In The Wild Geese, our heroes are scrambling onto the plane as it speeds up on the runway; teammate Richard Harris falls into torturous enemy hands; does Roger Moore hit the brakes to fight overwhelming odds? Of course not; Richard Burton mercy-shoots their doomed buddy and takeoff ensues.
Looking for action stories in which the heroes decide not to attempt a rescue of a captured comrade.
In The Warriors, Ajax (James Remar) is arrested by an undercover cop during their flight; the others continue on toward Coney Island, leaving him behind.
Sure, Indy had the intent to return, but fact of the matter is, he left her in the hands of the Nazis. For all he knew she was a few moments away from being tortured and killed.
Chee rode Adzel in with a blast cannon on his back to rescue David in Satan’s World. 
I can recall Dominic Flandry not being rescued in Tiger by the Tail, but could you refresh my memory with the Falkayn/Van Rijn novels?
Ardeth Bey is not rescued in the Mummy. He does fight his way out off screen.
This factors rather heavily into the plot of the movie Charade. (The original, not sure about the remake which I didn’t see).
Looks like shijinn went the way of so many Joss characters.
Also in Braveheart, Wallace’s friends don’t rescue him when he’s being disemboweled. I remember screaming at the screen, don’t just stand there, do something!
The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan and his companions are off to retrieve the Queen’s jewels (IIRC), and along the way they fall, one by one, leaving D’Artagnan alone to finish the mission. At no point does anyone even think of going back for a fallen comrade; the duty is to the crown! Of course, they all turn out to have survived (and in at least one case, profited).
I remember reading this story once where a bunch of dudes (thirteen, I think) ate dinner together, and then afterwards one of them was captured by enemy soldiers, and none of the others did anything to rescue the captured one. The soldiers ended up putting their captive through a show trial and brutally executing him, and again his buddies did nothing to help. In kind of a deus-ex-caverna move, though, the executed guy shows up again three days later.
The CW show Supernatural had a recurring theme: one of the two brothers that star on the show would be captured by demons and sent to hell or some other dimension, and the other would sell his soul or make some other deal to get his sibling back. Until the start of last year’s season, when Dean escapes from Purgatory to discover Sam did nothing to free him. Instead, he quit demon-hunting and settled down. Now, to be honest, this is what they always told the other to do if things go south - move on, get a life - but they always made the attempt.
I thought it was the other way around, that all the dudes got captured, and the one hero snuck around and figured out how to break them all free and hide in barrels so they could float away on the river.
In the remake of Red Dawn they leave the Tom Cruise’s kid behind. Whether it is because he has a tracker embedded in his arm or because nobody likes his dad is anybody’s guess.
Aliens is interesting for the tension between the cynical (the message repeated in several Alien-franchise movies that ‘you can’t help them, don’t even try to help them, they’re already being cocooned’) and the idealistic (the emotional heart of Aliens being Ripley’s refusal to leave the daughter-figure behind).
It’s a fascinating topic; it hits our evolved-to-live-in-groups brains right in the paradox: the conflict between the benefits of group adhesion, and the even more obvious benefits of self-preservation.
Except for that time two years earlier when *Sam *got trapped in a box in Hell with Satan and St. Michael, and Dean did nothing to free him. Funny how THAT never came up.
My thought is that since you’re kind of famous for keeping your promises, “Wesley Wyndham-Pryce” is probably code for somebody else.
Can we have a thread where we all guess who that is?
Sure, why not action: from an old episode of South Park: