Mooks / Film

• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Iron Man 2 has the Hammeroids, elite drones commissioned by Justin Hammer with the intention of being used for military purposes, only to be hijacked by Ivan Vanko in order to get revenge on Tony Stark.
  • Thor has the Jötuns, also known as Frost Giants.
  • Captain America: The First Avenger has the Hydra Agents, who would go on to become arguably the most prevalent mooks in the franchise.
  • The Avengers (2012) has the Chitauri, cyborg aliens with vaguely skull-like faces.
  • Thor: The Dark World has the Dark Elves.
  • Captain America: The Winter Soldier features the surprise return of Hydra, which of course means a seemingly infinite supply of nameless agents, although here, they are disguised as SHIELD agents.
• In The Incredibles, Syndrome has a bunch on them on his island serving as guards as well as monitoring operations.
• The Lion King (1994): Scar's hyenas. Not just Shenzi, Banzai and Ed, but a whole army of hyenas. After Scar kills Mufasa and becomes king, he introduces his hyenas and this eventually causes the Pridelands to dry out. Eventually they turn against and devour Scar when Simba returns and defeats him in a Battle Amongst the Flames.
• The earliest known use of the term mook (and thus Trope Namer by default) is Mean Streets in 1973.
• Most James Bond villains employ mooks.
• Dr Evil has a never-ending supply of disposable 'henchmen' in Austin Powers.
  • Subverted in the deleted scenes as, whenever a wisecracking Austin killed a henchman, the film would immediately cut to the Mook's family or friends learning of his death and mourning him.
    • That thing was actually played once in the finished version of the original movie, where one of Dr. Evil's mooks gets run over by Austin Powers, after which it cuts to his family and stepson, where the sad news get to them and they all mourn his demise.
  • Played with and lampshaded by Nigel Powers in Goldmember:
    Nigel Powers: Do you know who I am? [henchman nods yes] Have you any idea how many anonymous henchmen I've killed over the years? [henchman nods in the affirmative] And look at you. You haven't even got a name tag. You've got no chance. Why don't you just fall down? Go on, son. [henchman falls to floor]
• The Storm Troopers (a previous page image) from Star Wars. Were they ever.
  • In the prequels, the battle droids.
  • Lampshaded in Star Wars: Aftermath, where Sinjir outright claims that battle droids were "The most inept fighting unit in...perhaps the history of the galaxy." He then backs up that statement by saying that as a former Imperial, he knows that stormtroopers aren't much better.
  • The clone troopers (also from the prequels) are actually pretty competent, but they still fall into this role after they're ordered to turn against the Jedi.
• Spaceballs, where the mooks are actually the titular "Spaceballs".
• In the Blaxploitation thriller Three the Hard Way, the heroes take on a bunch of thugs, with nothing stronger than cap pistols, at long range, and never miss, while the thugs, armed with fully automatic machine guns, at point-blank range, can't hit the broad side of a barrel. The bad guys all succumb to the cap pistol assault, and the good guys emerge unscathed except for one of them who has a slight flesh wound.
• The Chinese movie Hero (2002) has some almost Diablo-like flashback scenes where the heroes mow down enemy soldiers by the scores, if not hundreds.
• The most recent Mummy film had an army of (technically) zombie clay soldiers. Which is about as dangerous as that sounds. Just the thing for killing with impunity.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera has Gene Cops, employees of Gene Co who are a lot more public and a lot less deadly than the henchgirls and Repo Men but are still enough to scare fifteen scalpel sluts and Grave-Robber into fleeing. Amber Sweet also has her valets.
• David Lo Pan's army of Wing Cong in Big Trouble in Little China.
• The dubiously named Crazy 88's were all mooks in Kill Bill which The Bride easily dispatched whilst on her revenge rampage. The trope was played with towards the end of the carnage as she spanks one of them with her sword.
  • A frame-by-frame count performed by Jonathan R. from Bouncing Ferret Films shows 82: 67 killed, 12 maimed, 1 killed by an axe thrown by somebody else, one possibly killed, one spanked and sent home to his mother. Assuming the name is accurate, the remaining six either weren't there or stayed out of the resulting slaughter.
• Ecoban soldiers in Sky Blue.
• Subverted in Brazil. Sam and Jill make a dramatic escape in her truck from a horde of guards giving chase; at the end their Mookmobile crashes and explodes. Cue the triumphant music, Sam celebrating... then slowly dissolving into horror as the camera shows the guards struggling to escape a horrible, burning death.
• Inception has an interesting variant: the apparent Mooks in this case are subconscious projections that populate the dreamworlds created by the lucid dreaming machines, not real people. Also from a certain point of view their role is benevolent as they are the primary defense a person's mind has against outside threats. The projections are initially harmless, so long as the dreamer's subconscious believes the dream is reality, but as the subconscious becomes aware that they are in a dream — accelerated by things such as shifting gravity or altered reality — they become more hostile, up until the point where they openly start attacking the "intruders." Certain people also undergo defensive training that "militarizes" the subconscious - which results in projections going from being an angry mob that only assaults when major changes are made to a well-armed, cohesive force of trained soldiers that attack intruders very quickly when a threat is detected. The latter is what composes the majority of the enemies the thieving protagonists fight in the movie.
• In Assault on Precinct 13 (2005), Duvall's cops.
• In The Crazies (1973), the Army never take cover and are incredibly easy to shoot because of their white NBC suits.
• In The Dark Knight, the Joker has a seemingly unlimited number of mooks. One has to wonder what they're in it for, with a nearly 100 percent mortality rate and their crimes involve no apparent monetary gain.
  • Additional material seems to indicate that most of them were mentally-ill escapees of Arkham Asylum.
• Used with an unusual (and probably realistic) moderation in Drive (2011), where the two villain bosses, in spite of being depicted as very powerful and dangerous, don't really have more than 3-4 mooks on their side.
• Tony Snow's gang in A Song Is Born are of the dumb muscle variety.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: Naturally, Cobra has them.
• The Mandarin has numerous mooks working for him in Iron Man 3. In a rare move for an action film quite a few of them are female and the Men Are the Expendable Gender trope is completely ignored.
• Yellow Submarine: The Chief Blue Meanie's mooks are quite varied. From little Meanies who look like him except for their Mickey Mouse ears to the Apple Bonkers, Snapping Turtle Turks, Countdown Clowns, Hidden Persuaders, Butterfly Stompers, Max-the-Nippers, and the dreaded Flying Glove.
• X-Men: The Last Stand is based around Magneto raising an entire army of mutant mooks. He even lampshades using them as, in the final battle, when he sends his first wave of defenders (who make the classic mook mistake of charging impulsively at the attackers), he calls the defenders "pawns".
• Commando has this in spades, with The Dragon Bennett himself outright telling the Big Bad that his so-called "patriots" are nothing and that he and The Hero Matrix between them could kill them all "in the blink of an eye". In fact, by the movie's end, it's estimated that Matrix has killed more than 90 mooks.
• Prime Cut: the Big Bad is protected by his many shotgun toting relations.
• Surprisingly, Die Hard actually averts this. Anybody who gets killed in the film is either given a personality or is, at least, shown to be quite good with a pistol/rifle.
• In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf - Moon Castle: The Space Adventure, the Bitter Gourd King has numerous bitter gourd soldiers that do his bidding and are easily mowed through by the goats and wolves. The bitter gourd soldiers wear paper masks bearing the Chinese character "兵", meaning "soldier".
• The Princess: Julius' many brutal soldiers who exist to get killed by the princess and Linh.

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