Kicked Upstairs / Film

• In Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie, Mr. Bean is selected (with much relieved cheering by board members) to represent Britain as an expert on art sent to America, just to get temporarily rid of him from his position as a security guard at the museum (firing him is out of the question seeing as the chairman has an inexplicable fondness for Bean.)
• At the end of the 2001 film Behind Enemy Lines, Admiral Leslie Reigart is "rewarded" for his rescue of downed pilot Chris Burnett by being promoted to a desk job (since he had disobeyed orders to do so), where he would no longer be in command of his US Navy battlegroup. Reigart chooses to retire instead.
• In Breach, FBI analyst Robert Hanssen complains about being moved to a "do-nothing position" of no importance. As we already know, he has actually been moved there because he is under heavy suspicion of being a Russian spy.
• Used to kick off Hot Fuzz, in which Nicholas Angel is promoted to sergeant because he's so damn good at his job, he's showing everyone else up. Unable to kick him out due to his extreme competence, they promote him to the sleepy little village of Sandford, Gloucestershire — except as it turns out, it's not actually all that quiet.
• In the Michael Douglas film Disclosure, Tom Sanders is under investigation for sexual harassment, brought about by the conniving Femme Fatale. Considering that the evidence is mostly her word against his, one of the solutions suggested is that Sanders accept a lateral transfer, with the same pay and benefits, from the company's Seattle location to an office in Texas. He immediately refuses, as he knows that the Texas location is due to be shut down and most of its employees laid off, making the whole exercise a roundabout firing in disguise.
• Curse of the Golden Flower: Since the imperial doctor knows too much about the secret ingredient of the Empress' medicine, he pretends to promote him to governor of the province of Suzhou when actually he's sending him away from his wife's influence to have him and his family killed.
• In Joe Somebody, the eponymous protagonist is given a high-level non-existing position at the company after he is assaulted by a coworker, so that he doesn't sue the company. After things die down, the Corrupt Corporate Executive plans to quietly fire him.
• In Leroy & Stitch, Pleakley is promoted to the chair of Earth studies at G.A.C.C., the Galactic Alliance Community College, but he is disappointed to find that he doesn't give lectures or teach classes; his job title is supervising professor.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home features an inversion. Kirk publicly violated orders in the previous film, but now he's managed to save the world. Starfleet "punishes" him by taking away his cushy desk job and demoting him to a "mere" starship captain. So Starfleet gets what it wants (a public punishment to demonstrate they don't tolerate such behavior, not to mention their best captain back in the field) and Kirk gets what he wants (the Enterprise).
  • Seemingly played straight in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, though. Unlike the following film, Kirk certainly doesn't like the fact that he's been promoted to a desk job, and uses the crisis to take back the Enterprise.
    • The (unseen) events preceding the film are actually a lot more like the Real Life military, where it's generally "Up or Out" (if you're passed over for promotion twice, then congratulations, you're retired, whether you wanted to do so or not). There has been some criticism of this, but it's mainly focused on lower-ranking officers whose jobs are primarily technical (and there just aren't any positions available at a higher rank) as opposed to command officers.
    • That doesn't seem to be the case, as Kirk was in his 40s in TMP (50s in the other TOS films) and plenty of other Starfleet captains continued captaining well into that age. Picard was Captain till near 70 and only accepted promotion to Admiral and stepped out of command in order to take up a special humanitarian taskforce. It was implied Kirk simply accepted promotion to Admiral as as soon as it was offered because he was following the "correct" promotion path and figured that was just the way to do things. It was only afterwards that he started regretting it and realized he was truly happiest captaining a ship and exploring.
    • Expanded media has elaborated on the circumstances of Kirk's promotion, most particularly the Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novel "Forgotten History", which depicted Kirk's final mission before the end of the original five-year mission involving subtle interference in events on a pre-warp world. Certain parties arrange Kirk's promotion to get him away from the Enterprise as they want access to its engines (which are currently the only form of controlled time travel in the Federation, having been subject to circumstances that cannot be repeated), with others feeling that it's a subtle punishment as they recognise that Kirk wouldn't be a good fit for a role in the admiralty even if some feel he would be a good fit.
• Beasts of No Nation: The Commandant returns to his rebel faction's headquarters after numerous victories expecting to be welcomed with a promised promotion to general. Instead, the Supreme Leader forces him to sit in a waiting room for almost a full day before announcing that he'll be removed from command and "promoted" to "Vice Deputy of Security," an obviously toothless post. The Commandant chooses to splinter off instead.
• In Mulan, the able soldier Shang is promoted to commander and given a group of raw recruits to train, while his father the General rides off with the main army. We are never told (and Shang proves able to whip his Ragtag Bunch of Misfits into shape), but it seems less like a useful position and more like an excuse for the General to keep his son out of the fighting.
• After the events of The Pentagon Wars, Partridge and his cronies (who had spent the whole film trying to gain promotions by endorsing a military vehicle that is a potential deathtrap, using a lot of dirty tricks to fool the testers) seemed to have gotten this; they earn their promotions and lucrative private sector jobs, while Colonel Burton (who had opposed them, concerned about soldiers' lives) was forced to retire. (Burton, however, got the modifications to the vehicle he had wanted.)
• Zig-zagged in Space Cop: For being a Cowboy Cop who keeps destroying everything, Space Cop is told he's being "promoted" to Space Traffic Cop. Space Cop enthusiastically treats it as if he's being kicked upstairs ("More money, less work!") but it's not clear if he's just being fooled into accepting a demotion.
• Storks: Hunter claims that this is what's happening to him after the upcoming Stork Con, which is why he's offering to promote Junior. Junior ends up doing this to Tulip when he promotes her to the letter department (which has been out of commission since she was born) as his first order of business when he can't bring himself to fire her.
• American Psycho: Patrick Bateman has some sort of vaguely defined but lofty position in Mergers and Acquisitions that gives him a secretary and a nice office but requires him only to watch television and plan lunches.
• In Citizen Kane, that was apparently the fate of Mr. Bernstein, Kane's Yes-Man.
  Bernstein: "Who's a busy man, me? I'm chairman of the board. I've got nothing but time."