Training The Peaceful Villagers / Film

• Ur-film example is Seven Samurai, where the samurai plan to let a few bandits past the village gates at a time so that the villagers can Zerg Rush them with bamboo spears from a safe distance.
• The Magnificent Seven, for instance, is a direct western adaptation of Kurosawa's film.
• And Battle Beyond the Stars has a Recycled In Space version.
• The Taiwanese film, Beach of the War Gods tells the story of a village being ravaged by Japanese pirates on a regular basis, until a heroic warrior and drifter band together six other warriors to help battle the pirates.
• Seven Swords is a Chinese version.
• Done in a silly manner in the movie ¡Three Amigos!. The villagers couldn't do much except dig and sew, which was a problem since the heroes couldn't do much except pretend to be cowboys in silent movies. But with a plan cobbled together from the big finales of their various movies, a Rousing Speech that got a bit lost in the middle, and a lot of digging and sewing by the villagers, the day is saved (if you're wondering how this all works, the villagers sewed copycat outfits of the Amigos to distract the bad guys while the real Amigos picked them off, and the digging is for a large, hidden water pit to trap several of the banditos' horses).
• Applied Phlebotinum film example: Galaxy Quest... again, not that the actual heroes have the skills that they're given credit for, either.
• Done in Argo. Not the actual Argo, but the fictional Film Within a Film Argo, and made to sound like an allegory for the Iranian Revolution itself, gaining the approval of some Iranian guards at the airport.
• The kung-fu movie Beach of the War Gods recycles the Seven Samurai premise in a Ming dynasty fishing village raided by Japanese pirates, with the hero (played by Jimmy Wang Yu) and his ragtag team of martial artists training local fishermen in fending off invaders.
• Done in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, by Robin and Azeem. They actually weren't peaceful (or villagers for that matter), but Robin and Azeem did ultimately make them more effective.
• The Spaghetti Western They Call Me Trinity has the heroes teaching a community of pacifists to fight back against the villain who wants the land they've built on. The villagers are so peaceful that they have no idea how to fight, and the heroes end up repeatedly clobbering them during the training exercises.
• The whole premise in Defiance, which is about a group of Jewish refugees. As they gathered more people, they begin training able-bodied people (including women) to fight for survival with weapons taken from the hands of dead Nazis.
• In Army of Darkness, Ash is inexplicably seen teaching the medieval villagers, including their soldiers, on how to use a halberd. Somewhat justifiable in that he's teaching them to wield the weapons in a manner similar to a quarterstaff (halberds and pikes were normally for attacking horsemen), but staves already were used as weapons in medieval times.
• The movie High Plains Drifter has Clint Eastwood as No Name Given train the villagers to fight. Darker and Edgier because they aren't peaceful, just cowards, and he really doesn't care much for them.
• Subverted in Ip Man, where our hero trains the workers at Quan's factory in Wing Chun to help them resist a group of bandits, only for the bandits to prevail anyway until Ip Man pulls a Big Damn Heroes moment. The main thing the workers accomplish is a Divide and Conquer variant: to keep various small groups of bandits busy long enough for him to show up and deal with them one at a time rather than forcing him to fight all of them at once.
• This is how they deal with the bad guys in Dragonheart. The villagers weren't exactly peaceful, however; rather, they were worn out from trying to fight the current Big Bad's father some ten years earlier, and just didn't want to get involved again. Having a dragon on their side changed their minds.
• Blazing Saddles has the villagers contribute by making a fake version of their town to lure the bandits into it and then blow it up. Then the heroes lead the whole town in a massive brawl with the remaining bandits.
• Parodied in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, where the Peaceful Villagers are so inept that Robin and company have to do pretty much everything themselves.
• In The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, the eponymous "36th Chamber" of the hero's training is to find and train commoners to retaliate against an evil regime of some kind. Although he pretty much does all the killing himself, it's an interesting coda to the most protracted Training Montage in martial arts cinema.
• Subverted in High Noon, where Gary Cooper plays a marshall who hears that a criminal gang is coming to his Wild West town bent on revenge. Despite the fact that he was already planning on leaving, he spends most of the movie attempting to rally the villagers to the defense of their town. Everyone else proves too cowardly to fight, however, and he is forced to take on the gang almost singlehandedly.
• Cave Dwellers has Ator ride into a village and immediately start this sequence (seriously, he begins the "This is what we'll do" speech before he even gets off his horse)... only to get pissed off on realizing the villagers aren't playing along. Turns out they're not on his side.
• Done to a degree and lampshaded in Kingdom of Heaven. After Balian knights all of the men in the village as a group, the priest asks if making a man a knight will make him a better fighter, to which Balian simply responds "yes."
• A Gone Horribly Wrong example in Apocalypse Now, where both Col. Kurtz and the villagers he's trained have descended into madness.
• Magnificent Warriors have the heroes training the entire village of Kaal, whose forces consist of mostly civilian militia, in order to repel an invading Japanese force, who comes equipped with cannons and automatic weapons. They win... against the first wave of Japanese invaders, but then it was subverted when the villagers ends up facing a second wave, whose forces includes tanks, at which point the citizens of Kaal ends up torching their homes to the ground to avoid a fatal second battle.
• The backstory of The Siege, where Iraqi fighters trained (and abandoned) by the CIA have returned to America for vengeance.
• A variation of this happens in Death Wish 3, where Paul Kersey teaches the retirees how to fight back against the young hoodlums that have moved into their neighborhood.
• Hercules does this early in Hercules (2014). It bites him in the ass when it turns out their leader is a tyrant.
• In Go West, Young Lady, all of the men in Headstone are formed into a Posse and ride out to raid Killer Pete's hideout. However, Killer Pete knows of this and plans to have the posse wiped out in an ambush by Chief Big Thunder Cloud's tribe, while he and his gang loot the town. Learning of this, Bill sends one of the women to warn the men, and hurriedly organizes the rest of the townswomen into a fighting force that ambushes the gang and does a good job of subduing them by pelting them with pots and pans and whacking them with brooms.
• Averted in The Wild Geese. When the mercenaries are abandoned, it's suggested that they rouse the local population with the aid of the African politician they've just rescued. It's quickly shown to be unworkable; the tribesmen don't have modern weapons, there's a regiment of the dictator's Praetorian Guard approaching and the politician refuses to lead his people to slaughter.
• Downplayed in Stargate. The natives are oppressed and cowed through fear of Ra's powers, but as soon as they are shown evidence that Ra and his minions aren't actually divine and can be challenged, they're quite willing and eager to fight back, with no motivation needed from the heroes. A few lessons on how to operate Earth weaponry and they're good to go.