Handicapped Badasses in live-action movies.
- Abominable: Preston is paralyzed from the waist down but manages to effectively evade and fight the villainous monster.
- Vriess in Alien: Resurrection: Strapped into his wheelchair, gets caught alone with his weapon not ready by a Xenomorph directly above him (and notices it only because it drips corrosive saliva on his useless legs) and STILL manages to kill it and get away with only a few minor chemical burns.
- Played with in the case of Jake Sully in Avatar, who still manages to be his own subtle kind of badass even though he is paraplegic and thus needs a wheelchair. However, most of his truly badass moments occur in his fully mobile Na'vi body and he changes to this body permanently at the end of the film, killing his old one.
- John J. Macreedy from Bad Day at Black Rock
- Blind Fury is an American remake of film 17 of the Zatoichi series. It stars Rutger Hauer as an American soldier who gets blinded by an explosion during The Vietnam War. With the help of some friendly locals (shown via Training Montage) he learns to kick all kinds of ass while blind, then returns to America as a traveling swordsman.
- Blind Justice is a western where Armand Assante plays a blind gunslinger. He is a Civil War veteran, who was blinded when he was thought dead and tossed into a mass grave. Quicklime was spread over the corpses, which damaged his eyes.
- Blindsided: the Game has the blind Walter, who can still hold his own in combat against multiple armed opponents.
- Lincoln from The Bone Collector is paralyzed from the neck down, relying on machines controlled by his mouth and his nurse, and still manages to fight off his assailant.
- In The Book of Eli it is revealed at the end of the movie that the title character was blind.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Amilyn continues serving Lothos despite the loss of his arm.
- Chinese films seem to have a thing for martial arts masters with disabilities.
- The eponymous heroes from the kung fu movies One-Armed Swordsman and One-Armed Boxer are all about this trope. In Master of the Flying Guillotine, the Master of the Flying Guillotine is a blind man who uses his exceptional hearing. He goes on a killing spree hunting down one-armed men, several of whom are martial artists.
- Same applies for One Armed Swordswoman, the Taiwanese Gender Flipped remake. A Korean adaptation takes this up to eleven, titled The Armless Swordsman
- And there's also The Seisure Soul Sword of a Blind Girl, which in a similar vein follows the Zatoichi formula, but with protagonist as a blind swordswoman. Both this movie and the above actually has the same actress, Chang Ching-ching as the handicapped heroine.
- Taiwanese cinema seems to like recycling ideas from kung-fu cinema popular in East Asia at the time, but with the main characters Gender Flipped. Golden Sword and the Blind Swordswoman follows the Zatoichi format, but the catch being there are two blind swordswomen in this one.
- Crippled Avengers features a blind man with super-hearing, a deaf-mute with incredible eyesight, an armless man with deadly steel prosthetic arms, a legless man with iron legs and a severely mentally handicapped fighter who is nearly invincible.
- Downplayed example in the martial arts film, Deaf and Mute Heroine. The protagonist can kick plenty of ass even if she's stripped of her voice and hearing.
- Not really a handicap, though Your Mileage May Vary: Chinese folklore and literature and film feature many eunuchs who achieve nearly-superhuman powers. Most notable is Pai Mei from Abbot of Shaolin, Executioners from Shaolin, Fists of the White Lotus, and Kill Bill Volume 2.
- Code of the Dragon: Badass fighting cripple. He doesn't even need the wheelchair.
- It's better than that. The fighting Black cripple is Henry Smalls
. He isn't crippled, he has NO legs. He is a kendo master, fourth-degree black belt, and a skilled practitioner of over 20 martial arts. If somebody tried to rob him in real life, the ass-kicking would be EPIC.
- It's better than that. The fighting Black cripple is Henry Smalls
- Used in the 70s Kung Fu flick The Crippled Masters. Lee Ho has no arms, Tang has no legs, together they fight crime.
- Bane has been reimagined as this for The Dark Knight Rises, wearing a mask which constantly provides him anesthetic gas to overcome the pain from a bad injury obtained during his backstory. The gas itself also qualifies as a major handicap, as it is knockout gas.
- In Darkman, the eponymous character is also a burn victim, who's lost his sense of touch as a result of the operation that keeps him from living in agony. His nemesis, Durant, has henchman with a wooden leg that hides a machinegun.
- The Old Man from Don't Breathe. He's a blind old man who lives all alone. When the main characters break into his house to steal his money, he shows how capable he is to take on three intruders, taking one guy's gun and killing him. Which makes his reveal as a villain in his own right all the more horrifying.
- Don't Say a Word: Dr. Conrad's wife, Aggie, broke her leg in a skiing accident, and spends most of the movie lying in bed with a cast on her leg. She's still able to fight off, and kill, one of her daughter's kidnappers.
- Snake Plissken may have but one eye, but in no way does that impair his status as a legendary badass. Also, in both movies, he winds up limping due to an injured leg, but not even that slows him down.
- Ash from the Evil Dead movies becomes a Badass when he cut off his own demon-possessed hand with a chainsaw, then mounts the chainsaw to the stump and uses it to saw off a shotgun for his other hand.
- Bob Paulson from Fight Club is originally introduced as a pathetic guy who lost his testicles to cancer stemming from steroid abuse, forcing him to take hormonal supplements that give him "bitch tits". By the time he gets killed, he has more than earned his place in Project Mayhem, as evidenced by the other members' chant:His name is Robert Paulson! His name is Robert Paulson! His name is Robert Paulson!
- Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump remains a rough and tumble guy even after getting his legs blown off.
- Cherry from Grindhouse becomes a Badass when several zombies tear off her leg, then mounts a modified M4 Carbine with a M203 grenade launcher attachment to the stump and uses it to kill zombies.
- Gunfight in Abilene: Grant Evers has a wooden right arm, which we learn was caused by a childhood accident involving his old friend Cal Wayne. Cal feels guilty about this, and tries to help Grant whenever he can, since Grant by his own admission can't fight. But then we see Grant practicing with left-handed firing in his basement and exhibiting Improbable Aiming Skills, and it seems obvious that things will eventually lead to violence between the two men. But then it's subverted when Grant has a falling out with his brutal enforcer, Joe Slade. Grant has his gun out and pointed in Slade's direction, but Slade still draws and shoots him down before Grant can take aim, revealing that he's the true Big Bad.
- Halloween (2018): Michael Myers is blind in one eye from his injuries in the original film, but that doesn't make him any less dangerous.
- Azog in The Hobbit had his arm cut off by Thorin in the Battle of Azanulbizar. He would later be seen with a metallic hook directly shoved into his stump with a spike and is utterly terrifying as he hunts down Thorin and Company. His and Thorin's rematch ended with Azog easily thrashing Thorin.
- Subverted in House of Flying Daggers: Mei is extremely skilled in fighting and martial arts, but she was only pretending to be blind.
- Dai Bando the blind ex-boxer in How Green Was My Valley.
- 2013 horror The Human Race featured a one-legged protagonist who couldn't walk without crutches. He's quite the fighter, uses his crutches to exploit a loophole in the 'no walking on the grass' rule and ultimately wins.
- The protagonist in Hush is Maddie, a novelist who lives in near-seclusion in the woods with only a nearby married couple as neighbors, who, one night while at home, encounters a masked serial killer who is hell-bent on toying with Maddie and eventually killing her. What makes this any different from any other run of the mill horror movie? Maddie is completely deaf, which of course makes her fight for survival a hundred times harder, but that's not to say she won't put up a hell of a fight.
- Ice Castles the main character becomes completely blind during a ice skating practice gone wrong (although later she can see light and dark). Later, not only can she skate, but she masters her entire routine! In fact, the only reason people find out about her disability is that she trips over the flowers thrown into the rink.
- Iron Will: Borg is a brave and tough musher who lost two fingers to frostbite during a previous race. Of course, his cruel and cheating nature also make him an Evil Cripple.
- Jojo Rabbit: Klenzendorf shows that, despite missing an eye, he's still quite good at shooting, managing to hit targets precisely (which is likely unrealistic, given lack of depth perception).
- Kill Bill:
- Elle Driver is an excellent sword fighter, despite having only one eye.
- The Bride is temporarily paralyzed from the waist down after waking up from her coma, but that didn't stop her from killing two rapists within an hour of waking up after not moving at all for five years.
- Kingsman:
- Kingsman: The Secret Service: Gazelle is missing her legs, which she's replaced with bladed prostheses. She's even more dangerous with this.
- Kingsman: The Golden Circle: Charlie lost an arm and his vocal chords from the events of the first film, and has robotic replacements offered by the Big Bad. Like Gazelle, he's The Dragon to a Non-Action Big Bad and one of the most dangerous members of the Golden Circle.
- Also from Kingsman: The Golden Circle, but played for drama: After being shot right through the eye, former One-Man Army Harry is now half blind, suffering from hallucinations, and out of practice due to having amnesia for a year. Unlike the bad guys, he does not get any snazzy prosthetics and has to adapt to it the old-fashioned way. He's eager to get back into the action, but struggles to overcome his handicap while the other characters question his physical and mental abilities. However, by the time they get to the Big Bad's lair his hand-eye coordination has improved greatly, and apart from a few clumsy moments he's a serious threat to his enemies again.
- Charlie from Land of the Dead. Half his face is burned off, he has only one eye, and he essentially has the mind of a very young child (He calls fireworks 'sky flowers', for example). He also has insane Improbable Aiming Skills and scores a direct hit with every single shot he ever takes in the film... with a peep-sight rifle.
- Late Phases: Ambrose's blindness does not stop him from quickly figuring out there is a werewolf, venturing around to find it and rigging defenses tonight it during the next full moon.
- Javier Bardem's character in Pedro Almodovar's Live Flesh.
- Lonely Are the Brave (1962). Kirk Douglas' character gets into a Bar Brawl with a one-armed man (played by the same actor who played the one-armed murderer in The Fugitive). To make things fair, he declares he'll fight with one arm held behind his back. Unfortunately the man he's fighting is a hell of a lot more familiar at this than he is, so our hero gets his ass kicked.
- Long John Silver: Despite being blind, Israel Hands is dangerous enough to keep Long John Silver and his pirates trapped in the stockade, and pursue Jim across the island and nearly kill him.
- Luz from Machete. She gets one eye shot out midway through the film and spends the rest of it sporting an Eyepatch of Power. In Machete Kills, Luz gets her other eye shot out, making her completely blind.
- Mad Max: the title character is kneecapped at the end of the first film and improvises a brace using a wrench. He wears a medical brace in The Road Warrior. It doesn't stop him from being the most badass survivor of the post-apocalypse and there's even an amusing scene of one of the refinery dwellers scrambling to oil it before he sneaks off into the wasteland to retrieve the semi-tractor.
- Handicapped Badasses are all over the place in Mad Max: Fury Road. Max still has his leg brace and is struggling with severe PTSD, Furiosa has a prosthetic arm, Nux is ill, and Immortan Joe has breathing problems.
- John Creasy, played by Denzel Washington in Man on Fire will simply not let a few bullet holes and massive internal bleeding stop him from opening a holy can of whoop-ass on a slew of corrupt Mexican officials who have killed a little girl he was guarding.
- The titular The Man with the Iron Fists counts after having his arms severed and replaced with metallic fists that he can manipulate with his inner chi.
- Lord Blakeney from Master and Commander. One-armed and commanding a ship during an epic sea-battle... and his voice hasn't even broken.
- Mastizaade has Romantic False Lead Deshpremi, who can do somersaults with a bamboo stick and still land in his wheelchair, manages to win a tug of war against several people by himself and perfectly shoots several bottles while his eyes are tied.
- In The Matrix Revolutions, Neo becomes one when Smith in Bane's body blinds Neo in the real world, although he is still able to 'see' in the real world by perceiving machine code, and he retains full vision in the Matrix.
- Men of Honor, in which the real life Carl Brashear, played by Cuba Gooding, Jr., not only becomes the Navy's first Black Master Diver; he does it after he loses his leg in an accident at sea. In that climactic scene he has to walk 12 steps in Standard Diving Dress. The badassness takes on new levels when you realize that the suit weighed 200lbs on land.
- The Milagro Beanfield War: A one-armed barfly and local eccentric proves that he can hold and aim a shotgun with his remaining arm during more than one Mexican Standoff.
- Misery: In the climax, Paul delivers a glorious beatdown on Annie Wilkes, a deranged Serial Killer. By this point his legs are broke, his ankles have shattered, and he has been shot in the shoulder.
- The 1970s crime B-Movie Mr. No Legs has the titular Mafia hitman, a martial arts expert that moves around in a wheelchair with concealed shotguns and ninja stars. His actor, Ted Vollrath, was a Real Life version of this as well, being a former Marine (that lost his legs in Korea) and the first person to earn a black belt in Karate while handicapped in such a fashion.
- Murderball: most of the main characters since it's about quadriplegic rugby players.
- Mythica: Marek is clubfooted, with both a brace on her leg and using a stick to walk at the beginning. Over time there however with training she becomes nearly as mobile as any able-bodied person (magical aid is possibly involved then as well). She does ask if Teela can heal her, but when this turns out to not be a possibility it doesn't faze her. It helps in that her weapon is magic, but she's quite capable physically as well. Her foot is entirely healed later.
- No Escape (1994): Killian the distiller is a one-armed man who is great with a melee weapon.
- Despite being in a vegetative state, the title character in the cult 1978 Australian horror film Patrick still manages to cause all kinds of mayhem thanks to his psychokinetic abilities.
- Pirates of the Caribbean:
- In the fourth movie Captain Barbossa has a peg leg, but is just as badass as ever.
- Ragetti holds his own through a number of intense battles in the series, and is missing an eye.
- The Raid (1954): Despite believing himself to be a coward, the one-handed Capt. Foster stages a heroic one-man Last Stand inside the burning town hall in which he kills multiple raiders and wounds their leader Maj. Benton before being captured.
- Hammer Girl in The Raid 2: Berandal is deaf and has only one eye, which she always covers up with big sunglasses that really don't help with situational awareness, either. She still can fight seven opponents at once, with a pair of hammers.
- Col. Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman can drive, tango, and choke people who piss him off... blind.
- In the opening scene of Sharknado 2: The Second One, April gets her left hand bitten off when a Sharknado hits the plane she and Fin were in. When the hospital she is recovering at gets hit later, she's well enough to help a young girl patient get to shelter and then drive a fire truck to reunite with Fin. The climax sees her tie a buzzsaw to her stump to chop up the sharks that are attacking him.
- The SHAZAM! (2019) version of Freddy Freeman takes this even further than the comics version, since not only is he a decently impressive Kid Hero in normal form despite needing a crutch to walk, but his Disability-Negating Superpower as Shazam quite notable doesn't un-cripple him while active, instead compensating for the still-useless leg with Flight, while still being just as strong of a Flying Brick as Billy despite not being able to walk or brace himself on the ground.
- In The Sign of Four: Sherlock Holmes' Greatest Case, the Big Bad Jonathan Small has a wooden leg. This slows him down hardly at all, and he is very adept at using the peg-leg as a weapon.
- Bethany Hamilton in Soul Surfer, based on the true story of the young surfing star who lost her left arm in a shark attack.
- The grandfather in the Spy Kids trilogy. He was played by Ricardo Montalbán, who really was a wheelchair user in his latter years.
- Hauptmann Hermann Musk from the German film Stalingrad (1993), who is first seen affixing his prosthetic arm before leading his platoon to assault a heavily guarded factory.
- In Star Wars:
- Darth Vader, who manages to be an almost invincible Big Bad despite missing both hands, one entire arm, and both legs, the entire remainder of his body covered in horrible burns, and having to wear a life support suit at all times. A suit that's primitive and clunky compared to those of other cyborgs like Grievous, at that.note Episode III implies that, had he not been so injured, his Force abilities would have surpassed even the Emperor's; as it is, he's still strong enough to defeat him after getting his ass kicked by his own son. In Rogue One, the first scene we see him in has him outside of his suit and floating in a bacta-healing tank. In his last scene, he effortlessly slaughters a squad of rebels in under a minute.
- Luke himself qualifies: it's after being defeated by Vader in their first duel and losing a hand that he takes a level in badass and becomes the awesome Jedi we know.
- General Grievous uses his cyborg body to fight several Jedi at the same time. After getting his chest crushed by Mace Windu just before the start of the third film, however, he's more of a genuine handicapped badass and puts up only a moderate fight against Obi-Wan.
- Han Solo gets his moment at the beginning of Return of the Jedi. Shooting a tentacle? Big deal. Shooting a tentacle while blind? Awesome.
- Chirrut Imwe from Rogue One is a middle-aged blind man who can still kick the assess of a whole squad of Stormtroopers, even when he obviously lacks the Force.
- In The Last Jedi Finn has lost his spine only literally. He still manages to defeat Phasma with almost no help.
- Sparky from Steel is crippled in a training accident, but makes up for it by loading her wheelchair with projectile weapons that she can fire while spinning the chair.
- The Tales from the Crypt movie Demon Knight has one character lose her arm early in the film. She continues on shooting demons and blowing stuff up, regardless.
- The Terminator reached maximum badassability when he had to rip off his own arm.
- In Terror in a Texas Town, McNeil's dragon is The Gunslinger Johnny Crale, who had his right hand shot off and replaced it with a steel prosthesis.
- The Transformers Film Series:
- Bumblebee is The Speechless, due to Megatron ripping out his vocal processors prior to the film. But that doesn't stop him from protecting and coming to Sam and Mikaela's rescue on many instances, killing Ravage and Rampage in the second movie and probably having the most fighting scenes next to Optimus Prime.
- Jetfire. Run-down due to lack of energon, his landing gear turns into a cane. Doesn't stop him from kicking serious tailpipe, and opening space bridges at will, though he's too rusty with that to use it like Teleport Spam.
- The Unknown: After having his arms amputated, Alonzo is still a lethal knife-thrower; able to throw with pinpoint accuracy with his feet.
- Uncle Sam: Jed lost a leg in the Korean War and can still operate a muzzle-loading cannon single-handedly.
- In When Worlds Collide, one of the financiers who supplied the money to build the escape ship, stops an attempted mutiny by shooting the mutineer with a handgun concealed in his manual wheelchair.
- X-Men Film Series: Professor Charles Xavier is confined to a wheelchair, although as X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: The Last Stand show, he is able to walk on his own, but it comes at the loss of his powers.
- Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, who travels from town to town as a common masseur but keeps a sword hidden in his cane just in case. He slashes through hundreds of victims (including the wings off of flies) in 26 films (the 2003 reboot included) and a TV series.
