The Millstone in Live-Action Films.
- Vicki Vale in Batman went from being a fairly competent character to being The Load to finally being this trope. She makes things more difficult for Batman when they flee the museum simply by not running when she had the chance. Some minutes later, she almost gets Batman killed — and then almost publicly unmasked — by lying to him about her weight when he tries using a motorized grappling hook to pull them up to the roof. She does manage to rescue him, but what happened was still her own fault and Batman feels compelled to point out her lie afterward.
- The Big Lebowski: Walter Sobchak is a cross between this and a total asshole. Everything goes completely wrong for the Dude the moment Walter opens his mouth or comes up with a plan. The kicker? Walter was right all along.
- Mina in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Because she is in love with the Count, she serves as a heavy burden to the vampire hunters trying to kill him and they use her psychic connection with him to track him down. She fully transitions to this trope during the climax, when she casts a spell to bring down the sunlight and summon nightfall earlier, which would allow Dracula to come out in full strength and place all the hunters in danger. It's not entirely her fault, since she is affected by the vampiric curse turning her into Dracula's loyal servant, but then she did willingly bring the curse on herself.
- Casino: All of the major characters become millstones, causing many small problems which combined, wreck the operation by the film's climax.
- Made Man Nicky Santoro is sent to Las Vegas to make sure no-one interferes with the money-"skimming" operation the mob are running in the Tangiers casino-hotel. Since he's a mafia capo, he figures he also has to earn a living, and sets about robbing the rich people of Vegas blind with his crew committing burglaries to the point where he he can't talk in public anymore without covering his mouth because of all the surveillance on him. Also he cheats so much at the Tangiers that he gets put in the black book which bans him from every casino in Vegas. His psychotically volatile nature and arrogance ends up screwing things up for everyone. The bosses eventually get tired of him throwing his weight around and make an example of him.
- The protagonist "Ace" Rothstein himself is often a millstone. He knowingly marries a hooker and hustler and is constantly driven up the wall by her lies and attempts to steal his money to give to her pimp. Ace makes an enemy of the county commissioner by firing an incompetent employee who also happens to be his brother in-law, and goes on record saying he's the true boss of the casinonote , causing the county commissioner to personally see to it that hell will freeze over before Ace ever gets a casino license. Then Ace gets a job as a talk show host in the casino to keep running it, which makes the bosses very nervous because they want to keep the skim operation under the radar and quiet as possible.
- Ginger nearly wrecks everything by sleeping with Nicky and conspiring to have Ace killed. The mob bosses completely forbid infidelity, because it can lead to the participants turning rat if the police or FBI find out and blackmail them, so Ginger nearly gets herself, Nicky and Ace killed with her reckless behavior.
- Before Santoro's live burial, the Mafia bosses notice that the profits from the Skim are actually being skimmed, so they send in Artie Piscano to try and get the situation under control. Unfortunately, he's even more disastrous than Nicky: not only is he an incompetent, but he ends up giving the police evidence by talking loiudly about the skim in a place that the FBI have bugged, and keeping detailed financial records of just about everything relating to the Skim.
Nicky: It should have been perfect. I mean he had me, Nicky Santoro, his best friend watching his ass. And he had Ginger, the woman he loved on his arm. But in the end, we fucked it all up. - Zack Galifianakis's character in Due Date, who not only plagues Peter with his stupidity but eventually reveals that he's had his wallet the whole time and forced him on a cross-country trip due to a desire to be his friend.
- Every major problem the team faces in Ghostbusters (1984) is caused by Peter Venkman. The Dean at Columbia U specifically cites Venkman's smarmy attitude and freewheeling approach to the scientific method as the reasons for kicking the team off campus. Venkman's overly-forward attempts to hit on Dana almost cost them their first customer, and his antagonizing of EPA agent Walter Peck backfires horribly when Peck turns out to be a petty tyrant who orders their containment grid shut down, freeing hundreds of trapped ghosts and speeding along the Big Bad's plan. Despite this, Venkman can be considered a subversion of the usual Millstone, since it's his cleverness, resourcefulness, and silver tongue that always end up fixing the problems he causes.
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Justified by Madison Russell when she's on the villainous team. She's basically just being dragged along by a mother whom she initially wants to please; a mother who failed to do anything to properly condition Madison for the horrors they were going to partake in (much to Jonah's ire), meaning Madison is struck by horror at the atrocities she's complicit in by association, and she only ever takes an active part in what's happening when it's to the eco-terrorists' detriment. Madison uses the ORCA against her mother's and Jonah's demands in order to save her father and the Monarch brass's lives by disorienting Ghidorah, at the price of almost getting herself and all the eco-terrorists shot out of the sky by the hydra; later on, Madison argues with her mother against awakening Rodan while their time window to continue with the group's plan is rapidly closing.
- Tommy, the perpetually-enraged Mafia hitman from Goodfellas, is a pretty transparent example. The guy's job is to be muscle for the mob, so pushing people around and keeping everybody in line is what he's supposed to be doing. The problem is Tommy is an unrepentant, loud-mouthed jackass who flies into a murderous rage at the slightest provocation, which in the long term causes more problems than it solves. Unlike most examples, Tommy's instability winds up getting him killed when his bosses realize he's too much trouble to control.
- Manchild Alan from The Hangover causes every situation he and his friends are in to go from bad to worse. He does, however, come to the rescue in the end of both films.
- Harold in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle would have a much more hassle-free life if Kumar wasn't always looking for weed.
- The plot of the sequel is kicked off when Kumar tries to smoke some weed on an airplane that is heading for Amsterdam. As Harold points out, all Kumar had to do was wait a few hours, and he could have smoked as much as he wanted.
- Virtually every bad thing that happens to the main characters in the second half of Dante's Peak can be laid at the feet of Ruth, who endangers everyone. And then, after an attempt to rescue her and everyone else at her place, she heroically sacrifices herself to save everyone from sinking into the acid lake they would never have been on if she'd evacuated when she was supposed to.
- Mary Goodnight in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun, especially while Bond was trying to retrieve the Solex Agitator in Scaramanga's lair. She accidentally hits the giant, candy-like button with her ASS, almost setting off the doomsday thingy while Bond is inside it trying to disable it. Holy crow, maybe not the dumbest Bond girl ever, but a contender.
- Lockout: The Ax-Crazy Hydell is one for the other villains, in spite of being the one who made their escape possible in the first place. Alex tries and fails to teach him Pragmatic Villainy and is constantly exasperated by how Stupid Evil he is. Hydell's Millstone feats include killing a guy whom Alex was interrogating, shooting down a rescue ship that could have taken everyone to safety, and trying to rape and kill their hostages. When Alex is asked why he doesn't just kill Hydell, he says it's because Hydell is his brother and he loves him.
- Peregrin Took in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, where he's responsible for, among other things: drunkenly revealing Frodo's identity to everybody within earshot, starting a fire at Weathertop that attracts the Ringwraiths, waking up The Watcher which forces the Fellowship to flee into Moria, waking up everything in Moria when they're knee-deep in it by pushing a corpse down a well, and touching a stone which alerts Sauron to his (and thus the Fellowship's) location. He does eventually grow out of it, though.Gandalf: Fool of a Took! Throw yourself down [the well] next time, and rid us of your stupidity!
- Jurassic Park: Neither Lex nor Tim can really be blamed for being The Load since they're both just kids caught up in a horrifying situation, but Lex's conscious decision to grab a lantern and start spotlighting an angry T. Rex outside their Jeep instantly turns her into this, which very nearly gets the two of them killed. Both children would have been in considerably less danger had Lex simply frozen in terror and not done anything.
- Carter from The Lost World: Jurassic Park comes across as this. In one scene, he's listening to music on his headphones while in a jungle full of dinosaurs, and he doesn't hear his buddy being eaten by a swarm of Compsognathus. Later on, when a Tyrannosaurus rex shows up at the camp while everyone else is asleep, Carter starts shouting at the top of his lungs, triggering a panicked stampede in which he's trampled by his teammates before being squashed by the T. rex itself.
- Francois Pignon is usually The Millstone or The Load in films by the French director/screenwriter Francis Veber. His first appearance was the title character in A Pain In The Ass.
- Pulp Fiction: Vincent Vega makes things worse for himself and everyone around him because of his profound stupidity. Accidentally shooting Marvin in the face due to holding and pointing his gun at him during a casual conversation for absolutely no reason whatsoever, turned a simple escort mission into a long saga of grief and stress for Vincent and Jules. Leaving his bag of pure heroin in his coat pocket for Mia the coke-fiend to find and assume it was her drug of choice and not his, turns a simple dinner date into a frantic escapade to his dealer's house to save her from death by overdose with an adrenaline shot. Vincent's stupidity proves to be his undoing when he uses the bathroom in Butch's apartment, leaving his gun outside the bathroom for Butch to find and use on Vincent. To make this extra brainless, the only reason Vincent was alone was because Marcellus had just stepped out to get doughnuts. He'd probably have survived if he'd waited an additional five minutes to use the toilet.
- Shaun of the Dead:
- Ed repeatedly endangers everyone else through simply being Too Dumb to Live. The worst instance occurs when the group is attempting to sneak past dozens of zombies. Ed's cell phone rings, and he answers it and begins cheerfully and loudly talking on it. Later, when they are attempting to hide from the zombies in a pub, he turns on the fruit machine. He also gets a bit too caught up in the excitement of dealing with the zombies violently, thus needlessly endangering everyone else several times for the thrills. Unlike many examples here, however, Shaun actually twigs on and angrily berates Ed for it (thus, rather amusingly, becoming something of a Millstone himself, since his spleen-venting unfortunately occurs right in front of the zombies).
- It's not brought up as much as it is with Ed, but Barbara is a total liability from the minute the group pick her up. She insists on not leaving Phillip behind even though he's already been bitten and is a dead man walking, then when Shaun, Diane and David are stuck with a newly-zombified David at the back of the car, Barbara just stands there until Liz opens the childlocked doors for them and it's strongly implied that when the party pass through the garden of a couple she knows, Barbara opens the sliding door even though she can clearly see they're zombies, thus getting bitten. Then she eventually becomes a zombie herself in the middle of the pub and triggers a Mexican Standoff because she didn't want anybody to worry.
- Blissworth from Watch Your Stern means well, but everything he tries to mend causes trouble for Captain Foster:Blissworth: Well, I'm doing my best to locate the trouble, sir.Captain Foster: Look in the mirror. You'll find it.
