, a humiliated Kmicic tells the Colonel to just Get It Over With, and is instantly downed by a blow to the head.
• Subverted in Snatch. when Brad Pitt's Pikey boxer has seven shades of shit punched out of him by Gorgeous George, but it turns out he's hustling. When he decides to fight back, he knocks George unconscious with a single punch. He does the same thing again later on.
• Space Jam has a brief one where the Monstars are initially scoring so often against the Tune Squad that the score ticker spins out a label stating "Kinda one-sided, isn't it?"
• Played for laughs in Spaced Invaders. The invasion the Martian characters were supposed to be a part of got its ass handed to it and was wiped out completely by the defending fleet in minutes. The patrol ship the movie focuses around lost contact before even they'd left the solar system and tries to invade Earth in their confusion.
• The original Spider-Man film, the Green Goblin throws Spider Man through a brick wall, throws a grenade in his face and beats the crap out of him. Spider-Man appears completely beaten, until the Goblin threatens to finish off Mary Jane "nice and slow" — then Spidey curbstomps the Goblin.
• Starship Troopers: An attempted invasion of the Bug homeworld of Klendathu to end the war right away results in an unmitigated catastrophe where the Mobile Infantry invasion force stumbled into the Bugs' defensive swarms and quickly collapsed into a panicked rout. The estimates given after the battle suggest 100,000 casualties.
  • The propaganda clip states "100,000 dead in one hour," but the total was somewhere above 300,000.
• Star Trek:
  • In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, V'Ger destroys three Klingon battlecruisers without breaking stride.
  • Discussed in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. The Klingons are utterly gobsmacked that the Enterprise hasn't blown them out of the sky as they outgun them ten to one. Turns out when you hit a jury-rigged badly damaged starship just right, they lose all steam.
  • First Contact: Starfleet fares better against the Borg than at Wolf 359, but the battle still goes very badly: the Borg Cube tears through Starfleet's lines in seconds, and destroys or cripples at least 10-15 Federation capital ships. Listening to the subspace transmissions of the damage and request for help convince Picard to take the Enterprise into battle. Picard's crew don't do so well against the Borg inside the ship either; they manage to assimilate half the ship in a matter of hours and only stop momentarily to use the Deflector Dish as an interstellar communication device so they can contact the other Borg.
  • Star Trek (2009):
    • Captain Nero's ship, the Narada, effortlessly wrecks over fifty starships: 47 Klingon, then 7 Starfleet, all offscreen, plus the Kelvin at the start. Making it even worse, the Narada is only a simple mining vessel, but it and its crew are time-travelers from the TNG era, over a century in the future compared to the TOS era ships it's facing. If it was going up against a Starfleet ship from its own time period, like the Enterprise-E, it would be the one getting creamed.
    • And Spock does this to anyone who insults his mother.
    • Spock vs. Kirk, round one: Spock applies nerve pinch, and Kirk is reduced to a boneless heap on the floor. Round two lasted longer, but Kirk still got his ass handed to him.
  • Star Trek Into Darkness:
    • The Vengeance lays a severe beating on the Enterprise, enough to knock her out of warp. It's sufficiently one-sided that the Enterprise never gets to fire a shot as the weapons systems are the first to be taken out. That doesn't stop the torpedoes themselves from being useful, however.
    • John Harrison versus anybody besides Spock.
    • His attack on Starfleet HQ. He spends several minutes hovering outside the window unloading heavy weapons fire into the conference room and laying waste to anyone who stands up or tries to fight back. Kirk finally manages to cripple his gunship only for Harrison to safely beam himself out.
    • Versus an entire Klingon squad. The Klingons don't stand a chance.
    • When Kirk tries to punch out Harrison, he hurts himself more.
    • He beats the crap out of Kirk near the film's climax, and it takes him literally two seconds to deal with Carol and Scotty.
  • Star Trek Beyond features Krall's swarm attack on the Enterprise. Sadly, the Lady E bites it.
• Star Wars:
  • The Phantom Menace:
    • Droidekas are equipped with personal shields that are nigh-invulnerable against small arms fire. Against a Naboo N-1 starfighter's blaster cannons? Not so much.
  • Attack of the Clones:
    • Dooku handily defeats Obi-Wan and Anakin before Yoda arrives.
    • And Anakin's orgy of vengeance on the Tusken Raiders (Sand People) who tortured and killed his mother would qualify.
    • During the battle in the arena, Obi-Wan is fighting some droids when the acklay — the giant spider-like monster that was sent at him earlier before the rest of the Jedi showed up — walks up behind him. Unfortunately for the acklay, Obi-Wan now has a lightsaber and almost effortlessly kills the once-dangerous creature.
  • Anakin pays Dooku back in this fashion in Revenge of the Sith.
  • The opening scene of A New Hope when the Imperial Stormtroopers make mincemeat of the rebel soldiers on Princess Leia's ship.
  • The Empire Strikes Back:
    • Darth Vader curb-stomps Luke in their first duel. Luke loses his right hand and his innocence, and his best friend is captured—and he's lucky to get away with his life. He gets better, but when the title said "The Empire Strikes Back," they weren't kidding.
    • The Battle of Hoth also counts, although it's only a holding action to delay the Imperial advance long enough so the Rebels can evacuate.
  • Return of the Jedi:
    • Contrasting Episode V, after a brief, fairly even exchange, Luke curb-stomps Vader.
    • The Battle of Endor goes this way at first until Chewbacca and a pair of Ewoks hijack an AT-ST.
    • That's not to say that the Ewoks couldn't hold their own.
  • Rogue One has about 8-10 Rebel grunts in a corridor on board the Mon Calamari flagship and confronted by Darth Vader. It's less appropriate to call the next ensuing minute a battle and more to call it a Nightmare Fuel-inducing slaughter. That's not to say that the ground battle on Scarif was any better for the Rebels either, but when the Death Troopers arrive, shit really begins to hit the fan, managing to kill Chirrut and Baze before they take the Troopers with them
  • The Force Awakens has five battles and a duel that come to mind. The First Order eviscerate an entire village on Jakku just to find the map to Luke Skywalker. By the time that Kylo Ren kills Lor San Tekka and discovers Poe Dameron was given the map, the FO Stormtroopers executing the survivors doesn't help.
    • FN-2187 AKA: Finn's rescue of Dameron succeeds but soon goes awry when their stolen Tie Fighter gets shot down by The Finalizer's Ventral Cannons which sends them crashing for Jakku. Finn awakes to find Poe missing and witnessing the starship sinking into the sand and promptly exploding.
    • The New Republic as well as The Resistance is nearly crippled when Starkiller Base opens fire and obliterates the Hosnian System
    • Not long after the Hosnian Cataclysm, The First Order virtually shoots up everything in sight on Takodana just to find BB8 Finn, Rey, The Millennium Falcon as well as Chewie and Han. Tie Fighters leveled Maz Kanata's castle and Stormtroopers surround the area. It is only when The Resistance X-Wings of Rapier Squadron arrive that it begins to turn into a fair fight, but Rey gets captured by Kylo Ren
    • The attack on Starkiller Base's Precinct 47 turns into this quickly until Chewbacca detonates explosives in critical areas unveiling a small access tunnel that the X-Wing pilots, including Poe Dameron, rush into and blast to pieces, turning the tide of the battle.
    • After giving his old man a nasty surprise, Kylo Ren confronts Rey and Finn in a frozen forest and engages in a Lightsaber duel with Finn, burns him in the shoulder with the crossguard blades on his saber and slices him across the spine, sending him into a painful coma. The fight quickly turns in Rey's favor, however, and her swelling strength with The Force allows her to overpower Kylo and gave him a cut across his right eye, a scar resembling that bore by his grandfather, Anakin.
  • The Last Jedi:
    • Kylo Ren standing up to challenge Snoke during their first meeting ends with the Supreme Leader effortlessly zapping him with Force Lightning and knocking him to the floor.
    • After building a bond with Kylo Ren, Rey decides to board the Supremacy and fight off Supreme Leader Snoke in order to convince Ren to turn back to the light. And the Supreme Leader utterly stomps her, immediately grabbing her with the Force and throwing her around the room with a flick of his wrist. He doesn't even get up out of his chair. The only reason Rey isn't killed outright is that Snoke wants Kylo Ren to do it to prove his loyalty, and Kylo is able to use Snoke's hubris to catch him off-guard and stab him. If it weren't for that trickery, he'd probably have killed them both.
    • The entire runtime of the film is essentially the First Order doing this to the Resistance. Almost immediately after the destruction of Starkiller base, the First Order launches a massive assault on the Resistance base, forcing them to assemble an impromptu evacuation. The Resistance just barely manages to evacuate all personnel with no casualties before the base is blown to smithereens by the First Order's dreadnought. Then the Resistance manages to take down the First Order's dreadnought, but only with the loss of their ENTIRE bombing fleet, and a staggering loss of life. Not to mention that it all turns out to be for nothing, as the First Order tracks them through hyperspace (something generally thought to be impossible), and catches up to them, with an even BIGGER and meaner Star Destroyer leading the assault, just a few minutes after they blow a ton of fuel on a jump to lightspeed. In the ensuing battle, the Resistance loses, in quick succession, one capital ship, their entire complement of x-wings, which essentially leaves them unable to fight back, and their senior leadership, save Leia, who is left in critical condition. Then it's just a matter of the First Order chasing the few remaining ships until they run out of fuel, and blowing each one to cinders when it does. The Resistance devises a plan to abandon the fleet in cloaked transport shuttles, down to a nearby planet. It doesn't work. The First Order sniffs it out and takes out transport after transport, and are only stopped when Admiral Holdo rams the Supremacy at light speed, leaving just a few transports to land on Crait safely. The Resistance plans to hide in a bunker on the planet's surface long enough to call The Cavalry to their aid. The First Order wastes no time in sending walkers, TIE fighters, and a MINIATURIZED DEATH STAR LASER down to the planet's surface. They slap aside the Resistance's pathetic defense with derelict speeders, and blow the massive bunker door open like it was made of paper. It takes Rey and Luke literally moving heaven and earth to save what remains of the Resistance, and by that point, there are so few of them left that they can all fit on the Falcon comfortably.
• Suspiria (1977). The head witch was invisible while summoning the zombie of Suzy's friend Sara to kill Suzy. However, her powers of invisibility weren't as strong as she thought, as an outline of her form started appearing, giving Suzy the chance to kill her with a single stab to the neck, before the zombie could reach Suzy. She died without any struggle.
• Taken. All of Taken. Liam Neeson curb stomps the entirety of Paris, except for his fight with The Dragon.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), each of the turtles properly get their asses handed to them when facing Shredder, even as a team. Splinter is the only one able to really give him much of a fight.
  • It's just as bad in the original film, with Shredder making chumps out of the brothers.
• In The Terminator, when the T-800 tracks down Sarah to the police station, the desk sergeant tells him that she is not available to talk to anyone, and the T-800 promises "I'll be back." He crashes his car into the lobby of the station, and despite the station's personnel firing everything at the T-800, from snub nosed revolvers, twelve gage shotguns, and automatic rifles, the T-800 just uses his AR-15 and SPAS to massacre seventeen police officers without missing a beat.
• In Tomorrow Never Dies, the final confrontation between James Bond and Elliott Carver. One is a media mogul who probably has never lifted anything heavier than a microphone in twenty years. The other is an elite Royal Navy intelligence officer/commando. Guess how that one ends.
• In Top Gun: Maverick, Mav's dogfight exercises with the TOPGUN pilots he's training. All of them were at the top of their class just like he and Iceman were in their day. He still flies circles around them, all set to the glorious strains of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again".
• In Transformers, Jazz made a valiant effort to attack Megatron and keep him away from the others, but it did not end well. Optimus Prime does this most memorably against Bonecrusher.
  • Starscream vs Ironhide and Ratchet in the Mission City battle. The two Autobots are temporarily taken down in ten seconds while Starscream didn't even scratch his paint job.
  • Blackout's attack on the SOCCENT base at the start of the movie. He manages to wipe out the entire base and kill nearly everyone present (barring Lennox and his team) whilst receiving only minor damage in return.
• In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, most fights in the second movie go this way. But when the Decepticons are wading headlong into the combined air-ground fire of entire battalions of a military that is equipped to fight them and is working alongside the Autobots, that's a given.
• In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the final fight between Optimus Prime and Megatron turned out this way. Megatron won't be coming back this time. Except that he did.
• Transformers: Age of Extinction continues the trend. First, there's the Cemetery Wind and Lockdown taking down Ratchet, then the final battle after Dinobots join the party, and Lockdown overall. The guy can fight one-to-one with Optimus and not die, and uses Bumblebee as a flail.
• In Transformers: The Last Knight, Sir Edmund Burton is on the receiving end of this at the hands of Megatron using his arm cannon on him.
• TRON: Legacy: Rinzler effortlessly lays a smackdown on of Sam in the most showboating way possible when they first meet ("why do I feel like I just got dunked on?").
• In Troy:
  • The young and reckless Paris challenges hardened warrior Menelaus to Combat by Champion, and gets an asskicking. His defeat is so absolute it ends with him literally crawling towards his brother to get away.
  • In the first fight, Achilles runs towards the enemy champion, dodges two thrown spears on the way, reaches him and kills him without breaking pace.
  • The climactic single combat between Hector and Achilles is a rather contemptuously easy victory for Achilles, who has the advantage from the very start of the fight and immediately forces Hector into desperation mode.
• In the climactic fight of the prison boxing movie Undisputed (2002) Monroe takes a beating in the first few minutes but the rest of the fight played this straight.
• The first time Danny goes into an underground prize fight in Unleashed, he is pitted against the reigning champion. Since all fights are death matches, and this guy has been the champ for a while, you can expect this fight to be brutal. You would be wrong. As soon as it starts, Danny punches him in the throat three times in quick succession, and the guy keels over.
• In The War of the Worlds (1953), when the Martians reveal themselves to be clearly hostile, they proceed to vaporize anything and everything that humanity throws at them, and are able to even brush off an atomic bomb thanks to their protective blisters. They are able to push humanity to the brink without much effort, and are only stopped because the Martians are susceptible to germs.
• In War of the Worlds (2005), humanity's inability to fight back is mentioned two times:
  • After venturing out of his ex-wife's destroyed house, Ray finds a reporter rummaging for food in the destroyed airliner, who then goes on to tell him she and her TV crew were covering a National Guard unit that attacked one of the tripods, and were lucky enough to escape when the tripod vaporized the troops before moving on.
  Reporter: Once they begin to move, no more news comes out of that area.
  • The second example happens when Ray and his two kids are part of a large crowd of refugees who happen upon a battle between the military and the tripods. The commander acknowledges that their actions have no effect on the tripods, but are firing because they need to provide the refugees enough time to get as far away as possible.
  • And like the original film and the book that inspired it, the invaders have no trouble fending off humanity's weapons, but have no defense against germs.
• In the 2011 film Warrior: Tommy overwhelms all of his early opponents with superior speed and power, quickly defeating them in brutal fashion. His fighting style highlights his role as the Anti-Villain of the film.
• Pretty much all fight scenes in Watchmen are like this. The best example is Dr. Manhattan vs the North Vietnamese army. The poor saps barely get to run a few steps before getting disintegrated.
• Lena in We Are the Night is turned into a vampire. Her sire Louise decides that the best way for Lena to understand what powers she has now is to accuse her of Russian pimps and criminals. When Lena's vampire powers awaken, the criminals are quickly over.
• Director Kurt Wimmer loves these:
  • Equilibrium: Every battle that Preston gets into, he wins effortlessly. Of particular note is his fight against The Dragon, Brandt. They'd fought to an apparent impasse while training, but now Preston wins their face off with a Single-Stroke Battle.
  • In Ultraviolet (2006), Violet squares off against a dozen fellow hemophage assassins. The other Mooks were just humans, but these guys have all the same supernatural powers that she does. And they do the same thing she does. And there's a dozen of them. All of them combined should present some kind of threat, right? Right? After two seconds, we find out no. The difference is that they weren't anywhere close to one tenth as pissed off as she was.
• In Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled, a bouncer throws the Djinn out of a club, and beats him up while the Djinn tries to get him to make a wish. After he's finished, he wishes that the Djinn would put up a better fight. No points for guessing how this turns out.
  Djinn: Granted!
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Wolverine and Sabretooth fight thrice, with Victor getting the upper hand the first time, the second ends indecisively, while in the third, Logan beats ten shades of sunshine out of Sabretooth in around ten seconds.
  • X-Men: First Class:
    • Shaw and his cronies' first attack on the CIA facility—the entire staff of the base is killed, almost entirely by Azazel repeating the same brutal tactic, one by one, on each human at the base, with no way to stop him until all are dead.
    • Riptide is immediately taken down by Havok when the two teams fight, and is subsequently buried under a wall of metal by Magneto.
    • Sebastian Shaw casually sends Erik Lehnsherr flying across the room several times by merely tapping him. In desperation, Erik tries to use metal to restrain Shaw, but Shaw casually tears through it and pins him against a wall. Erik only wins because Shaw stops to give him a We Can Rule Together speech. Erik then takes the opportunity to knock away Shaw's helmet, allowing Charles Xavier to paralyze Shaw with his mental abilities.
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past:
    • Wolverine vs. Magneto. Even without adamantium covering his bones, Magneto has a baseball stadium full of metal to weaponize, preventing Wolverine from even landing a hit before he's disabled.
    • Magneto always makes Wolverine his bitch in the films. In the original "X-Men", Magneto tears open a train Logan is on, levitates him, and casually bends his own claws against his hands before flinging him out of the car. Wolvie doesn't fare any better in "X-Men: The Last Stand", where Erik Lehnsherr once again captures Logan in a magnetic field and flings him like garbage like miles away.
    • Magneto's fight with a Sentinel only lasts a few seconds.
    • Subverted with Wolverine's fight with the mafia goons. The audience and Wolverine himself believes that it won't even be a problem for him, but then we learn that Wolverine doesn't have his adamantium (which besides making his claws super-sharp, also protect him from a headshot and absorb the impacts of the bullets). Wolverine still wins fairly easily (he's still Immune to Bullets because of his Healing Factor), but it's not entirely one-sided.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse:
    • Apocalypse in general against anyone who goes up against him, except for Jean; the one who comes the closest to get good hits in is Quicksilver, and he's ultimately dispatched. Professor X is at a tremendous disadvantage when he confronts Apocalypse on the astral plane because the latter can sizeshift to an impressive degree. After being crushed like a bug and smashed against a wall like a rag doll, Xavier is left crawling and he's covered in blood. Mystique gets one sneak attack on Apocalypse and then it's over. His hand constricts her throat, asphyxiating her.
    • Jean, meanwhile, shows that Apocalypse was ultimately small peanuts compared to the Phoenix Force.
    • On a smaller scale, Wolverine vs the soldiers at Stryker's facility.
    • Mystique vs one of the bouncers who is running cage matches of mutants. She tries to stop it, he gets in her way. She oneshots him with an elbow before finishing what she was doing.
• In Yamato, just like in history, the eponymous Japanese battleship gets sunk by American bombers without ever seeing, much less successfully taking out, any American ships. All she manages to do in return is shoot down a few planes.
• Yojimbo has the climax of the film where Sanjūrō takes out nine men (Ushitora, Unosoke, Inokichi, and their Mooks minus one whom Sanjūrō spared) in seconds without receiving a scratch.
• As a deliberate parody of action movies, the titular character in You Don't Mess with the Zohan is a literal One-Man Army to the point that the Israeli counter-terrorist unit constantly tricks him into taking out terrorists all on his own without even giving him a gun. At the start of the movie, Zohan is shown to be eliminating an entire terrorist cell by himself.

---